Yesterday I wrote about some of the things we expect from the conference in terms of content and direction – Oh, was that last week, sorry lol.

Ok, we decided to use Cavendish Conference Centre for a few reasons. Before I get into them, it is always a difficult process finding the right venue for your event. Even places that you find attractive might have already been booked up for the date you have in mind.

Often times, they offer alternative dates in case you are flexible enough to change this or you have not made the proposed event day public.

The best conference organisers also struggle with searching for venues and confirming them. I have seen a few events where they have venue: TBA until a few weeks to the event. Event organisers do these for several reasons, some of which I guess you can guess.

Usually, when you try and book a venue for a large event in the UK, you are expected to make a deposit for a rough number of expected delegates, before your booking is confirmed. Others charge a flat rate for the rooms hire + lunch etc. Typical deposit is around 50%, and you should try and budget between 10-15K for the conference venue holding 150+ delegates.

Right, back to Cavendish. When we decided to run this conference, we looked through a list of venues that can hold at least 100 people, ideally theatre styled and very easy to get to (traffic within London). It was also important that the venue have wi-fi connection, as we hope that bloggers and delegates alike will be able to live blog / tweet during the conference.

Something we hope we can also achieve will be live streaming the conference. We are meeting with the Video Technicians at Cavendish so we can go through all the technicalities.

While searching for venues, we visited at least 6 different locations that promise to offer the basic, traditional conference needs. But, 2 of them was automatically not in the running as they cannot guarantee wi-fi access. One of these looks really really cool. Just don’t get it that they don’t plan to ensure Internet access.

Out of the other 4, we checked out people flow around the venue. We wanted to make sure that attendees have short distances to travel around the venue, so we don’t have the conference room on one floor and reception two floors above. Close proximity will ensure that people can interact better and network properly.

From visiting Cavendish, I realized these guys are proper conference people. They just manage conferences (nothing else) and that kind of gives them that focus. It is a bit unlike Hotels with meeting rooms or Public venues that have conference facilities. Also interesting to see they have a small office right near the venue entrance, but tucked away nicely in case we (as organisers) need any quick administrative help.

The lunch / networking area is large enough to hold 200+ people, but can they can also close out some parts of it, in order to make the crowd more intimate if you have around 100-150 delegates. There is ample space for conference sponsors to showcase their brands and products, right in the networking areas. Have a look at the Gallery.

We have the option of using some of their other meeting rooms in case we decide to run break-out sessions, which we probably will not at this stage. But it’s also nice to know their is some kind of speakers / sponsors lounge where these can discuss more privately.

The decision to use Cavendish revolves around the points mentioned above. But getting a nice bottle of Bordeaux from the Conference Manager just before I left, helped make the decision easier. The power of old-fashioned courtesy, and eh red wine.

Errors on this post are mine, and no, its not the wine!

At the start, and after sounding the conference to a few chaps, some were concerned that all the speakers will be talking about the same thing, since its a case study event. This is not what they said, but my intepretation of what they think the speakers will discuss is: ‘We use Facebook to recruit graduates and Twitter to post jobs and LinkedIn to attract experienced talent’.

What we need to remember is that no two companies are the same. And different organizations have completely different ways of approaching things. So, no, the case studies will all have their uniqueness and diversity.

Now I am gonna do a quick run down on what some of the specific speakers will be discussing, obviously without giving much away:-)

The conference agenda will demonstrate real life scenarios of how these organisations (EA, Intel, SABMiller, Deloitte NL, Roche, Cummins, G4S etc) are building internal teams to recruit directly, with a focus on social media as a sourcing tool and branding channel.

They will showcase social recruiting strategy, that is well thought out and planned for, over a period of time. Some will share insights on how they influenced senior management teams to buy into social media as a recruiting platform.

While others will highlight on how they built multi-country and location-specific social media adoption techniques. By this, I mean scenarios where X might work better in country A, than Y in country B.

You will see the conversations some brands are having on social media, the skillsets needed to communicate openly in these platforms and the feedback (positive/negative) that they get.

Expect to see figures, analytics and statistics of social recruiting processes, and some projections of where they are heading with these numbers, in the future. While some speakers might not use the phrase ‘ROI’, watch out for specific areas where social media has added demonstrable value to their overal hiring strategy.

Yes, cost per hire and volume of hires will be mentioned, as well as quality of hire. Mind you, the latter is a delicate issue, and relative to who is hiring. People’s attitude to work can change depending on the culture of the company, relationship with their direct reports or any sudden uncertainty within their business.

We will continue to post relevant preview regarding the conference in the coming weeks, and Alan will do some video interviews with some of the speakers before the conference so they can explain a bit more on what they will be presenting.

Tomorrow, I will write about ‘where’ the conference will be held, and what is involved in finding and sorting venues for conferences. You can also read why we organised the event and how we selected the speakers. By the way, have you registered yet?

But the original motivation for this event was to bring in people who actually manage these processes. It is not just what they have achieved (i.e. twitter profiles, facebook pages and linkedin usage) that we were looking for. It was important to see how they developed an internal social media recruiting strategy; the barriers, the challenges and possible failures and potential successes.

With due respects to the social recruiting experts, gurus, rockstars, well-read bloggers and well-respected speakers (who we are very sure will do a great job of speaking), the motivation behind this conference was important. We wanted to attract actual corporate recruiters who will share their own internal issues and implementation processes.

It is one thing to talk about a subject from a flexible operational background. It is another to extract an example from a speaker who is currently doing the task, after convincing people ‘at the top’ to adopt the ‘new tool’, within a large global corporation.

Hence, it is possible that some persons assumed that we will invite them as speakers or the ones who recommended themselves expected to be selected. For these ones, please do understand you can also support and assist us in other ways. You can get involved as a delegate (discounted rate ends 30th Sept) or you can promote the conference as a blogger, with demonstrable value to the event. Feel free to chat with Alan or myself.

If you plan a conference, also watch out for random speaking requests from people with very unrelated skillsets. We got over 15 emails from PR people pitching their clients as speakers, and direct emails from all sorts of Social Media extraordinaires. These guys probably set up Google alerts for ‘social media’ and ‘speaker’ and auto email to everyone. It is amazing.

Right, let’s get to the selection, shall we. As I said yesterday, we only had 1-2 case studies at the start. From research, we identified 5-6 more speakers, but needed to get beneath what we have read about them and their social media efforts. Hence, we had a series of conversations with these potential speakers in order to understand more about their internal processs. During these discussions, we started creating drafts of the agenda and placing some speakers on some specific topics. The specifics will range from Talent Acquisition, Graduate Recruitment, Global Sourcing (multi-country approach) to fully integrated Social Recruiting strategy.

We wanted to feature a presentation on broader Social Media (not just recruitment) so that the audience can also appreciate other areas where Social Media has played a major impact in corporate organizations i.e. PR, Customer Service, Sales, Community etc. Hence, we decided on a topic around Social Media and Community Management, with Mel Carson as speaker.

Initially, we invited speakers from the public sector who we hoped would discuss their approach to social media in recruiting. One of them didn’t think this was the right time to present their case study in the public domain, while the other was experiencing some senior management changes and their role wasn’t certain at that time. Of course, we also invited and spoke with speakers whose scheduling will not allow them to speak at the conference. And some who never came back to us. These things happen!

Interestingly, after we announced the speakers line up and agenda last week, Alan was asked by someone: How did you guys find all these speakers with an excellent agenda? And the simple answer was, we researched, we asked nicely and followed up politely.

Along the way, we examined some formats for #SRCONF. Should we have panel discussions, break out sessions, expert workshops or even an unconference? We figured that the target delegates will likely prefer a structured conference format that covered a wide area of interest, without compromising networking opportunities, throughout the day.

We agreed on running two panels, that will not just rehash the presentations from the speakers but focus on other elements of social media. Hence, we were glad when Jon Ingham accepted our request to Chair a panel on Social Media and Employee Engagement. This should be a rather HR-centric panel, that should give some insights on other aspects of Social Media within the HR department. The other panel will look at specific realities of Social Recruiting to Recruiters and Candidates alike, moderated by moi.

So, we are very pleased to have confirmed speakers from EA, Cisco, Intel, G4S, Microsoft, Cummins, Deloitte, SABMiller, Roche, representing a diverse set of industries: Entertainment, Technology, Blue Collar, Consulting, FMCG, Pharma. Now that you know a bit about how we selected the speakers, why not have a look at the conference agenda.

Tomorrow, I will write ‘what’ we hope to get out from the agenda. Ciao.

I have always wanted to write a bit about the ‘behind the scenes’ planning process, inspired by this post; partly to provide some level of openness; partly to share some relevant tips and ideas to anyone interested in coordinating a conference in the future.

This post will be the first of a series that will take us through the why (we embarked on this journey), how (we selected the speakers), what (will be discussed at the conference), where (the conference will be held) and which (direction this event take). Lets just narrow these posts to: why, how, what, where and which.

So, why another Social Media Recruiting Conference? After all, ERE produces the brilliant Social Recruiting Summit in the US and Mike Taylor has done very well with the Social Media in Recruitment Conference in the UK.

I attended #SMIR in April, and it was a very informative event with a lot of How To’s around Social Media in recruitment. But I realized (I guess along with others) that the case study sessions added some spark to the day. And when chatting with other delegates during the breaks, some people were hoping to see more examples of real life social recruiting strategy, especially from corporate organizations.

Personally, it was great to see UK companies who were willing to discuss their internal adoption of social recruiting. It is rare in this part of the world to discuss ‘trade secrets’ in the public domain just so the competition don’t ‘steal’ your ideas. But I was quite pleased with the two case studies.

After the conference, I started talking with a few UK companies and listening to their foray into Social Media. The feedback was mixed. I was aiming to understand what they think, where they are, what they are doing and what they hope to achieve around social recruiting. No, I wasn’t selling, just listening. But, most of them kept asking the same questions: who else is doing this and are their UK case studies with some level of success? We all know the Starbucks and Sodexo’s of this world. But these stories tend to come from across the pond.

That was when the idea of creating a conference that brings together a diverse range of companies, ideally operating in the UK / European space. The target was brands who already have developed advanced social media recruiting strategies or are currently implementing a social media plan. Admittedly, all companies have different work culture, and how decisions are made internally vary from one to the other. Hence, we sensed that no two companies will have devised the same approach to using the tools. Yes, the tools may be the same in most cases, but the internal decision making process and external strategy implementation, will surely be different.

Now the reality check. I have never organised a conference before. I have managed a 20-30 people workshops and events. Hence, with the idea on paper, I knew I had to tap someone with great experience on conference organisation, but also with extensive knowledge of UK, European and Global recruitment industry. And who better than to connect with Alan Whitford. We have worked together on a smaller project and do respect each others value. When I initially discussed the concept with him, he asked a lot of questions, naturally.

Over a few days, Alan saw the potentials of a conference that could shift from how to’s to hard facts. At the beginning, we had only 1-2 real case studies that can be identifiable within the UK social recruiting circle. But within a few days, we gathered a fair list of potential companies (and speakers) whom we intended to approach. It was interesting that when I mentioned a name X, Alan would say: ‘Oh, I know him/her. We met at Y event 5 years ago’. And gradually, we drew up a decent list of possible speakers. Note: A future post on how we gathered and selected the speakers will be up here in a few days.

