I may have taken my laptop with me to the UK, but now I am back I am still struggling to catch up! It has been a little while since my last post and I have to admit I have no excuse, I have plenty of  material but for some reason I have found it difficult to put pen to paper.

In all honestly consistency is one of the hardest things about blogging, which happened to be one of the subjects I covered as one of the guest speakers at the Recruitment Society the other week. My presentation was on blogging and recruitment, which went well and I was pleased to be let into the Guardian’s new offices, considering my last article on Guardian Jobs…

Following this I managed to get to the CIPD conference, which although is not core to me, I did get to see some of our recruitment software competitors. On top of this it was great to meet face to face some fellow bloggers Andy Hedworth, Peter Gold, Alan Whitford and Mike Taylor it was almost surreal we just need Louise to make it almost a full house.

Mike had a stand to promote his Social Media in recruitment Conference, which I promised to give a mention, not because he bought me a beer at at the UKrecruiter networking event held later that evening, which from a personal point of view I thought was their best function to date, but because his conference should be of benefit to many recruiters who want to get their head around Social networking for Recruitment. The areas he will be covering are below:

In total there will be nine expert speakers, including speakers from  Facebook and YouTube, covering the following areas:

* An overview of Social Media including social networking sites,
blogs and podcasts
* How social networking sites such as Facebook can be used to get messages to your target audience
* How to use LinkedIn to promote your vacancies and source new candidates
* How to use Twitter, TwitterJobSearch.com and the Job Search Engines for recruitment
* The legal issues re the use of social media web sites
* Using online video to promote your company and your job  vacancies
* How to put together a social media strategy for your company
* The future – taking social media to the next level

“Even if a Recruiter has no prior knowledge of social media there will be plenty of information and examples of how social media is currently being used in recruitment.”, commented Mike Taylor.  “This will give Recruiters the confidence to consider where social media could be used in their own organisations.”

To sign up you need to go here

In the end when I think about my presentation to the Recruitment Society, I came away thinking how much of what I said was relevant, because without my blogging and twittering I would not have been invited to their event, but more importantly I found that the ice was already broken with many contacts, not just at the Guardian, but at the UKrecruiter and at the CIPD. This for me is what social media is all about, that ability to connect to new people with a common interest.

All in all it was an excellent week where I met many useful connections, but mentioning everyone would take up too much of this post, but I would like to say that Geoff Newman, who’s blog is an excellent example of a recruitment blog and Frances Gillibrand who demonstrated their job board mypeoplebiz.com, whom both happend to be in this photo (Andy is the one without the jacket).

In addition I must mention my fellow presenters Luke Mckend of Google & Jon Hull of RS Components, a report of which found it’s way onto Ri5