Performing Sourcery at The Recruiting Unconference

I wrote about Unconferences a few months ago, after attending Tweetcamp. I started to wonder if the recruitment industry was ready for something like that. After all – the social web has enormous potential for aiding the recruiting process.

Up until now, events about online recruitment in the UK have still trudged you through eight PowerPoint presentations and left the six participants that actually use twitter floundering for a hashtag.

Enter @BillBoorman, a recruitment trainer and now infamously prolific tweeter. He spots myself and @MervynDinnen talking about this very subject on twitter and informs us that he is planning just the event we seek – The Recruitment Unconference taking place in London on 19th November. The first event of it’s kind on this side of the pond.

I blog about the event not only out of relief that the day has finally come, but also because I’m involved.

How did this happen? Quite by accident, I assure you.

As you may be aware, I am an Internet Sourcer by day, sourcing candidates in the Renewable Energy industry for a firm of Headhunters. See Wikipedia for more on Sourcing.

As part of The Sourcing Conference (an event in the USA), there is a regular competition for us Sourcers, pitting us against one another to keep us sharp and also to find a Grand Master. Last year, I gave the competition a go and, having only a few months of sourcing experience, didn’t get very far at all. This year though, I managed to make an impression on the world of sourcing in the first qualifying round of the competition. It’s this that gained me a place assisting Geoff Webb (aka @RadicalRecruit) in the sourcing track at the Recruiting Unconference.

So – I’ll be helping recruiters learn to track down potential candidates for their toughest assignments using the Internet. Let’s hope I’ve got my Sourcing hat on…

What else will be happening at the Recruiting Unconference?

Well, I’ll definitely be in good company. Some of the most future-thinking folks in the recruitment industry will be there including Matt Alder, Alistair Cartwright and Andy Headworth. I have created a list, using Twitter’s new Lists feature, of all the track leaders:

After the unconference there will be a tweetup (register here)- I expect that all those recruiters will be in need of some beer after such a busy day of learning and sharing. The Recruitment Tweetup is already an established quarterly event. I look forward to finding out what it’s all about.

There will also be a Big Brother style diary room for attendees to go in and get caught on camera talking shop about whatever they like, as well as a special radio show and a Gen-Y recruitment debate.

There is a lot going on - so recruiters will have to shout loudly and embrace the unconference spirit in order to make the day their own.

Picture courtesy of Benjamin Ellis

Tagged as: Event, Lists, recruitment, sourcing, tweetup, twitter, unconference