Diving Into A Recruiting Marathon

It’s not always the amount of revenue that my company generates that qualifies as a worthwhile week. Sometimes it’s getting overwhelming confirmation that we are on the right track, and other weeks it’s avoiding a potential catastrophe. I must say that the last two weeks have been like Nitrox scuba diving to say the least.

Let’s start off with avoiding disaster. Last year I attended the HR Forum held on the beautiful cruise ship, The Norwegian Dawn. I was on the ship less than 30 minutes when I ran into ex-husband #2. There was no avoiding the X for the next 48 hours. Can you imagine? Spare yourself and don’t. God clearly has a sense a humor to put me on a cruise to nowhere with my X. At this year’s event, I was overcome with joy to see the X would not be making an appearance. I could buckle down to business and concentrate my HeadHuntress powers on making connections that would hopefully end up more successful than my marriage.

The HR Forum is like running a 2-day marathon. With my terrific associate Nikki Shapiro, I conducted eighteen 30-minute presentations to some of the top human resource officers in the country, plus had meetings over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This year’s HR buzz words are global talent acquisition, talent management, and retention. After years in the human capital space I can safely state with confidence: it’s all about the people and getting the best fit at the onset.

The HR Forum was held the same week as the biannual meeting of the Pinnacle Society. I am honored to be a part of the Pinnacle’s very select group of successful industry recruiters. Our meetings are a time to connect and share best practices. For a couple of days I could give my voice a rest and take an extended journey into listening and learning. At the top of everyone’s list was the growing importance of research, the front-end of the recruiting process. We discussed using social networking tools to research and identify candidates, internet search strings as well as blogging, niche boards and so on. Let’s face it if the new wave of talent is growing up in the digital age, executive recruiters need to become experts with web 2.0 resourcing.

So here was relief #2 – both events confirmed that my team and I are working in the right space and it spurred us to keep on trying new approaches and actively plan these initiatives into our day. Staying focused with all these new communication venues can be consuming, but there are no shortcuts to success! At the end of an incredibly intensive week, it was a huge relief, comfort and bonus to get validation from my peers not once, but twice. On top of not running into the X, I’d call that a successful dive without “the bends.”

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