After we have put together a few names for the initial speaking slots, we then looked at the logistics and finances, scanned the calendar for dates and worked out an organization structure for planning the conference. We also decided on using Eventbrite early on (which does make conference ticketing fairly seemless) and then put the proper plan in action. The domain names have been registered, and we developed a simple but smart website that will suit the event.

Finally, we announced the conference on 1st July, and got some interesting responses. Some were positive; some were skeptical. But wasn’t that expected? From that day, we have focused on the job at hand i.e find the speakers, sort the venue, attract the delegates, identify some sponsors, engage with the community.

The conference has generated great interest across the recruiting industry, so much so that we had some great speakers approach us from the corporate recruiting sector. These persons had seen the momentum of the speaker’s announcements we made over the summer and were interested to share their own social recruiting experiences. We hope they will be available for other future events.

However, we delightedly confirmed our conference agenda last week, with about 10 speakers, operating from 4 European countries, who will discuss specific social recruiting case studies. I am really looking forward to their presentations and learning how they built an internal social media strategy within their HR and recruitment teams.

My post tomorrow will discuss how we selected these speakers. That will be interesting!

So, still not giving this blog a lot of love, after a post in August suggesting the opposite. Yes, I will put the blame on that word we all love and hate: busy.

But, in the next few days, I will be busy writing about some key elements of planning and organizing my first major conference. And the series will be on here – away from the business blogs where the projects are currently hosted.

And, if you have noticed, I have reverted back to my original twitter username (@vicokezie) and will keep the social recruiter profile strictly for Social Recruiting. Feel free to follow.

The main reason is that I may be doing quite a few other projects that presumably will be relevant/interesting (or not) to my current followers (which happens to be a healthy mix around HR, recruitment, PR and social media). Plus some personal tweets every now and then.

In a few days, I will write a few posts here about how I acquired the twitter username @socialrecruiter and some more tips around using Twitter, from a personal and professional point of view. I have learnt a lot from using Twitter, and although I may not be the most engaging user (my time constraints), it has proved to be an invaluable tool for learning and sharing information.

I have taking a part of the conversation to twitter via @socialrecruiter, and focused on a few social recruiting projects, advising and consulting for some companies within the UK. Since early July, Social Recruiter and RCEuro have been working on a Social Recruiting Conference dubbed #srconf. I will write more about the idea and concept behind that later.

It has been quite interesting trying to put together the event, which is planned for 30th November 2010 in central London.

Been thinking a bit more about the subject of personal branding, especially online. It is one thing to run and manage social media accounts in the names of one’s venture(s) but another to build a consistent ‘very’ personal and professional profile.

Hence, I will try and engage more via my personal twitter account @vicokezie from soon, while ensuring the other accounts stay true to their respective offerings.

Also, I will be more active here – blogging for personal branding, across various subjects esp social media, social recruiting, online recruiting, web design, SEO, web 2.0, entrepreneurship & more.

For now, I am concentrating on developing Crexia as a Recruitment Media firm. Yes, we did Consulting a while back, but shifted focus to Online Recruitment, Employer Branding and Recruitment Media from 2010. This is something I find more exciting.

Also, I am more active on Social Recruiter these days, doing more of research on Social Recruiting across the globe and advocating how the trend will supplement employer’s Direct resourcing efforts.

You will see me online more on Twitter.

As I seem to find this subject quite fascinating, I have decided to spend some more time learning more about Social Recruiting and also assisting recruiters to take advantage of this trend, that could potentially change tha landscape of recruitment as we have it.

Job boards took the world by storm in the ’90s and then came the online recruitment industry, within Web 1.0. Now with the world feeling the full impact of web 2.0 and its produce (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc), information is now being obtained and managed in completely different ways.

Having followed web 2.0 since 2006, and attended a few events in the past, I am begining to see how it will be of value to the recruitment sector, as shown in more recruiters using social media tools to engage with candidates.

Hence, I have just founded Social Recruiter – to further explore Social Media Recruiting and assist Recruiters develop and implement a Social Media Recruitment Strategy.