It’s not every day you have 72 recruiters, internal and external, descend on #Trademe HQ to participate in #WellyRecMeetup. We were greeted with offerings of Garage Project beer (on tap), wine and later Tommy Millions pizza. And of course since it was at Trademe, if you couldn’t help yourself you went for a ride down their two story slide.

Lot’s of familiar faces, but also the opportunity to meet people I hadn’t met before – the networking opportunity is excellent, and being a friendly bunch you could hear the healthy banter throughout the room.

Troy from Talent Army hosted the evening, MC’ing if you will in his normal No F&*%’s way. Twitter use was encouraged throughout the evening, and through tweets using the hashtag#WellyRecMeetup our meet up was impressively trending nationally by the end of the evening.

We started with a talk from Jon Rice about agencies using employer branding, looking at old school snapshots of recruitment websites. Discussions ensued around how agencies can better market themselves to new staff and how partnering with clients and utilising each other’s brands can be a powerful tool in attracting talent.

Paul Greenway, the CEO of HainesAttract then discussed how he saw marketing and recruitment being essentially interchangeable. Some great information about branding was presented, along with the challenges faced by agency and internal teams.

After this we had a quick intro and update from a Product Manager at Trademe, talking about changes to the Trademe Jobs page and what he does for the recruitment community.

That’s just a quick summary of the evening. If you want to get to know and hear from some interesting people in recruitment, or to innovate and be more successful, then why not come and check out the next #WellyRecmeetup. If you’re really keen, come and speak at one!