After a busy first few days here at BlueSky, I attended the Social Media in Recruitment Conference last week at the British Library. The event was hosted and organised by Mike Taylor of Web-Based-Recruitment.com and was attended by over 200 delegates. I had heard from my colleagues that the 2009 conference had been a success and provided some very useful information on Social Media, and as I will be concentrating on this area I was keen to attend and see what I could get out of it for myself but also, and more importantly for the clients I would be working with.

The conference was split in to nine different sessions ranging from the use of social networking sites in recruitment (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc) to the legal issues affecting social media and employment. The conference also had a new element this year which was to illustrate some success stories from the 2009 conference.  For me, the success stories were the highlight of the conference –we heard from Jonathan Hart-Smith of CK Clinical who really emphasised that to use social media in recruitment you need a strategy and the time to implement it, and following on from last years conference – one of the first things his company did was hire a Social Media Marketing Manager to do this.

We then heard from Elkie Holland of Prospectus IT Recruitment who explained that prior to the 2009 conference she knew that she should be using social media for recruiting but just didn’t know how. However in the last twelve months had been using it effectively to get some great results.

Another presentation I found useful was given by Andy Headworth of Sirona Consulting who concentrated on strategies for using Twitter. I have used Twitter for a while now but am no expert and Andy shared a whole host of different ways to use Twitter effectively.  All of us know that you either love or hate Twitter, some refuse to use it and some are probably a little too obsessed with it!! Andy shared some stats with us which suggest that those in the recruitment industry really should be using it – the fastest growing group on Twitter is the 18-34 year-olds which account for 45% of users and the second is the 35-49 year-olds which account for 24% of users. Therefore a staggering 69% of Tweeters are the target audience for recruiters – a clear indication that Twitter should be used as a recruitment tool.

All in all it was a great day and I certainly learnt a lot and am looking forward to next year’s conference!  Congratulations to Mike Taylor for organising the event.