RPOlosophy

I just finished up at the Social Recruiting Summit in NYC. The 1st event was held in Silicon Valley on June 15th, 2009 followed by NYC experience on November 16th. The goal of the Social Recruiting Summit is to have an industry conversation about social media tools, talk about tactics and strategies that are already in the field and working, not pie-in-the-sky ideas.

At the event, someone asked me an interesting question: “Why would Pinstripe, a recruitment process outsourcing company, sponsor an event where the goal of the attendees is to become better at recruiting, more self-sufficient, and hopefully less reliant on service providers?”

Great question and I’m sure others were thinking similar thoughts. And the way the question is asked, it does seem somewhat counter-intuitive to be a sponsor; however, we believe that sponsoring the Summit has a tremendous amount of strategic value and is almost perfectly aligned with Pinstripe’s vision.

So the first and most apparent reason we sponsored and attended the event is to learn about social media recruiting techniques. In addition, many of these tactics are transferable to the sales process. So by exposing our recruiters and salespeople to the event, we hope to be better at both recruiting and selling. For example, check out tracked.com, which is sort of like LinkedIn meets Twitter, or meetup.com. These are just two of the many things I learned about at the summit from Fred Wilson, the keynote speaker.

Next, many of the presenters, like John Sumser and Gerry Crispin, are key influencers in the world of recruitment. Maybe they are not specifically focused on RPO; however, their “approval” means a lot to many people (some of whom are current or future buyers of RPO). I personally met at least a half dozen people at the Summit whose opinions and teachings are followed by tens of thousands, if not more. A simple positive mention of our organization in their blogs or personal appearances goes a long, long way.

Finally, and equally critical, the event was attended by some of the brightest and forward thinking talent acquisition professionals in the recruitment space. While many of the attendees are currently recruiters, recruitment managers, and directors of talent acquisition, these individuals will be the future leaders and vice presidents for many key organizations’ talent functions. Many of these individuals acknowledge that RPO has a role and are open to discussion. The opportunity (and accessibility) to meet them now is extremely valuable and enjoyable.

As our team traveled back from New York to Milwaukee, we discussed our sponsorship in some detail. It was unanimous that sponsoring the Social Recruiting Summit was an excellent decision.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 6:24 am and is filed under RPOlosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.