We don’t need #Recruitfest

The camera friendly Charlie Judy (Source: Smartblogs.com)

I was commenting on Charlie Judy’s excellent post, “The Recruitfest Drive By Shooting” when I got the urge to write this post. The over-riding message I took from the 9 hours of Recruitfest streaming, and I watched it all, was that Recruiters and HR need to brush up on candidate care, and give a good candidate experience.

No S**T Sherlock!

It’s great that we have a conference streamed to 3000+ people.

It’s great that we have an active twitter back channel that creates its own set of conversations.

It’s great that I can phone in and speak to a presenter 1000’s of miles away and ask a question in real-time.

It’s great that #Recruitfest happened and created a whole new type of event: ConferenceTV

It’s great that a big part of #Recruitfest talked about the real candidate experience

It’s sad that we had to have that part of the conversation in the first place.

It’s not rocket science. We don’t need the great and the good to give us solutions. Why don’t we all just stop talking about it and agree:

To acknowledge all applications received

To agree, communicate and stick to a timetable and method for feedback.

To communicate “decline” decisions as soon as they are made.

To give candidates constructive feedback. Not war and peace, but something they can work on in the future.

It’s not rocket science, it’s not hard and its basic human decency. We can automate 80% of it.

Lets cut the excuses. We shouldn’t need to waste the #Recruitfest opportunity (or any other conference/unconference including #tru,) talking about things we should really be doing.

We should be talking about the future and how we can make the most of it. Talking about new developments and where they can fit in.

Start thinking #BrandRecruiter and do the simple things to clean up our act!

Be ambassadors for common sense good practice! Don’t make decency the exception.

Bill

Links Mentioned In This Post And A Must Watch Video

The Recruitfest DriveBy Shooting – Charlie Judy

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r596kymIPwI]

#Recruitfest Speakers Charlie Judy & Gerry Crispin Talking Candidate Experience