by Chris Hoyt
Originally published on RecruiterGuy.
As SXSW Interactive week came to a close, I took a look at what our recruiting team had accomplished in Austin, TX. What I found most interesting was the realization that I was looking at measuring the success of our participation from a “recruiting” standpoint much differently than recruiters or recruiting management might expect. In fact, in speaking to anyone else in the staffing or employment space that attended the event – it’s very likely that we took an incredibly different approach to our attendance at this 5 day digital parade than anyone else.
I’ll explain… Good recruiters are ALWAYS recruiting. So it’s not unusual to ask a recruiter what they’re doing at any event and receive from them a response that they’re looking for, or recruiting, top talent. Being 100% honest – it’s just in our DNA. Recruiters that are passionate about what they do, love the talent. But in looking at the goals and measurements we set forth for our team at SXSW – “recruiting” someone didn’t make the list. Nope – we came to do something much more important than acquiring talent.
We know that what we see and hear during the interactive week at SXSW is typically what we’ll be holding in our hands or looking at on any of our 3 screens over the next year. It’s because of this that we look at SXSW as anything but a typical event. And it’s because of this that we didn’t go to simply recruit… we went to meet people, learn about the future and share our passion for connecting with people.
Meeting vs. Recruiting
In my opinion, getting back to the roots of networking is more than overdue. Expanding on that, I believe that ‘connecting’ is the next (r)evolutionary step that sits before recruiting – remembering that there are people on both sides of a resume can sometimes be a challenge for everyone involved. In fact, one of the largest challenges that the recruiting and hiring process faces today is the divide between the talent and hiring teams. It’s no secret that job seekers want to skip the resume submission process and get right to the people that help make the decisions – to showcase their talent and talk about why they’re the perfect candidate.
Of course, looking at the other side of the equation let’s not forget that there is typically a single recruiter working against the clock to review literally thousands of candidates in an effort to find that perfect marriage of skills, knowledge and ability. (not to mention the dozens of candidates that were not actively looking for employment and that were referred or sourced as a potential fit!) It’s a scenario that anyone in the industry is familiar with – and it’s why we can sometimes lose site of what recruiting should be about… Connecting with talent vs. processing talent.
It’s for that very reason that our recruiters took the approach of meeting the people attending SXSW and not acquiring them. I’ll be honest, there were more than a dozen conversations held between myself and an attendee explaining the difference and in some cases, assuring them we were not “headhunting” in Austin, TX all week. The response was more positive than I’ve seen at any “recruiting” event in the past few years. In fact, there were a few conversations with people we’d have otherwise never met – but gladly paid an agency thousands of dollars to simply make the introduction after getting the job seeker interested.
As the event went on our recruiters were fielding conversations about getting noticed by employersand asking about how they could more effectively match their skills and passion to the right company (not just PepsiCo!) We candidly shared what most job seekers do wrong, how to avoid some common mistakes and the importance of pushing hard for what makes them excited about their work.
To expand on this point, I was fortunate enough to take part in a panel on the PepsiCo Stage with the great minds of Scott Belsky (Behance.com, ScottBelsky.com), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit.com, AlexisOhanian.com) and FastCompany’s Anya Kamenetz (Fast Company Staff Writer) as moderator. The topic was related to careers of the future and how to find jobs that don’t exist today. The conversations that took place during this unscripted panel covered not only the general topic but several of the previous points I’ve made within this article – the connections make all of the difference. It’s not a short video, but if you’ve the time to watch it I would love your feedback.
Was the event a success from this recruiter’s viewpoint? Yes, because our goal was to make connections for tomorrow as opposed to recruit for today – and we did exactly that.
