NRF Annual Conference 2016

Last Thursday, the highly anticipated National Recruitment Federation Annual Conference took place in the City West Hotel. As sponsors of the NRF, we were delighted to be in attendance. It was a pleasure to be in and amongst Ireland’s finest recruiters and industry professionals! This year saw a massive 350+ delegates come from all over the country and abroad to attend the 2016 conference, entitled ‘Navigating the Future’.

As you can imagine, the atmosphere was fantastic and everybody was looking forward to the great line up ahead. It was great to catch up with so many familiar faces over a morning coffee before the day kicked off and in addition to this we teamed up with SiSu juices to offer a variety of healthy juices to all delegates, giving everyone their VitHit for the day!

Kevin Green, the Conference Chair, kicked off the morning to a full house, welcoming all delegates and introducing Barbara McGrath, President of the NRF. Barbara reflected on key trends of the recruitment industry both at home and abroad. For those who missed this year’s conference, we’ve listed below some interesting insights, facts and figures from the key speakers on the day:

• • • Joan Burton gave some interesting insights into the Irish Economy, most notably that the Irish unemployment rate has dropped from 15% in 2012 to 8.6% today! Joan finished off her speech by presenting this year’s NRF graduates with their certificates. A huge congratulations from Contracting PLUS to all the NRF Graduates!
    • AnneMarie Muntz, President of CIETT (International Confederation of Private Employment Services), spoke about the Future of work and how agility will help companies adapt to what will be the future of working.
    • James Osbourne, CEO of INNERGY, brought great energy to the stage and gave a really insightful presentation on growing your recruitment business and the importance of adding value for customers!
    • GoogleDave, Partner at PHCreative, shared insights into the future of digital technology. According to GoogleDave we need to “Be curious and dig deep!” We should remember that less than 2% of content gets shared more than 100 times, so it’s important to build quality not quantity!
    • Caitriona Lannen, Head of Irish Times Jobs, reviewed the results of a recent survey of Irish talent living abroad and how we can work to bring them home! Interestingly11% of independent young professionals are planning to return to Ireland this year, and another 34% are planning to return within the next 2-4 years!
    • Ingrid Devin, EMEA Diversity & Inclusion Lead at Dell, reminded us of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and asked us all to identify and be aware of our unconscious biases

• • • Joe Schmidt, Head Coach for the Irish Rugby Team, finished up the event, highlighting the importance of self-awareness, emotional intelligence and accessing knowledge from all levels of hierarchy within your team. What happens when your star performers are not available? Joe’s speech finished with a 15 minute Q&A lead by Kevin Green in which he discussed his top motivational and leadership tips and answered questions from the delegates!

Overall it was a really enjoyable and successful NRF Conference, with a very positive message to delegates reminding up to prepare ourselves so we can successfully ‘navigate the future’!.

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