TRU Australia - Idea generation on crack

Last Friday, after two days of excellent workshops and presentations at the Australasian Talent Conference's annual Social Media event, I attended the inaugural The Recruiting Unconference (TRU) Australia in Melbourne. I shared a taxi to the TRU venue, the Royal Melbourne Hotel, with the founder and conference dis-organiser of TRU, Bill Boorman at the very early time of 8am. Just a few hours earlier we were in a karaoke joint with some of the other conference presenters. Just for the record, Facebook's recruitment manager Richard Cho is an awesome singer - he should seriously appear on F-Factor USA. 

TRU started 2 years ago in London and has since gone global - one moment Bill's running TRU Romania, then he's in Amsterdam, Johannesburg, San Francisco ...  Though I've followed TRU, this was my first time attending one. Bill kicked off TRU Australia by asking who wants to facilitate a track, on any topic. Bill said let's break into 2 concurrent tracks. There were about 35-40 attendees. I sat in Kevin Wheeler's track - we sat around a circle, not too dissimilar to a group therapy session. To be honest I can't remember what the actual initial topic was. The discussion went in all directions and off-topic which was fine. It is an Un-conference after all, where the traditional conference rules don't apply - no Powerpoint, no pre-planned presentations. The team from Accenture openly shared some of the innovations they're launching around online predictive candidate videoing. As a group we deconstructed their offering and probed, all in a joint problem solving way. I learnt from them and they, I believe, learnt from us. They were certainly taking lots of notes. As was I. We talked about employee referrals, an area where, in NZ and Australia, we need to seriously lift the game. Again we deconstructed the topic, shared experiences and thoughts, and looked at every stage of the referral process, not just the reward side. Then we deconstructed referral rewards. I scribbled down 2 pages of notes and ideas on referrals alone. It's got me thinking ... Should we crowdsource the design of a referral programme to employees? Should we gamify referrals? Should we have a referral KPI tied to employees' performance? This is just a very short list of possibilities. I probably learnt and thought more deeply about employee referral programmes in 25 minutes than I have in my 18 year HR career.

In other tracks we talked about mobile, Facebook, video and ROI. I particularly enjoyed one session where Bill asked us to think about a hypothetical scenario of having to choose between LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+ as the only social network we could use for recruiting. We split off into 3 camps. I headed up the Google+ camp. Each camp pitched to the wider group and our members could join from other camps, or defect, as the debate ensued. Though we had lots of fun, many of us learned about the pros and cons of each platform. Many would say Google+ was the #winner on the day - we put across a very persuasive argument.

I'm now a big fan of the Unconference movement. To me the vibe of the day was an intimate family-like setting that sparked creativity. It's one of those situations where you just have to be there. Those who didn't attend missed out on something very special. I'm proud to be part of the TRU movement. Bill is very keen to host TRU New Zealand in Auckland in May 2012. If you're interested in being a sponsor or event partner then let me know and I'll put you onto Bill.

The reasons to use Google+ for recruitment, scribbled on a tablecloth: