Feedback from the Real World

There are a couple of ways you can gather the data you need to support your professional or personal interests. The insular way is to stay in your office and evaluate the feedback that comes in on a minute-by-minute basis and bounce that off of what you glean from the Internet.

The other way, of course, is to actually attend conferences, seminars, and workshops that are taking place around and about topics of interest in your area of interest and/or supposed expertise.

For good or for ill, my work-life balance in this regard is badly skewed to the office-bound variety of trying to get a handle of what's hot and what's not.

It was therefore with considerable anticipation that I looked forward to attending Kennedy Information's Recruiting Conference & Expo in Orlando recently. I wasn't disappointed.

It was a fun time because I got the chance to catch up with many industry colleagues I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was also a time for some significant "learnings" when I had the chance over the two days to hear what thought leaders in the HR and Staffing world had to say on a wide variety of topics. I even had the opportunity to contribute a bit myself as part of a panel headed up by Pete Weddle who moderated a discussion on looking ahead at what recruiting in 2017 might look like. Long story short, there was a lot going on.

Of course, one of the dilemmas that anyone attending a conference like this faces are the hard choices you have to make when you have concurrent tracks going. To try and help people overcome this habitual hurdle, the folks at Kennedy asked us to field some "reporters" so that we could pull together a summary that participants could use and have the "learnings" and headlines in one place.

Spearheaded by our intrepid Senior Contributing Editor and industry guru Joe McCool, we tried to accomplish all this by doing a live wrap-up session at the close of the conference and then using the notes of our "reporters" to create a summary report for the attendees.

While there were around 500+ attendees at the conference, there were obviously lots of people who were not able to go but who might have an interest in some or all of the topics on the agenda. Kennedy has posted copies of the PowerPoint presentations on their site as well as a PDF copy of the report that ExecuNet put together called ROI Recruiting: Select and Retain the Best.

While certainly it is not the same as "being there" it still seems to me a nice gesture on the part of Kennedy to make these materials available, so by extension, I thought I would make them available here as well.