Thursday was the recruitDC conference just outside of Washington DC. As we are just finishing up the customer validation phase of our development and the conference is almost literally in our backyard, I decided to go to meet and learn from the region’s top recruiters and sourcers.
The conference led off with an amusing and insightful presentation from Kris Dunn on the 7 lies that every recruiter tells. At the start of the talk, he asked for a few volunteers. Not many people did, and (not knowing any better), I raised my hand. As it turns out, that was a mistake; he then called on me to answer a question as if I was a recruiter. Which I’m not. A lovely way to start out the day.
For the remainder of the day, I attended the sessions and tried to talk to as many recruiters as possible about RE’s future ATS, with some pretty good feedback. The pitch of “simple, easy and cheap” gets a lot of attention from recruiters. One of the people I talked about our current pricing model thought about it for a bit, then looked at me askance and said “so, you’re basically telling me that your product will save me $9,000 — no, $13,000 a year?” Yep, pretty much.
The closing talk of the day from Ed Newman was very valuable if for no other reason in that it provided RE with a laundry list of competing ATS services. I plan to spend a fair amount of time over the next two weeks working through Ed’s list and adding pricing and feature details. When finished, I will send a version of it to Ed for him to include on his list.
It was a good day, and I look forwards to the next one.
