The Minnesota Recruiters Spring 2008 (un)Conference was held on Friday, May 9th in the theatre at the Best Buy corporate headquarters in Richfield, MN. The free event was “sold out” with 220 pre-registered attendees and a waiting list. Actual attendance will appear on the Minnesota Recruiters Network blog in a day or two.
Plenty of post-event information will appear on the network blog over the next couple of days, so I won’t cover details of the event itself in this post other than to say it was well worth attending. Instead, I’d like to bring some attention to the remarkable efforts of a rising star in the Twin Cities recruiting community and a group of people dedicated to supporting his efforts from the very beginning.
Paul Debettignies
Paul Debettignies (pronounced “de-bettingz”/aka MN Headhunter) is a recruiter, blogger, social media aficionado and social networking star. With more than 10 years of experience as a technical (IT) recruiter, Paul is currently a one-man-band recruiter with Nerd Search, a firm he incorporated in 2006. But that’s just his day job.
In May of 2005 Paul started his blog MN Headhunter. In December of 2007 MN Headhunter was nominated by Recruitingblogs.com for “Best Third Party Recruiting Blog of 2007” (for the third straight year). Last summer, as his blog continued to grow in popularity within the local and national recruiting community, Paul and a couple of other local bloggers, Steven Rothberg and Josh Kahn first discussed the (un)Conference idea. Their meeting took place over some enormous burritos at a Chipotle just around the corner from where the fourth (un)Conference event just took place.
The Minnesota Recruiters Network was born. Paul’s efforts in building the Minnesota Recruiters Network (including the development of a web presence on a social networking platform) combined with his planning and promoting of the (un)Conference events have produced extraordinary results in less than a year. As of today, 372 members appear on the Minnesota Recruiters Network roster.
The Minnesota Recruiters Network has three key elements that provide events, networking portals and content:
1. (un) Conferences – four have been held so far and more are planned
2. Topical Sessions – the first of these was held on April 4, 2008 with Jason Alba, founder of JibberJobber.com and author of “I’m on LinkedIn, Now What???”.
3. MinnesotaRecruiters.com – a social network and blogging platform for recruiters on Ning with 372 members as of this posting
The co-founders and volunteers directly supporting Paul’s efforts from the beginning include: Don Ramer, Steven Rothberg, Josh Kahn, Nicole St. Martin, and Toby Dayton. Paul Debettignies is credited by this distinguished group of industry professionals as being the driving force behind the effort. In Josh Kahn’s words, “He won’t admit to it or take credit, but he’s the guy”.
Local recruiting-related businesses have shown a strong interest in the rapid growth of the Minnesota Recruiters Network and the (un)Conferences. Sponsors of the (un)Conferences providing the support necessary to produce high quality events at no cost to attendees have included: Arbita, Job Dig, Oberon, Jobs2Web and LinkUp.
Paul Debettignies’ impact in the Twin Cities has received national industry attention for some time now. He has been featured or written about by some of the highest profile recruiting industry thought leaders in the country. Jason Davis (founder of Recruiting.com and RecruitingBlogs.com) recently recognized Paul in his May 1, 2008 blog post. Jason’s post about sums it.
And he’s just getting started.
Recruiting Impact 