• Events & Presentations

#truBudapest 2016

Read this in Polish

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending to lead a track on talent pipelining and network recruitment. When I say pleasure, I really mean it. I dare you to find a photo from the event where I’m not smiling! (unless concentrated on tweeting the awesome content)

Even though I don’t speak a word of Hungarian, I didn’t really feel I was missing out. There was a track in English every hour and I wasn’t the only international attendee. That being said, I really enjoyed listening to those who work on the Hungarian market on a daily basis.

Why? It’s simple. The recruitment market in London is quite different to any other market I’ve ever worked on. The challenges that recruiters face in Hungary are much more similar to those Polish recruiters deal with every day. This is partially due to culture (Poland and Hungary have had quite a similar history and so we have a lot in common today) and partially due to similarities in the economic situation  of the two countries.

This, I feel, had a big impact on the discussion we had about creating talent communities. In Poland as well as in Hungary the biggest challenge is certainly encouraging people to share with the community. They are happy to engage with the content you may be sharing, they will share their opinion with the author, but presenting it in an open forum is quite rare.

As we discussed the different things you can do to overcome this, we’ve mentioned a  hands on approach to managing a group, where the moderator is responsible for the “induction” of each new member of the community. Clarity around what’s allowed makes people in the group more likely to engage in an open discussion.

The challenges around creating active communities led us to an important question: is creating your own talent community the best way to ensure you have a strong pipeline of candidates in place? In cultures where people can be quite sceptical when it comes to groups branded with a company logo, the best approach may be to encourage recruiters to become active members of groups that already exist in the market. Not just work related groups, but any group that your potential candidates are a part of. Agency recruiters are often able to focus on their niche, become SMEs in their own niche and thus earn a place in groups dedicated to, for example, IT professionals. While this isn’t necessarily the case for in-house recruiters, they can encourage employees of the departments that require talent pipelining to become more involved in those groups, becoming brand ambassadors for the company.

Other amazing discussions that I felt reflect the challenges in CEE included one around recruiting for Shared Service Centers and one dedicated to sourcing professionals ready to relocate to a different location. On the other hand, the tracks on botification of recruitment and about Applicant Tracking Systems helped the audience better understand how certain challenges are overcome in other markets, encouraging them to look for their own solutions instead of blindly following the industry “best practices”.

Big thanks to  () for organising what was an absolutely amazing event and  () who co-created the track with me!

Social Recruiting geek turned trainer @ Lightness, networking enthusiast & blogger. Love travel, sci-fi & all things employer branding! I travel between London and Poland a lot and so some of my social posts will be in Polish :)