I attended the Social Media in Recruitment Workshop last week hosted by Peter Gold and what a day it was. I had agreed to help Peter on the day and turned up at the British Library early to help set up; after the initial problem of not being able to get into the British Library (the gates were all locked up at 8:30) I was responsible for registering the delegates along with Lisa Scales and Claire Dalton and by 9:30 the venue was full.

There was a good mix of recruitment agencies and in house recruiters – a clear indication that both are really utilising social media in their recruitment strategies – just what us social media fans like to see! The day was split into different sessions and after some initial problems with the WIFI at the British Library the first session began – Facebook run by Peter.  Prior to the workshop, my thoughts were that in house recruiters – particularly from large corporates – would not see the benefits of using Facebook and that it was not taken as a serious tool. Furthermore it may have been overshadowed by a perception that employees misuse it and there were not enough resources to regulate it. However I was proved wrong – a large proportion of the audience had Facebook pages already and those that didn’t were actually setting them up at the workshop!

We then heard from Paul Vernon & Alex Hens on career site optimisation and optimising the visitor experience. I have to admit some of this went completely over my head but it was interesting to see how simple things can really make a difference, e.g. short concise copy on your website and ensuring your website is Google indexed.

The afternoon consisted of legal issues surrounding social media presented by Kevin Barrow which was particularly interesting followed by tips on LinkedIn by Mr LinkedIn himself (Mark Williams) – I found this great and judging by the delegate reaction on my table so did they!  We were encouraged to search for ourselves and see how effective our keywords were in our profiles – I came half way down the page so not bad really!  The final session in the in house recruiter track was on Twitter and was presented by Andy Headworth – this was my favourite session and even though I had heard Andy present at the recent Social Media in Recruitment Conference I still managed to learn more here – in particular the use of followerwonk.com – giving you the ability to search bios on Twitter and twollow.com – twitter’s yellow pages!

At the end of the day my head was buzzing with information – a great day and well organised. Thanks to Peter for organising it and letting me attend!!