#CHRU3 #ConnectingHR Unconference: Human-Centric Recruiting

 

    I skipped most of our unconference yesterday – partly because I had a couple of meetings and really wanted to attend the Workplace Trends conference too.  And partly because ConnectingHR is a community, and the community is now running the unconferences, which is the way it should be.  This is still one of my favourite events, but I don’t have to be there now.

But I do still feel a strong attachment to the event (and even more so the community) so I wanted to blog something about it, even though I wasn’t there.  I asked a few people about what the main themes, issues, conclusions, agreements had been, and got a few snippets about different things, but nothing that bloggable.  Martin Couzins summed it up well – blogging from unconferences is really difficult because the whole day is so random and varied (that’s why I did a storify from HREvolution a few weeks back).

But the session that got people’s greatest engagement was clearly the one where the Spring brought in graduates who’d be unemployed for the last year to talk about their experience at the sharp end of the HR / Recruiting stick.  You can see Martin’s interview with one of them here.  The issue was clearly that recruiting is a bit of a one-way deal.  HR gets to sit back, choose who it wants, treat candidates as it wants to, and unless the get a job, the grads don’t get much back in return – certainly very little feedback which might actually help them get a job elsewhere.

Then there was a group session later on suggesting that we need for H for Human in the term HR (also see the picture from the tablecloth used during the world cafe session).  Michael Carty has blogged on this here.  That’s the key for me – it’s about respect and mutuality, and it applies across the whole area of HR, not just recruitment.

 

Human-Centric Workplace Design

It’s even largely what we were talking about at Workforce Trends, though I prefer human-centric to user-centric design.

It was obviously another good day, and in a way I regret attending Workplace Trends – don’t get me wrong: there was lots of great insight there, but there’s only so much a traditional conference format can achieve.

The good news is that we’re looking at getting Workplace, HR plus IT, OD, Communication and all the other professional functions together for an unconference next year – what this – and that – space.

 

Human-Centric HR Technology

Also look at for a post on human-centric use of HR technology, supporting the HR Technology Europe conference on 2nd and 3rd November.

 

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