For a downloadable copy of Matt Charney’s 2019 RecFest presentation on the Hiring Hype Cycle and Recruiting Trends You Need to Know, click here or check out the embed below and stop asking where you can find a copy, already.
I had the good fortune to be introduced to Jamie Leonard several years ago, when I was surreptitiously invited to one of his Reconverse events, a nice way of saying, I kind of snuck in. The format of these events, which was a first for me, can be succinctly summed up as HR Technology speed dating bolted onto a community of practice centered around peer driven, private professional conversations about the big themes, trends and topics impacting the business of talent.
In short, it was “a really cool event people want to attend,” to use the event organizer’s official mission statement. Mission accomplished, to say the very least.
The vendors paid for the right to get in front of qualified decision makers, which is the ultimate goal of their marketing spend, and after the shills were done, the vendors were kindly shown the door as the event transitioned into a pretty profound closed-door discussion that was one of the most direct and refreshing conversations I’ve ever witnessed, then and now, between recruiting and HR leaders. This is likely because they stopped, for a fleeting moment, being human resources and became human, instead.
It likely didn’t hurt that it was held at a bar, which, let’s be honest, is where everyone wants to be at most industry events, anyways – and seemed to be organized chaos, which is to say, it felt more like a group of friends meeting for a pint than it did a standard, stodgy staffing shindig.
Affinity breeds honesty, and all people leaders are facing more or less the same challenges (not to mention fears and frustrations). Jamie’s event allowed them to open up and be vulnerable, a luxury most talent executives rarely enjoy. More importantly, by keeping it real, the group was able to provide sympathy, support and suggestions, to each other in a way that no vendor or consultant ever could.
The concept of “community” has become something of a commodity, but whatever I saw at that first Jaime Leonard joint was a refreshing reminder that outside of consultant speak and BS business buzzwords, there’s real power in real communities like the one I saw that day in Reconverse; that community has continued to evolve and grow over the intervening years, culminating in this year’s #RecFest19.
My presentation, as promised, is posted below. I apologize as it’s a few days late, but I thought I’d be remiss if I didn’t include some thoughts about a conference that was, on the whole, way more interesting than my presentation, or any presentation, really.
The content was great, of course (present company excluded). But the context was even better.
The 2019 edition billed itself as the world’s largest independent recruitment conference (an objectively accurate claim). Not included in the marketing is the fact that it’s also the world’s biggest community for anyone who geeks out about recruiting and hiring. Turns out, there are a thousands of us, which is both exciting and depressing, I guess.
As recruiters, we generally sit in silos, which makes it hard to make any sort of real impact in recruitment as individual employers or talent organizations beyond filling reqs, hitting our numbers and keeping hiring managers happy. Collaboration is almost non-existent in recruiting; instead, we see ourselves at “war,” and that war for talent is predicated not on collaboration, but competition.
Read any recent “recruiting thought leadership” (an oxymoron, if ever one existed), and you’ll see a worldview in which winning is a zero sum game. Either you hire the candidate, or the competition does.
Forget the fact that the competition is normally just another recruiter filling the same sorts of roles in the same industries and geographies; if there is a “war for talent,” as most seem to say, then they are enemies. This ‘us vs. them’ mentality even extends to the pervasive divide between third party and in house recruiters, despite the fact that both work best when there’s symbiosis instead of holding to the great schism of the status quo.
This same professional polarity extends to sourcing professionals and recruitment marketers, whose enmity comes primarily from their bifurcated approach to building the same exact pipelines.
Similarly, executive search dismisses high volume recruiters as paper pushers, and high volume recruiters look down on leadership or professional recruiters and the fact that they carry a fraction of the reqs and expend so much effort to close a single hire, when some hospitality and retail recruiters have to make thousands in the number of days it takes to fill one VP level position.
The list of examples is essentially infinite, but the point is, we create divisions amongst ourselves that, intentionally or not, hold all of us back, on a personal and professional level.
I’m not going to sit here and give the standard liberal stump speech of clichés about why we should focus on uniting instead of dividing, on our similarities instead of our differences, or similarly tired and trite aphorisms.
But the point is, we’re all in this together – and the only victory in the war for talent will be, for recruiters anyway, pyrrhic at best, since we’re all going to be candidates again, and therefore, ultimately reliant on other recruiters.
