I’m at TransformRM this week in Boston as the folks from Smashfly are hosting the first ever Recruitment Marketing conference. Day 1 was packed with content as the designers of the conference mixed in quick-hitting 30-minute sessions around 50-minute keynotes.

Turns out you don’t have to do an hour and fifteen minutes per session and your conference won’t explode! Who knew!

I will say the content design made the day fly by and having mostly practitioners come on stage for thirty-minute sessions forced them to get to the point and share great stories, tips and results from their own organization. I loved it!

Finally, TransformRM pulled in keynote speaker Mel Robbins, of TEDx fame, and her 5 Second Rule theory. She freaking killed it! Get ready to see much more of Mel around the HR community conferences. She’s a legitimate speaking superstar.

Here are some of the key takeaways from Day 1:

• We’re all still pretty new in this whole recruitment marketing skill set. So, you still hear a lot about ‘brand’ and less around the actual marketing aspect. (Yes, I know brand is part of marketing!)
• Most impressive practitioner/company presentation was from John Qudeen, VP of Recruiting at Thomson Reuters. If you’re looking for a company that flat out gets recruitment marketing, you need to check them out. One of the few that seems to have figured out measurement of RM, definitely a market leader out of the gate!
• Across the board, though, all practitioners shared great ideas and were very forthcoming in sharing their secret sauce, notably, Julia Levy from Fiserv, Jared Nypen from Great Clips (who had the hardest job of the day in following Mel Robbins and he killed it!), and John Cotton from CH2M.
• Not a ton of talk around the actual tech stack it takes to pull off great recruitment marketing, but as you can imagine all those who were doing it well were all using CRM technology to help retarget candidates and elevate their message and content to those they were trying to attract.

Can’t wait for Day 2! Check out the live stream at TransformRecruitmentMarketing.com, I think you’ll really get a ton of takeaways on what some great brands are doing in their own shops with RM! Also, follow along on Twitter at #TransformRM.