Two conferences (sort of) – in one day …

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend my first unconference ever. This one was produced by radical planet# Geoff Webb and his team.

I loved:

The concept of no talking heads (speeches given by industry experts one after another).
The opportunity to get to know everyone’s opinion.
The fact that most people went for lunch together and drinks after.
The fact that www.www.randstaad.com and Monster understand the value of these networks and sponsor them (keeping the costs reasonable).
The networking environment not found in traditional conferences.

I disliked:

The sessions that were clearly advertorial (Branchout)
The facilitators who could not keep their group on theme or showed up late
The lack of structure – starting late, no sign in – no name tags
The dress code. People, we are professionals --- tacky t-shirts and jeans are just a bit too relaxed for me (although I did like the sayings – “I sourced your sister” and “I facebooked your HR Manager.”
The “Paula Abdul” hr judge … let’s hope she was just acting on the future of HR Technology in 2050 …
The tacky bar for drinks after… Come on guys - you could have upgraded us a bit.

About 100 people were on site and divided into three tracks over two days. Unfortunately, I could only stay for the first day. But it was great to finally meet Geoff and reconnect with Dan Arkind (JobScore), Leanne Chase, Matt Charney, Jeff Nugent and James Fehrenbach – all top professionals in the space - and many other HR.com members.

After this, James Fehrenbach and I headed over to the swanky launch of the Ceridian Canada Talent Management Unveiling. Held on the glorious Sunnybrook Estates, the evening was filled with great food and drinks as well as comic relief from guest speaker Wendy Mesley. As we all know, each HR vendor has their own Wheel of their offerings and Ceridian’s is the first wheel I have ever seen that has Store Value Systems on their offering to HR People…. $25 gift card to the first non-Ceridian person who can tell me what this product actually is….

Being Canadian, I believe the landscape in Canada for the SME (Small- to Medium-size Enterprise) for Integrated Talent Management is virgin territory. Halogen, HRsmart and wwww.taleo.com have made some inroads but this large land mass north of the 49th parallel has predominantly remained untouched by the majority of HR vendors.