Learning Together - Continuing Development for Retained Search Professionals

This past December 15th, our Blog post was on trends we consistently see in each of our searches - three key areas that our clients want from each candidate.  One of those trend areas is Continuing Education (or Continuing Professional Development).  Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to practice what is preached - I was able to attend the International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment's Small Search Firm Forum.  The Forum is attended by boutique search firm owners from around the country.  In some ways we are competitors, but for the two days we were together, we were colleagues that learn together.

What is the shelf-life on new information?

I was once told that a person is 50% out-of-date in the technology of their field (whatever their professional field is) after only two years.  Continuous learning, especially today, takes on added meaning if this above reference is even close to true.  The Small Search Firm Forum (SSF) meets two times/year.  For those of us that attend, it is almost a requirement.  Why?  Where else can we learn together with our peers in this field?  Our focus - to better serve our customers to assure we are identifying, assessing and placing the best possible talent.  We facilitate some of our own sessions; we also bring in outside speakers to assure we are getting a very broad and up-to-date perspective.

The likely subject of many posts . . . . .

Two days of meetings can produce an amazing amount of material.  Here are just a few of the topics we covered:

• Update on New Technologies
• Economic Update
• Client Feedback
• Use of Social Media
• Best Practices in Search - Dashboards for our Industry

Best Practices

I often hear companies talking about the need to identify best practices in their respective industries. Thousands of professional and industry associations exist for this reason - and countless articles are written within almost all business niches.   Over the next few months, we will be taking the liberty of expanding on some of the conference learnings. The next post will specifically be on what we learned from client surveys we each conducted. Each attendee asked three clients questions about the overall business climate as well as areas we as search firms could better serve them.  The data was put together and the findings are great guidelines for better serving your needs.  Details coming mid-May!