This should be a virtuous cycle, but instead, it’s becoming an increasingly virulent one.
I’ve learned a lot from RecFest over the years, but this year, it wasn’t about the content, or the conversations – both of which are always world class (except for the live Chad and Cheese podcast, which was mediocre at best – and that might have been their best show).
It was about watching a community coming together to collaborate, not compete, with other recruiters. To swap war stories, to talk shop, to form real friendships that will last infinitely longer than the relatively finite tenure inherent to most roles in recruiting.
In a business that’s based almost exclusively on the strength of relationships, and in an industry that’s inherently incestuous, RecFest represents a learning opportunity more valuable than most conferences, where attendees listen and speakers speak, where “best practices” are codified, and where the solutions are products, and not outcomes.
It’s a chance for 3,000 recruiters to come together around shared interests, experiences and aspirations and actually learn about each other, and from each other, instead of just learning about specious stuff like talent trends, the speculative fiction that’s codified as “the future of work,” or what’s next in TA tech. That stuff is important, but not as important as the collisions that can only happen outside of a structured session or even an official schedule.
The original vision for RecFest, its creation myth, was born seven or so years ago when Jamie Leonard and his better looking, more charming brother Bobby found themselves at a music festival. After a few beers, they had a breakthrough: festivals aren’t about the musical acts or the lineup – those are the inducement.
What festivals are really about, and are defined by, are the audience, not the performers. Festivals are all about bringing people together, and, obviously, it didn’t take long for them to realize the parallels to recruitment – and to see the possibility of a recruiting event that, like a festival, was more than another one off event, but instead, could be a shared experience built not around a dynamic collective instead of simply staid, static content.
RecFest 19 was the culmination of a long gestating dream, and somehow, exceeded even the wildly Quixotic goal of having an HR version of Glastonbury, which sounded ridiculous to me the first time I heard it, too. They pulled it off, though, and I can’t recall having more fun at any recruiting event, and I’ve been to more of those than I care to count. Another takeaway: we forget about fun too often in recruiting, but recruiting without fun would just be sales.
I’m grateful to have geeked out about stuff like predictive analytics or labor economics with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the people business, but the real thing that stood out to me at RecFest 19, and the best proof of concept, was the fact that most of the interactions I had, most of the conversations I found myself involved in, had nothing to do with recruiting.
I find industry events very tiring, particularly because, for whatever reason, when recruiters come together, most can’t stop talking shop, even when the event is over and the bar is open. Like, I don’t know why, but recruiting people cannot shut up about recruiting. But when it comes to work-life balance, I like the life part a whole lot more (and find it infinitely more interesting).
I had relatively few recruiting related conversations at RecFest outside of some follow up questions after my presentation on trends recruiters should care about (spoiler alert: it’s making hires and building relationships, not pretending to be in marketing or buying tech just because you can).
Photo: RecFest organizer Jamie Leonard and author
I got to talk about hip hop, sports, street art and stand up with people who happened to be in recruiting, and found that to be a far better way to build relationships than the small talk and ulterior motives that dominate so many interpersonal industry interactions.
Turns out, when we stop being personas or brand ambassadors and start being ourselves, recruiters really aren’t that different after all. In fact, recruiters and talent acquisition professionals are pretty awesome (not to mention pretty funny, very profane and often profound, too). The problem is, we’re too busy trying to establish our credibility for everyone outside the function than establishing a cohesive community within it.
The thing about communities, however, is they can’t be faked or forced – they either happen, or they don’t. RecFest represents one of the most authentic, organic and, with 3,000 attendees this year, one of the most powerful communities in the business of talent – and unquestionably, it’s become one of the industry’s premiere events.
It might be the only one where the tickets sell out overnight, however – which is a strange anomaly from the tiered pricing and desperate CTAs of most event organizers desperate to draw a respectable crowd. The thing about communities, though, is that the real ones can’t be replicated, forced or faked – which is why the good news is, there’s only one RecFest.
The bad news is, there’s only one RecFest – and there’s another whole year to go before the next one (that is, if you can snag a ticket). But trust me: it’s worth the effort, particularly with so many worthless user conferences, infomercials disguised as best practice sharing, and inane industry expos filling out the rest of the recruiting events calendar.
Lord knows, I’ll be counting down the days.
