We held one of our regular Recruiter Networking events on Wednesday at The Square Pig in Holborn. This is a venue that very comfortably holds 60 people. However, we managed to squeeze 87 recruitment industry professionals into the room!
We followed basically the same format as for all our recruiter networking events of free drink on arrival (thanks Jobshop HQ, Allthetopbananas and JobSiteAdvisor), networking time, presentation and speed networking. The differences were that this time the mic wasn't working and I had to do the speed networking myself! I apologise if it didn't have the same sophisticated and professional edge that Oli Barret normally brings to the occasion.
Lee McQueen (winner of The Apprentice in 2008) was our guest speaker (kindly brought along by Fiona Lander). He was a very genuine chap (I wanted to write "geezer" but wasn't sure if that passed for a compliment or insult!). He talked about how he got onto The Apprentice (the lies on his CV!) and how he won (quite simply by trying very hard not to be fired!).
Once numbers died down a little we also had a debate on Recruitment – Agency vs Inhouse. Stephen O'Donnell kindly chaired this as my voice was by now in poor shape and our debators were Mervyn Dinen and Gareth Jones vs Gary Franklin and TheHRD (all the links there are to their Twitter profiles as that's where you'll get the best sense of who they are – if you don't know them in real life). TheHRD has written a follow up blog post, which has some interesting comments, on the debate.
Feedback on the night, and since, has been very positive. So, we'll be doing it all again in late January or early February. However, this time I think we'll try for slightly less people in the room!
If you can't wait until them we have two other events this year:
The first is our Recruitment Directors event on Wednesday 13th October. You can find out more here: https://ukrecruiter.co.uk/networking/13oct.htm
The other is the annual National Online Recruitment Awards event (which we run in conjunction with 1job), taking place on the 4th November. You can register for this event now at: http://www.eventelephant.com/recnet4nov
If you can't make these we should be back, as I say, in January or February with our next set of recruitment networking events.
