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Welcome to RecruitTECH – hopefully this year’s inaugural conference will result in RecruitTECH becoming an annual event.

I thought I would open my blog with a few notes about how RecruitTECH came about…

After attending Michael Specht’s HR Futures Conference in Melbourne some months back, I thought that I could organise something similar in Canberra (where I operate an online jobs board – CapitalJobs.com.au).    I mulled over it for all of about 10 minutes and then decided to give it a go.  And, hence, RecruitTECH was born.

Unlike other HR conferences, I chose to limit the scope of the new conference to recruitment and how technology is impacting on it.  To my knowledge, there isn’t another conference that deals purely with the confluence of recruitment and technology, although I’m sure that the subject matter has been covered elsewhere in broader HR/recruitment conferences.

The name RecruitTECH comes from two words – recruitment and technology.  Clever, huh?   I did ask my contemporaries for other suggestions for a name, but I didn’t get any takers, so RecruitTECH it is!  I’m pretty happy with that name – plenty of creative energy was expended coming up with it.

Once the name was locked in, it was time to ‘recruit’ some speakers – and it was most appropriate that I utilised some of the technology tools that will be covered in the conference for this purpose.  I was quite amazed that all potential speakers that I approached were quick to accept!  Thanks, guys.

I got to know Thomas Shaw, Geoff Jennings, Riges Younan, Ross Clennett, Stephen Collins and Michael Specht at the HR Futures Conference and through blogging, Skype and Twitter.  I’ve always been a keen follower of Phillip Tusing’s work (great Job Boards Guide!) and he was good enough to review CapitalJobs.com.au when we first started out.  I’ve never met Brett Iredale, but through Thomas and Geoff, I am led to believe that he is a good bloke who likes a beer (and JobAdder is a great product) – looking forward to meeting him!  Kelly Magowan and I have previously swapped job board owner stories, commented on each others’ blogs and exchanged content.  As a fellow Canberran job board operator, Kate Sykes and I have had coffees together in the past to discuss our respective business strategies.  Once the original crew had been locked in, Laurel Papworth signed on as a speaker (the icing on the cake), after a recommendation from Kelly Magowan.  All of these people are doing great things in recruitment and technology and each has a great story to tell.  I’m looking forward to our pre- and post-conference dinners already!

Once our speakers were locked in, it was time to get a logo.  I’ve never tried a web-based design contest before, so I thought I’d give it a go and the results were pretty good.  For an outlay of about $350, we got a great logo from 99designs.  You can see the contest entries here: http://99designs.com/contests/22440 (unfortunately many of the designs have been withdrawn by the designers).  Each of the speakers contributed their thoughts about the winner and there were quite divergent views about which logo was best.   In the end, we went with the great design by Shannon Froese depicting three stick figures with an ‘on’ button for their head.  Simple, smart and indicative of the theme of the conference.

After our logo was selected, I knocked together this WordPress blog in 2-3 days.  We’re now ready to tell the world about RecruitTECH….the site goes ‘live’ tomorrow.

The next step of course is to attract some delegates – hopefully we can fill the conference facility (75 delegates).  In fact, it would be great if we could sell it out in the first two weeks and then be forced into moving venues in order to satisfy the demand for seats…here’s hoping.