Minnesota Headhunter: Minnesota Recruiters #9 | Fall 2009

Minnesota Recruiters #9 | Fall 2009 | Recap

May 13, 2010

Originally posted on the Minnesota Recruiters group site December 7th, 2009.

The 9^th edition of the Minnesota Recruiters Conference is over, the dust has settled and all have full minds. I do wonder... if you are a newbie to our event and you have all this stuff in your head where do you start when you get back to the office?

I ask because after 9 events I feel much the same way every time and I have a fairly good clue what I am doing.

OK so I will start with the important stuff, our sponsors who all signed up for the event and the quarter, without who (or is it whom) none of this is possible:

Adam Sprecher [email protected] LinkedIn
Tom Wentzel [email protected] LinkedIn

Gregg Dourgarian [email protected] LinkedIn

Doug Berg [email protected] LinkedIn

I know I say that all the time, “without who none of this is possible” but it’s true. If not for them I would be getting 10 of my friends together at a breakfast place.

Thank you to our Group Sponsor for their ongoing support:

A few of us started the night before the event with dinner and a bit of a get to know you while I had my laptop out still trying to cancel and add people to the event.

Here is a photo:

Ryan Estis, Kristi Jones, Gregg Dourgarian, Paul DeBettignies & Jennifer McClure

Here is the formal invite that was sent out:

Response to this event (to be blunt) freaked me out. Two events ago we “sold out” in 3 days and the last event was 25 hours. I was concerned that with registration opening two days before Thanksgiving that we might go into the week of the event. I was already getting a lot of “out of office” replies when I was sending out the event information.

We started registration that Tuesday morning at 10:00 AM. By 11:10 AM the “wait list” kicked in. Yeah no joke, 70 minutes to fill the seats.

In all between attendees, cancellations, no shows and those on the wait list I could not make room for we had 352 people show interest in the event. We had 2000+ views of the registration page with some of that due to pointing people to who they would be attending with.

So how do you fill that many seats in 70 minutes? Have an awesome list of speakers and topics:

Jennifer McClure is from Cincinnati, Ohio and is Vice President at Centennial, Inc. I have been following her online for a couple of years through her blog CincyRecruiter and through many email and Tweets. I have a lot of respect for her personally and professionally. She does a lot of speaking to Recruiter and HR groups in her area as she has both a HR and Executive Search background and can talk not only the “why” of using social media but also the “how”.

Here are some photos from her session:

Jennifer did a fantastic job engaging the group. There were a lot of questions asked about the “why’s” and “how’s” of Social Media and she did a wonderful job answering them all. I knew Jennifer was doing well when during her session I saw three Tweets from different folks asking if Jennifer could move to Minneapolis. Clearly a good sign that a presentation is going well.

I hope my ERE and other conference/event friends are reading this and if they are let me blunt, put Jennifer on the stage. NOW!!!

Jennifer’s contact information:

[email protected] - LinkedIn - Twitter - Blog

Next up was Teresa Thompson, Esq an Attorney from Fredrikson & Byron. It had been a couple of years since we had an attorney at an event and after meeting her at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota when we were part of a HR panel I knew I wanted to her to talk with our group.

Teresa spoke about use of social networking sites as recruiting tools can get recruiters and/or employers in trouble. Her focus was on how to keep us out of legal conundrums.

I knew she was doing a sweet job when I was getting Direct Messages on Twitter asking when we would have her back.

Here are a few pics:

Teresa and I are going to talk about how she might be able to help us with future sessions.

Teresa’s contact information:

[email protected] - Bio - LinkedIn

Doug Berg of Jobs2Web batted clean up for the morning. This was Doug’s second presentation (and second or third time sponsoring) to our group and I am reminded that he may be the only person I know who can talk faster than I can.

Doug gave us ideas on how we can use social network sites, SEO and other Internet related tools to bring in the types of candidates we want to recruit.

A couple of pics: