The Future of Recruiting Barcamp

Just recently, I attended a Barcamp for the first time (in my life, yeah)! What made it more exciting was that it was the first biggest Recruiting Barcamp in Hamburg!! There were over 160 recruiters, tech recruiters, and HR experts from Germany and Austria. We shared our knowledge, experiences, and how recruiting is carried out in our companies.

The event was opened by welcoming participants to pitch their own topics. In total I attended 7 discussions about Recruiter Brand, Online Marketing, Data in Recruiting, Women in Tech, Shortage of IT Talents, Long-term Job Ads, and Active Sourcing for Young Talents.

Here are my highlights from the 2 days of #Recruiting #Sourcing #EmployerBranding !

Active Sourcing is dead

A controversial opening from Michael Witt, who forsees it as the future of recruiting. You could see the faces in the audiences was like “Whaaattt??!!”. Active Sourcing for recruiters is like our daily bread to find candidates and our way of networking. It’s THE METHOD. Okay, so what’s next? Michael claimed that in the future Candidate Matching is how recruiting would be done, the applicant market will turn into a supplier market, in which companies have to focus more on Recruiting/HR Marketing. This is where digitalization comes in, as well as AI and better algorithms to improve the application process, candidate matching, and cultural fit. But for now, I would say Active Sourcing is still on 😉.

Employer Branding is dead. Long live Employer Branding!

Gero Hesse, one of the keynote speakers, gave an excellent presentation on Employer Branding, an aspect that should be inseparable to recruiting. The main point I took home from this was, in order to be successful in an employee market we need to focus on creating a combination of Opportunity Marketing and Employer Branding, i.e. what does the future employee want to do + what satisfaction do they want from it = where can I do it.

7 Open sessions

I really enjoyed the open discussions here. You get to talk with people, who understand exactly your pain points, challenges, satisfaction, and motivation. The role of recruiters has grown over the years and with digitalization, we are not just someone who fills position. We are our own brand and the employer brand, as the first line of contact to the company for future employees. Recruiting marketing can learn a lot from online marketing through the usage of Google AdWords, Social Media campaigns, generating and measuring click rates, creating better HR marketing campaigns and more attractive job ads.

The last session about active sourcing young talents was particularly interesting, because ultimately these are our future talents and employees. How can we create the connection to them, to build the network, to understand what they want, what are the best channels we should use to reach out to them.

In between the sessions, there was also a Q&A session with Glassdoor as employer rating portal like Kununu, however here it is more popular as a job portal.

In a nutshell

I had great networking sessions and we all learned a lot from each other during the discussions. It motivated me to learn more about how we can combine Recruiting with Employer Branding and HR Marketing as a package, rather than being separate entities. It was a wonderful experience, and I am looking forward to attend the next event in 2020.

About the author

Serena is a passionate Tech Recruiter, who enjoys talks about technologies, and believes in creating an awesome candidate experience journey.