RecFest Recap

Part 1 – Performance

Today I’m nursing a sore head and tired body thanks to a massive day yesterday at RecFest in Melbourne.

‘The largest recruitment festival in Australia and New Zealand for in-house recruiting, resourcing and talent acquisition’ is the tag line on the website – and we were all there to celebrate ‘Heroes’ in the recruitment industry; those who are doing good in, and with, recruitment.

Shameless relevant plug; we’ll continue the celebration in Sydney next month at our Hiring Heroes conference, with an afterparty on ‘The Island’ in Sydney harbour. Speakers will include Gray Wilson of Vodafone, Sally Garner of Alfred Health and Edan Haddock of flybuys – details and registration here if you want to come along!

Back to RecFest AU 2019; with Hung Lee our competent MC, we were in safe hands.

We had a quick introduction from him and an overview of the charity partner Wear For Success from Jodie Tuckwell-Knight. They're helping people in need with professional clothing for job interviews, as well as career support coaching.

Our opening speaker was Derek Redmond, former Olympic 400m runner, former professional basketball player (started after being told by a surgeon he’d never run again!), performance coach and, I learned in a later Q&A session, a semi-pro boxer at age 54 (!) .

Derek spoke about success, breaking down his approach to goal setting. He shared his mindset about lofty goals:

• The outcome (in his example, a gold medal) is out of his control – someone might run faster – he doesn’t worry about this
• The objective, which will help him get the goal (his example, a 43 second, 400 meter time) is somewhat within his control – but he can only control that in the moment on the day.
• The inputs (diet, training, etc.) he has total control over.

He encouraged us to think about our own inputs, and implored us to put all of our time and effort into the things that we can control.

His story is a famous one – he had a string of medals for Britain in the 4X400m relay across a number of events (success by any measure), however, in 1988, at the Seoul Olympics, Derek pulled out of his solo event 90 minutes before the opening round after injuring his Achilles tendon during warm-up.

He then got himself fit again, and prepared for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where he made it through to the semi finals in good form.

Disaster struck in the 250 meters from the finish line in the semi final when his hamstrung tore.

If you haven’t seen the video:

I’d seen the video before, but with Derek up there telling the story, talking about his relationship with his dad, and then showing the video, he nearly had me in tears first thing in the morning!

Not a single person in the audience at RecFest didn’t have their heartstrings wrenched.

 What made Derek get up? His champion mindset. He explained that to be a champion you need to be in shape both mentally and physically. He had broken down physically in that moment, but his mind was still focussed on the goal, and his first thought when he looked up was “I’ll catch em”.

It’s also why he hobbled his way to the finish line (“the only time I could swear at Dad and get away with it”) as he could live with finishing dead last, but he couldn’t live with the fact he didn’t finish.

This champion mindset also saw Derek rebuild his fitness level to the point that he played professional basketball after being told by his surgeon that “ya hamstring’s buggered, career’s over, and you’ll never play for your country again”.

Never, ever give up. Don’t see problems, see challenges.

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Next on stage was Edan Haddock, Talent Manager at flybuys.

I've written about Edan before when he presented at the Melbourne Recruiter Meetup - he had even more to share this time.

Edan shared in detail the work he’s been doing at flybuys since April (accomplishing a LOT in just 7 months!!!) to develop their employer brand and promote flybuys as an employer of choice after its split from Coles.

He showed us his ‘find your place’, day in the life Employee Value Proposition video, explaining that the way we view work is changing, and that he wanted to show a real story from his employees both within and beyond the office walls.

He walked us through the hiring journey of a candidate. A couple of exciting things that stood out to me were:

• The welcome to the flybuys interview zone; including an introductory video with flybuys CEO John Merakovsky making the candidate feel at ease and welcomed, with the first questions the candidate is asked being ‘coffee or tea?’ and ‘what is your favourite song?’ designed to have the same effect.
• The values assessment tool (shoutout Weirdly) which every candidate takes, helping them design the role to suit and playing to the candidates strengths. You can take the assessment here – I’m most closely aligned to ‘Do the Right Thing’.

Edan has worked closely with the flybuys team to define their employee value proposition, and then found the technology that enables him to put it to work.

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Part 2 can be found here– I’ve recapped the other topics we explored:

• Diversity & Recruiting for Difference (Wow Joanne Lockwood, Bill Boorman, Nicola Harrison)
• The State of the Nation and Recruiting Myths
• The Candidate Experience and Engagement