Review of Enhance Media Online Recruitment Conference 2014

Yesterday Enhance Media held their 12th Annual conference; Online Recruitment 2014, The Year Ahead.

As always the conference was incredibly well organised with speedy registration , plenty of staff on hand and teas/coffees and pastries on arrival. The venue is the Royal Geographic Society and is just perfect for this event.  As per previous years delegates are given the traditional hard back bound delegate book with information on speakers and space for notes on arrival.

The line up of speakers was great:

DeeDee Doke – Recruiter Magazine – 100 Employers’ Views of 2014
Alex Lowe – Google – Recruitment: Reboot and Reframe
Hannah Salton – BT – Attract the Perfect Graduate Candidates
Giles Guest – Enhance Media – Strategy and Big Data
Christer Holloman – Glassdoor – Optimising Social Media for Candidates
Peter Brown – PwC LLP – Impact of increasing the direct sourcing channel
Sarah Rozario and Kate Pollard – KPMG – Gamification to engage candidates
Daniel Ricard – Sonru – Video Interviewing in 2014

Delegates could also pre-book from a selection of ‘materclass’ sessions.

I was sat next to two infamous bloggers in the guise of Alan Whitford and Mervyn Dinnen. Knowing they were taking studious notes (and live blogging) meant I could take part more in the twitter stream which was actually very prolific.  It certainly helped that Enhance Media had so many staff on hand able to contribute and re-tweet.

Alan covers the first session from DeeDee Doke here: Navigating the recruitment landscape in 2014 and the second from Alex Lowe here: Recruitment Reboot and Reframe.  He also live-blogged the Christer Holloman’s session How do you optimise social media for candidates (in which I noted, via Twitter, Christer mentioned his new book no less than four times!).

I would have liked to attend quite a few of the workshops but didn’t want to miss the action in the main hall.  I’ve persuaded Adam Gretton from Careerplayer to do a guest blog on the subject of his (Tips and Tricks to get free traffic from YouTube) so I’ll link to that once we have it.  I did, however, sit in the “fireside chat” with Google.  This was a great session with loads of questions from the audience, many around the hiring model Google utilises.  Another great question was “how can recruiters use Google+”.  For the full answer you should check out my recent blog post on the hangout we did with Andy Headworth on this very subject.  However, I’m sure you also want to hear what the chaps from Google said.  

These are their three tips:

a) you’re business will have more visibility in the search results (lot of people had already asked to increase search engine visibility) if you have a page on Google+ and post regularly.
b) Use hangouts for interviewing candidates and/or run a q&a hangout with experts from within your business.  A hangout is recorded (one on one conversations are not by the way) so can be uploaded onto YouTube for free and used as candidate attraction collateral or as part of your recruitment campaign.
c) Create a community.  For example creating an active community around your niche will attract possible candidates that you can engage with and pull into your recruitment campaigns when the time is right.  Just make sure all your content is good and giving the right message!

Mervyn has also blogged about the day; Job Applicants Have Feelings Too – with a really nice summary of some of his thoughts as has Mark Stephens from TIRA.

So another success for Enhance Media and a great opportunity for me to catch up with lots of people during the networking time. 

PS, lunch….. it was lovely as usual (in actual fact it was exactly the same lunch as last year – but on complaints there).  In previous years I’ve complained about the lack of seating and this year a marquee was set up so that people could actually sit down.  I’m sure attendees really appreciated this but I suspect it made it harder for the sponsors to chat with them during the breaks.  You just can’t win can you!