Last week in New York City at a rooftop lounge overlooking the Empire State building I had the opportunity to attend the newest entry to the recruiting and HR conference circuit. It was called HIRE Conf put on by Jeremy Roberts and his Hiring Solved compatriots. 200 or so attendees braved the cold rain of the city for the one day event.

I love one day events like this. They tend to be smaller, more intimate and better for networking. Plus it was great that they chose to come to New York where few conference organizers dare to try for fear of costs. It was nice not to have to fly in to attend for once.

The tracks presented were interesting and full of data and some very practical advice. Glen Cathey kicked it off talking about machine learning, A.I. at the intersection of recruiting. His slides had some great quotes about the future of recruiting and you can see some of them in the above slideshow of pics I took. I also enjoyed Todd Davis and his Facebook sourcing tips and tools show.

Takeaways

Cathey thinks in the future recruiters will do more "discovery" of candidates as the technology gets better surfacing related candidates to the skill set you need to find them for.
Future technology will help guide recruiters to candidates they want.
VolkScience.com can help you build custom email message templates to candidates.(currently in beta)
Future recruiters will need to know how to leverage much more technology to be sucessful.
The #1 job skill in 2020 will be "empathy". Something machines don't have.
Check out Stanley Bot for Facebook Messenger. A Facebook messenger bot that takes care of things like answering recruitment related inquiries, processing job applications, interviewing potential candidates to creating a shareable audio profile for candidates you’d want to review and share.
Looking for a good Chrome extension to help you search Facebook profiles? Click here.
Don't try and keyword search facebook profiles on your own, use the 3rd party tools like Net Bootcamp.
Stat of the day: Men apply to jobs if they think they meet 60% of the requirements while women only apply to jobs where they meet ALL the requirements.
Quote of the day: “One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

And though I didn't get to stay for the night life it was good to reconnect with the usual suspects.