Last week, Talent Net Live came to San Antonio for the first time. It was an honor to host the group at Rackspace for the day-long unconference which brought in participants from around the world.
TNL officially started up on Thursday night at the downtown San Antonio restaurant Tre Trattoria. The group gathered for a great Tweet-Up and some catch up time. The food and environment were amazing!
The next day, we promptly started at 9am with a fascinating keynote by Robert Scoble (Scobleizer). Scoble gave us an hour long adventure in technology, interesting recruiting approaches and some fantastic stories. The topic of turning your recruiting brand into a social object was central and caused for some interesting debate and questions. In essence, he stressed the importance of aligning your brand to something that ties in with your larger story, that’s easy to share and consistent. He made me think and I enjoyed it. Thank you Robert!
The rest of the day was filled with presentations ranging from employment branding to cool recruiting tools.
Some key takeaways:
In China Gorman and Alicia Arenas‘ presentation on Engagement, I learned that research is indicating some major movement in the labor market’s near future. Employees, as a whole, are under-engaged and ready to make a move.
Matt Charney and Maren Hogan led a great session on the definition and future of talent communities. The range in definition was almost as broad as the ways in which employers are trying to use them. I think it’s fair to say that this dialogue will continue for some time.
Craig Fisher, Bill Boorman and Marianthe Verver led a session on Cool Recruiting Tools. They shared a bunch of new tools that I hadn’t seen yet. One of my favorite tools was Find People on Plus – a search engine for finding people who have joined Google+. Super cool tool and very much so worth a look! The other interesting tool was Smart Recruiters. Jerome Ternynck gave us an overview of the product and how it’s impacting the market. Open source ATS system… whoa!
Jason Seiden gave us his presentation on Profersonalism. This is the second time I’ve seen him present this and, as expected, I took something new away. If you haven’t seen Jason present this topic, I encourage you to. It’s hard to put it into a nutshell, but I promise it will make you think differently about how your personal and professional lives merge. Very compelling stuff!
There were many more fantastic presentations, but, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend them all.
As always, by the end of the day, my mind was packed with ideas… something I have come to expect from the unconference format. Awesomely overwhelming 
I took the TNL survivors for a tour around the Rackspace facility. It was fun to show the group the mall (aka our corporate headquarters).
Thanks to everyone who joined us for the event!
China Gorman and Craig Fisher exploring the world wide web
Bill Boorman lookin’ Texan. Craig Fisher being Texan.
Matt Charney on talent communities
Bill Boorman in his hilarious Social Talent shirt.
Any #TNL memories or lessons you’d like to share?
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