Last week I hopped on a short flight and headed to the DC region to attend the annual RecruitDC event. It was their largest attendance ever as more than 400 packed the ballroom at the Falls Church Marriott. RecruitDC is a networking community that hosts events with the goal of fostering best practice and new idea discussions to elevate the recruiting profession in the greater Washington, DC area.
This year’s keynote was given by Kara Yarnot from Hireclix, the agency based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She encouraged the audience to create a connection with candidates to establish their trust.
In order to do that she said to do things like;
- Explaining your hiring process up front
- Writing better job ads
- Enlist the help of your employees (to tell stories)
- Consider adding video to your recruitment marketing mix
- Commit to Following up
She actually began the keynote with stories of her battle with a rare form of eye cancer and the crowd gasped with tales of her treatments and getting a prosthetic eye. It was quite a story, and rumor has it she sometimes pops it out for her HC colleagues on occasion!
I attended a couple of breakout sessions starting with Chad Norman from Catch Talent on Employer Branding. The audio for that can be heard below.
I also recorded a recruiter named Veronika Henderson who spoke for her first time about How To Be An Effective, One Person Recruiting Team. Her audio is also below;
After the cocktail reception of a few of recruiting’s regular such as myself, Jo Weech, Matt Duren, Roy Mauer, Susanna Frazier and Martin Burns headed to the hotel bar for an impromptu happy hour courtesy of Hiretual‘s Ninh Tran. As always, the drinks were good and the conversations even better.
#recruitdc Great givers and sharers from whom I have learned much! pic.twitter.com/zJXQhvL11O
— Jo Weech (@JoWeech) May 24, 2018
Special thanks goes out to Jo Weech who also fed this late night crew via her access to the Presidential Suite.
See you all in 2019.
Learn more about the RecruitDC organization here. Follow the twitter stream from the event here.
Best quote at #RecruitDC so far: “Did you see my email? Is the worst question in the English language”
— Chris Russell (@ChrisRussell) May 24, 2018
