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Minneapolis Recruiting.com Roadshow Unconference Oversold

Chipotle burritoPaul DeBettignies, Managing Partner of Nerd Search, LLC, Josh Kahn of Best Buy / Accenture, and I came together a couple of months ago and laid the foundation for a free, half day conference for recruiters and other human resource professionals. We knew that a key component to the success of what later would become known as the Minneapolis Recruiting.com Roadshow Unconference would be to have a nationally known speaker keynote and I knew that John Sumser of Interbiznet and Recruiting.com was looking for a way of getting the word out about Recruiting.com so I contacted him to see if he'd be interested. Not only did he agree but he enthusiastically helped with some of the organizing.

Flash back a bit. Paul, Josh, and I are sitting around eating burritos at Chipotle and planning out the timing, duration, price, target market, location, etc. for the conference and we're having that discussion about who should keynote. As the conversation developed, Paul opines that he thinks we could have 100 or more participants but just as quickly said that he often will over estimate because he's such an optimist. I wouldn't call myself a pessimist as I tend to be on the optimistic side but I said that I thought we'd get around two to maybe three dozen attendees. Josh later lines up a room for 100 people and I figured we'd have a LOT of empty seats but this was the first time so the number of attendees was anyone's guess.

Flash forward. Two days ago Paul calls. We're oversold. More than 100 people have signed up in the 1.5 weeks since we started taking reservations. We're maintaining a waiting list and will email all of the attendees twice to remind them of the conference and ask them to notify us right away if their plans have changed so that someone from the waiting list can take their spot.

Wow. Paul deserves a real tip of the hat. If his recruiting gig ever gets old for him, he could do quite well as an event planner...especially if he does his planning at Chipotle.

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