It’s hard to believe we are only two days away from the Fall 2016 SourceCon Conference. SourceCon is a three-day conference (if you count the SourceCon Happy Hour) for recruiters, sourcers, and talent acquisition leaders. For three days, you get to share and learn from your peers, who face the same challenges you do every day in recruiting and sourcing. This year will be the largest show since its inception in 2007.
When you go to SourceCon you will realize that there is a spirit of community and sharing of information, unlike any other conference you have attended. When you go to the Conference, don’t ask yourself what can I learn from these experts, but instead ask yourself what can I share. What is unique about this conference is that it is interactive. It’s not heavy on theory. You get to practice in real time at the SourceCon Hackathon the strategies and methodologies shared by the speakers and attendees to ensure an immediate impact when you return to the office. You get to learn the latest and greatest tools used to find passive candidates, their contact details, and how to engage them in a way to influence them to make a change. There is also so much more you can learn once the speakers are finished speaking and the networking sessions commence.
I have been recruiting and sourcing for 20 years. When I started recruiting, we would source in-house through newspaper ads and job boards. The only job boards around were Dice and CareerBuilder and they were less than a year old. Monster came around two years later. We didn’t have Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. None of those products or companies were created yet. We didn’t even have cell phones. But with the advent of the mobile phone, particularly the smartphones and social media websites, recruiting and sourcing now has more access to talent than ever before. What SourceCon teaches you is how you can curate all the unstructured data points created by someone’s social footprint or lack thereof, how to analyze that data to create unique opportunities to engage those candidates in a unique way that separates you from the hundreds of other recruiters reaching out to them.
There is no doubt that technology has transformed the recruiting and sourcing industry. Even with 20 years of experience, at SourceCon I was able to learn about new Chrome Extensions to find contact details, how to manipulate API’s, build customized bookmarklets, web scraping techniques, and Excel hacks to organize and be more efficient in my recruiting efforts. I learned that I had a lot to offer as well and was able to share my journey and stories in recruiting with others seeking advice.
If you are unable to attend SourceCon in Anaheim this year, I have some good news for you. This year SourceCon will be live streaming the conference. Furthermore, you can follow #SourceCon on Twitter and join in on the conversations and actively engage with those at the conference. Third, connect and network with the speakers and attendees on Linkedin and Twitter and Snapchat. Finally, I recommend joining the SourceCon Facebook community. This is where a lot of knowledge is shared throughout the year and a great way to continue growing your skills and asking your questions to your peers.
For those of you attending next week, I look forward to meeting you and sharing ideas. For those of you who aren’t able to make it next week, I hope to see you sometimes at a future event. If you are passionate about the advancement of recruiting, sourcing, or talent acquisition, you need to add SourceCon to your bucket list of conferences.