Over the tail of the last week, I was in Silly Valley at SourceCon. Having been to the Spring one in NYC, I was looking forwards to this for a few weeks. The two reasons why I went were to network with The conference attendees and to learn more about the methods and procedures of sourcing. Here’s a short recap as to how it went.
Today, I went to recruitDC, the local recruiting unconference. Unlike last time, today’s festivities were only a half day. Personally, I found that length to be a little more congruent with my own schedule, as it left the remaining half day to work on our upcoming SEATS launch.
The morning started with a “buzz” session, which consisted of several people sitting at a table, having a round table discussion. For the table at which I was located, we had a freelance recruiter, three corporate recruiters, a corporate sourcer, a business development person and me (the lone vendor). A rather wide ranging crew, we talked about the start, middle and end of the hiring process, as well as ways to improve the end result. Just speaking for me, corporate culture is one of the biggest factors of working at any company, and most job descriptions have the same generic corporate culture boilerplate (“we’re an EEOC company who only have the best and brightest in our fast paced environment, blah, blah, blah”) — if they even have that.
The keynote was from John Sumser on All Recruiting Is Local. John’s talk was very enlightening as he touched on a number of factors that contribute to the unique character of any geographical region. For example:
I highly recommend breezing through his presentation for the demographic information alone.
The other talks were not really up my alley, but the keynote alone was well worth my time. As always, it was good to meet fellow travelers focusing on the recruiting space in the DC area. I’m already looking forwards to the next one.
