Let me start by saying that everything you read in this post is colored by the fact that San Diego is my favorite place on the planet.  There’s not even a close second.  (If you see me in person, buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you the story.  Or, frankly, any story you want.  I really like coffee.)  

With that disclosure in place, let me say that TA Week in San Diego this year was a great show with a ton of highlights.  I’m glad to get to share a few of them with you!

Day One

For the GBS team, the show started with a great content-focused workshop.  Over the course of two hours, Crystal and Jenn dazzled the crowd with their depth of knowledge and simple, meaningful plans for enhancing content creation for EB.  (If you missed it, don’t fret, Boba Fett.  We’ll be seeing it soon as a webinar!)  So many people visited our area over the balance of the show to follow up, ask questions, and talk about partnerships in creating content.  We’ve done a lot of workshops over the years, but it is always satisfying to get to dive in deep with practitioners and help solve some problems.  That’s the best part of any event, and we’re lucky to get to experience it!

The welcome reception was also a great time.  We were lucky enough to be set up in the foyer, so we had a lot of traffic for the evening.  We set up our 360 photo booth and spent the evening helping our hundreds of friends get great shots to remember their trip.  Feel free to check out #TA_Week on Twitter to see some of those videos.

Day Two

Wednesday was the first of two “main agenda” days, meaning two full tracks of sessions.  We spent most of our day in our booth, building out more services for attendees.  Between setting up snacks (who knew protein bars would be such a hit?), a first aid station, multiple charging stations, and a comfortable place to sit and look at the water, we worked to create a comfortable space for friends.  It kept us busy, with a day full of visitors and tech demos with other vendors.

Who caught my eye?  There were a couple that stood out that I’m excited to share!

Cliquify - A platform for distributing Employer Brand content across teams and locations, while maintaining brand standards and controlled user editing.  There was a lot of excitement for their platform, and I heard their name in conversation a lot across the event.  If you deal with content, or if you are looking for a way to distribute the work you are doing in this area, they are absolutely worth checking out!

Joonko - A very interesting tech that helps you convert diverse candidates into employees.  They have a great story, a great team, and are very much worth your attention.  (Also, full disclosure, they were there for me when I realized I had thrown on white socks instead of dress socks that morning and hooked me up with some of their sock swag.  It was on point, and I’m eternally grateful.)

Day Three

This was the big day for Team GBS.  I had the pleasure of serving as Emcee for the day, and it admittedly felt like coming home. Having served in this role at previous #TA_Week events, it was an honor to be back on stage, directing traffic for the day.

Crystal started the day with me, serving as our opening keynote discussion and then leading a session on neurodiversity in the workplace.  She shared some of the great work and research she’s done in this realm and invited two of our clients to join as well.  We heard stories from Rahul Yohd, VP of Talent Acquisition for New Western, and Erica Weber Whitmore, Director of Talent Acquisition for McKinstry, and their work around building inclusive workplaces.  While they have very different cultures and approaches, they both have great stories and successes to share.  If you’d like to get the one-pager from this session, you can grab it here! 

We also had some fun giving away a couple of fun attendance prizes, including a Louis Vuitton Neverful MM and a Kindle Scribe.   Keep an eye on our Facebook page to see who walked away with those!

And, like most great events, it ended too quickly.  I’m already looking forward to next year, though we also have the summer virtual event in July to keep us warm.  The SRSC team are great partners and are absolutely worthy of your consideration if you’ve never attended an event.  We made some great connections, and have some budding new partnerships as souvenirs.  2023 is off to a great start.  Here’s hoping you’ll join us on our journey for the rest of it!