Question: What’s the difference between a traditional recruiting conference and a tech recruiting conference? Answer: Engineers! At what is believed to be the first ever national tech recruiting conference, Talent 42 debuted in June this year. The sold out show was attended by both tech leaders and tech recruiters. Plus, three of the keynotes were engineering leaders from Groupon, Google, and Facebook. At the SHRM National Conference in Atlanta, I caught up with John Vlastelica (@vlastelica), producer of Talent 42 and Managing Director of Recruiting Toolbox. I asked Vlastelica to give me some highlights and what he planned to change for next year’s show. Here are just a few of his discoveries:
- Whether you’re from a tech company or a non-tech company, all tech recruiters are struggling to find tech talent.
- Individual tech candidates have pulled their profiles out of LinkedIn as they don’t want to be found.
- Hiring managers are getting more involved in the tech communities by either holding meetups and/or participating online in tech forums.
- Since the conference sold out and a lot of people couldn’t physically come out to the conference in Seattle, Vlastelica is looking into the possibility of live-streaming for next year.
- Vlastelica built a lot of time for networking and a best practice session, but for next year he’s going to build some more time for sponsors to demo their products. The audience really wanted to see cool tools that would help them with their tech hiring challenge.