Phil Tusing’s #SOSU12 – another mind melter

OK so SOSU12 started its National Tour last week (By national I mean Sydney and Brisbane) in what was a flurry of tips, tricks, ideas, memes and some great discussion to go with it. 

Firstly hat tip to Phil Tusing, who, albeit, voiceless, somehow managed to out together a strong run down of speakers and topics.  Getting Irina Shamaeva (AKA @Braingain) to Australia was a coup upon itself, let alone getting her to speak numerous times throughout the event.  I know I learned some stuff about LinkedIn that I thought was to know, some back doors and bugs that only the really inquisitive, OK sticky beaks, would take the time to find, and then to share them with a room full of sourcers, well that was worth the entrance fee in itself.

Christian Le Loux hosted the event, and after a bit of a nervy start, he handled both the room, the topics and the flow of events with aplomb, taking technical issues and even the odd changing of sequence of speakers all in his stride (my bad… thanks mate!) An awesome effort from an emceeing virgin 

Irina was booked solid, and even with the odd lingering side effect of jet lag, had an obvious flow to her talks, building the crowd up to the point where you couldn’t help but sit back and go “wooooooah” in the final talks.

Jared Woods was his normal creative, completely out of the box self.  (See Jared’s blog here) Have you ever seen a presentation made up completely of Memes? No? neither had I until Jared took the stage.  And dead set… it just “wowed”.  Jared spoke in a great fashion about the emotional connection required in sourcing and quickly got the crowd nodding their heads in agreement, well those who weren’t scratching their head after him teaching us all a new word (OK, I learnt it) “Hyper dyadic”, I’ll let you look it up, but essentially it means that we are all responsible for everyone else’s happiness, which is built off our own moods (I didn’t say it wasn’t complex!)

Kelly O’Shaughnessy hosted a “Round table” discussion, which really was an eye opener to this guy.  There were 6 tables, all hosted by a different person, discussion the use of some different Social Media mediums for sourcing.  Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+.

The most interesting part of this discussion for me was essentially how little their mediums were thought of when it came to sourcing.   Surprisingly most in the room only saw them as one way marketing channels, somewhere for you to push a message on mass.  This really surprised me, as someone who has been an early adapter and sees them as a way of life.  That said, I realize they are all time suck mediums where you can lose days going down the sourcing rabbit holes, it will be interesting to watch or have the same conversations in different parts of the world, or even in a couple of years and see if attitudes have changed.  (Although it was fun introducing people to the #sosu12 the sub conference of the conference happening on the Twitter stream, raising that level of realisation was fun)  Interestingly enough, Irina didn’t help with the take up of these channels for sourcing channels, apart from one, saying she made 100% of her placements via LinkedIn in the last year.  (I’m assuming, LinkedIn was the place she contacted them via not solely found people, although there is nothing wrong with that.

Rowena Caruana from Futurestep was up next, with an interesting presentation, around the contentious topic of about building Talent communities, which personally and professionally validated a few things we are doing at IMA-MT.  She did a deep dive into the metrics and value for companies for having a well structured, driven talent pool, putting herself up against the “Just in Time” recruiting ideas of Glenn Cathey, the Boolean Blackbelt.  Not that there is anything wrong with that. I did the same thing here…

The only part missing from this presentation was the “What’s in it for the applicant/candidate” there was a graphic at the end with 2 intersecting circles (A really small intersect) which was called mutual value.  A great discussion point I think.

Sadly I kind of missed the main part of the panel discussion around “Cross border sourcing” with very smart people from Deloitte (Vanina Santana-Sweeney), Dell (Rodney Ko), and Adobe (Rhys Hughes) holding the floor.  (oh yeah… Riges Younan did a stellar job hosting it too) Although I did hear Rhys from Adobe say something that was music to my ears,  “The Sourcers are the champions of our business!” — Hear Hear! .   The reason I missed it? Well I was there and picked up a few gems, but I was busy, stressing about presenting myself.  Something I hadn’t done before and was quietly panicking about as it went on.

My presentation went OK, even without the promised heckling and lolly throwing.  I spoke about a subject I am passionate about “Selling sourcing to Stakeholders”.  You can find my presentation on slideshare here.  Basically I spoke for 30 minutes about how much Sourcers rock, my professional crushes,  and should have more recognition as the “strategic enablers” that they are.  I also added a couple of memes to ensure someone spoke about it… In short, watch out for future Recruiting Chuck Norris’ out there J

Unfortunately I had to leave from there, to catch a plane, and from what I heard I missed some special presentations from Deloittes, Vanina Santana-Sweeney, Social media Superstar, Kelly O’Shaughnessy and HRX’ Mark Reilly.

Again, thanks so much to Phil and his team for organizing, I really enjoyed this, even if I was made to feel old, being addressed as “Mr Nuroo” by his eager staffers who manned the event. (joke Phil)