Today saw the latest incarnation of Bill Boorman's TRU recruitment un-conferences roll into town with the first day of #TRULeeds at Broadcasting Place in Leeds. It was my first experience of a TRU event, although probably the fifth or sixth unconference I've been to.
If you've never been to an unconference before, they can be a bit of an unsettling experience at first, the setup seeming so laid back it's almost horizontal. But that's a good thing! No registration desk, no name badges, and no fixed presentations or structure. Instead, there's a loose outline of subjects with two tracks running at a time. A track leader starts the discussion and then everyone in the group pitches in with their thoughts and opinions as one big discussion.
It's a refreshingly open format, that tends to generate a lot more thought and ideas than listening to one presenter for half an hour. You're also free to wander between tracks at any time, avoiding the usual conference syndrome of buyer's remorse when you realise 5 minutes in you should have picked the other track. TRULeeds kicked off with my bumping into Wayne and Lisa from Barclay Jones, I was at university with Wayne and haven't seen him for a decade so it was great to catch up and hear about some of the really interesting work they do as Virtual IT Directors for their clients, a quick coffee later and the first session started, led by Patrick Boonstra. It was titled, "Slaying the Social Media Dragon" and at first I was dubious, I'm naturally sceptical about being jollied along and taking part in group activities, but it proved to be great fun as it unfolded. A series of scenarios were outlined, with two opposing viewpoints.
For example: "Social media should be centralised in an organisation, or it should be everybody's responsibility", everyone went to stand by the side of the argument they agreed with and then the two sides debated it. Everyone took the role of a knight (slaying the metaphorical dragon) and was equipped with a shield (a cocktail umbrella!) which could be gifted to someone else if you thought they'd made a good point. And a party blower/squeaker to be blown at any point if you felt someone was "talking bullshit", interrupting someone with it though did mean you then had to put your counterargument to the group. The session turned into a really lively discussion on social media policy, engagement and embedding social within an organisation. And somehow at the end of it, I found myself the winner with 4 cocktail umbrellas awarded to me. My prize? The toy dragon (donated to Wayne and Lisa's 3-year-old).
With the ice broken, we moved into a couple more tracks of discussion, I sat in on the Graduate Recruitment track, led by Martin Edmondson from Graduates Yorkshire. One of Bill's side initiatives #TRUgrads involves mentoring a number of graduates and two of them were part of the group. It was really useful when talking about Graduate recruitment to have their input as graduates currently looking for work. There was much discussion of whether grads actually use careers sites, and how they respond to social media initiatives.
One thing that became evident was the difference in approach between different disciplines and types of graduates. Merchant banking, for example, attracts a very different mindset to retail. I then sat in on part of the track looking at the campaign Beyond Interactive had run to recruit leaders for Weight Watchers. It was really interesting to see the similarities and differences in approach to the way we'd work at Chatter on this kind of campaign. And great to see them using Facebook advertising effectively and also testing and monitoring conversion rates between different styles and colours of creative.
There was also a nice anecdote about how a client had started correcting the spelling and grammar in employee blog posts and seen engagement fall by an enormous amount. Seemingly the typos were making it seem more real and less like corporate PR fodder. Later I sat in on a session on using LinkedIn, where I picked up some interesting tips on fine-tuning the integration between Twitter and Linkedin, as well as how to use it better for engagement (rather than purely as a sourcing tool).
Following, a good chat over lunch at The Dry Dock, it was back in for tracks on Augmented Reality, led by Layar and an interesting look at The Social CV, who do some interesting stuff linking together the social footprint of users, creating a very interesting resource to mine for candidates from the information that's already out there in the wild.
A packed day, but really thought-provoking and fun, I met some great new people I'll be following on Twitter. I'm down in London tomorrow at a client meeting, so Paul will be attending Day 2 of #TRULeeds (and I'll be reading up on the happenings online after!)
