#SMIR was it any good?

Great video. Nice to hear from some familiar folk from an absentee. Good to hear that real examples are coming to bear – however clearly the recruitment industry is still a big tanker to turn – and only those of us with `light feet` are adapting to it in the timescales available. I recruit in social media, and the experts will tell you that in a couple of years it may well have passed. So in truth, more live examples would have been good while the iron is hot – however it is clear that the shining examples may sadly have been few and far between.

That said – following it on the #SMIR hashtag was very enlightening, engaging and clearly more recruitment people are being inspired to engage in SM – and look forward to more examples of success.

SMIR conference this year followed a similar format and trend to the 1st event last year, but this time was almost radically different for the simple fact that we’ve clearly progressed from the trepidation of unknown, un-measurable and speculative, to some of the first examples of Social Media in Recruitment that’s been used and has actually worked well! And, as a direct result of what was learned and acted upon from last year’s conference!

Now isn’t that a success story?!? I mean, how often is it that you attend an inspirational conference or seminar and come back burning passionately with ideas and actions, but as time moves away from the event, the big thing that you were going to do never actually happens!

And for the Guru’s who’ve been saying for years, ‘no, you have to believe us, it really does work’ this day has been forthcoming, and many a sigh of relief was made, and not only in so much as there might finally be some reasonable financial reward on the cards in the future.

Ariel Eckstein from LinkedIn shared some great features that they’re developing or have rolled out recently, including Recruiter Network, Jobs Network and Talent Direct. He then explained an interesting difference between the mentality of British Recruitment Consultants compared with those in the US. Where in the US the game plan primarily surrounds engaging and building networks of active candidates; in the UK activities are centred around building networks of passive candidates in lieu of the promised recovery.

Andy Hedworth presented the challenges surrounding recruiting with twitter and provided some great resources for measuring the results of such campaigns. One great observation he presented, later emanated in Luke McKend’s excellent presentation on recent and future Google products, was that the kids no longer use e-mail! 3.8 million people in the age range 18-39 are registered with Twitter and untold on Facebook. Luke explained that having tried to communicate with his children using the conventional methods of e-mail and text message, with the latter at 2 days response time being considerably faster than the former, which he claimed took several weeks to get a response, he was amazed when he Facebooked one of his kids and received a reply within seconds!

Lisa Scales from Talent on View discussed how online communities can play a part in your attraction strategies and explained how their new product, TribePad could help recruiters with this challenge, and then we heard two case studies from Jonathan Heart-Smith of CK Clinical and Elkie Holland of Prospectus IT Recruitment on how they had used what they learned from last year and produced some fantastic results! Both presentations were excellent but I have to commend Elkie for her fantastic ability to have us all in stitches whilst at the same time delivering the very valuable points! I tried to get her to make a You Tube video of the bits she omitted as she thought the humour may have been a little inappropriate! Inappropriate? Never!

Lucian Tarnowski of Brave New Talent presented some eye-opening thoughts on Gen Y and how the Social Media frenzy has changed their mentality in a working environment and Peter Gold gave an excellent presentation on how to maximise the use of Facebook pages for recruitment – a topic of much contention! I was silently very pleased when he alluded to the fact that crazy people might actually be ‘alright’

Adrian Marlow from Lawspeed delivered his usual remarkable effort in making Law actually interesting, and again gets my approval for being able to use a great deal of humour while delivering the necessary points in a concise and understandable way.

After Luke’s great presentation that served not only to educate but also to rouse the now weary audience, a panel was put forwards to the floor consisting of Alan Whitford of RC Euro, Louise Triance of UK Recruiter, Matt Alder of Metashift and Bill Boorman of himself limited. These guys were received very well and fielded a range of great questions.

All in all an excellent day and finished off with the traditional merriments. My congratulations to all the speakers and panel, Mike and Jane, and equally the delegates themselves!