A BIG THANK you to Anne Heraty of CPL, Jane Lorigan of Saaongroup, Joe Ffrench of Microsoft and Patrick Traynor of LinkedIn for their very insightful and provactive presentations at the "The Future of Recruitment: Part 1: The Road Ahead" conference. Also,thanks to the sponsor on the day Pairic O'Dowd of Prima and all those who attended. It was great to see so much education taking place and open and honest dialogues about the times we find ourselves in and the speed at which technology is evolving the industry.
There was a lot I took from the session. Just some of which were:
1. Anne Heraty's opening slide " Bad and Getting Worse" - was a very interesting way to kick off a presentation! Her thoughts on where the recruitment agency industry needs to get to in the next few years was an intersting perspective on "talent scouting" or "collaborative consultancy" with businesses.
2. LinkedIn's presentation was great! Learning about their concepts around"Super Groups", their Opensocial ideas and how this will evolve their apps platform, and their future development roadmap around wanting to be the defacto "online address book" for professionals and their plans on how they intend to do this was an excellent example of how progressively they are thinking about the future use of technology. They are most definitely a leader in their field and will become more important than ever for recruiters in the near future, especially in-house recruitment teams with the next iteration of their "recruiter" product. But at 29k US for 3 user licenses it will be interesting to see how people react to the cost.
3. Jane Lorigan's insights into moving of the IrishJobs platform to career mangement, skill gaps assessment and analysis and her open and honest admission that the Irish recruitment industy had "taken their eye off the ball" the last couple of years, set the tone for some very good debate and was very welcome.
4. I also took from the meeting a lot of positive feedback in relation to my "Recruitment Darwinism" concept and why it is critical to be able to analyse technology trends if a company is trying to respond to change "it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive the change" . For FY10 and beyond: Cloud Computing, Green IT, Unified Messaging, Social Software and Virtualisation will certainly be key technology trends that will call be the clarion call that will summon through a lot of recruitment innovation in the near future.
5 Likewise, it was great to see such a positive response to the concept of the "cloud recruiter" that now exists amongst us and how automation and aggregation are going to evolve the industry dramatically enhanced by mobility and applets in the near future.
And "Yes" we can try keep the momentum, networking and learning moving forward and I will do my best to see if we can organise Part: 2 of the conference before the end of the year!
