Recruiting targeted talent has always been hard, and it looks like it is not going to get any easier. One of the main obstacles a talent acquisition team needs to overcome, is to simply get time with the candidate.

Social media is quite often the path that recruiting teams take. However, you still have to compete with a lot of “noise” in that area and getting the attention of that targeted candidate is still an obstacle.

An additional path that recruiters should consider is industry events.

An industry event is essentially a collection of targeted talent. The catch is, that at events you literally need to go "handshake to handshake" to find them, engage with them and follow up with them. Most recruiters do not have the tools to do this on their own, yet alone as a team.

That is where recruiting analytics can help. Consider consolidating your talent pipelines in a CRM model. This allows you to do the most important piece around successful event management...pre-conference work.

You will get the best results when recruiting from industry events when you plan out your event and engage with candidates prior to the event. Not only can you engage with talent that will be at the event, but this also gives you a chance to engage with talent that will not be at the event.

You use the event as the talking point, or the "introduction content" and futher continue your relationship with the candidate...even if they are not going to the event.

Industry events are fantastic talking points with targeted talent. It gives you the opportunity to follow up with your existing network, the opportunity to engage with new people to build your network and the opportunity further deepen your relationship with a face to face meet that you can schedule while at the event.

So, conducting outbound email marketing prior to the event is essential for getting the highest return on your event investment. The more targeted you get get, the better.

While at the event, you of course need an easy and accessible process for new talent that you meet. The key ingredients for this process are:

• Track which event
• Know who from your team met the candidate
• Know who the candidate is and their key contact details
• What the person from your team thought of that candidate.

You will want to make this “process” available to anyone from your company who is at the event. Managed web landing pages are a great way to do this. This will funnel in real time directly into your hosted CRM where you can track, follow up with and begin the “long relationship” if needed that is required in recruiting certain kinds of talent.

Event management in certain industries has been streamlining their process for years, it's time for recruiters to do that also.