This week was the quarterly Jobsite International Conference with our Eastern European partners from the top job boards in Serbia, Bosnia, Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary.

Spinnaker Tower

The conferences allow us to share our learnings with each other & invite guest speakers along to help us stay at the cutting edge of recruitment, so that we can continue to offer the best service to both our clients & candidates.

Previous conferences have been held in Sarajevo and Bratislava, but this time it was our turn to host it in Portsmouth. We’ve always been shown fantastic hospitality by the other hosts, so it was great to get a turn in organising the proceedings and return the favour. The bar had been set pretty high as at the last conference in Sarajevo, we were taken on a fascinating cultural tour of the city.

The presentations during the two days of this most recent meeting focused on trends in recruitment & the direction that the industry is moving in. We heard from expert speakers such as Onrec’s David Hurst on global trends, Matt Alder on how social media can be used in recruitment and Mick Rigby from Yodel on how developments in mobile technology will impact on the industry.  One of the interesting snippets from Mick’s presentation was that 74% of people never switch their mobile off - afraid I’m guilty of that one! On day 2, some of the team from Jobsite talked through what we’ve been up to. It was great to share information and learn how our European partners are operating and the opportunities available to all of us.

It wasn’t all work and no play though. We started the conference with a breakfast briefing and historic guide up the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth’s Gunwharf Quays. You get some fantastic views over the South Coast and we were lucky enough to see a perfectly timed entrance by one of Her Majesty’s naval fleet.

On the Tuesday evening we took everyone to the Pompey vs. Sunderland match at Fratton Park for one of the tensest matches of the season (well the last 6 minutes of it anyway!). In the true spirit of international relations, the delegates were introduced to some of the local football chants (try explaining what some of the words mean!)

Thank you to all the speakers who presented at the conference and for the great company of our delegates, we will be getting the video up soon. I’m already looking forward to April’s conference in Győr.

Image by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos