Staffing World 2021 Insights

Insights from the ASA’s Staffing World Conference 2021: Better Together – Stronger Together. Join us as we talk through the key takeaways from the year’s event.

Don’t panic if you could not attend the recent American Staffing Agency’s Staffing World Conference for 2021. We have all the insights from this year’s conference. Join Bill Inman, Executive Vice President of SmartSearch, and Leigh Ann Pagnard, Staffing Executive Consultant and Thought Leader, as they dive into the insights from this year’s event and discuss how the recruiting industry continues to transform and innovate during the current economic landscape. 

Watch the videos for each event as they take you through the main messages, and insights, as relevant to recruiters in 2021. Or read below for the synopsis and key takeaways from each.

Pre-Conference Event: Advancing Women In Leadership

The first Staffing World event focused on advancing women in leadership and implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruitment through the lens of empowering women. The top three takeaways from this session centered around the below pillars:

• • Belief – Instilling women with self-belief is the spark needed to strive and reach their leadership potential and is the key to empowering others.

• • Mentorship – Studies have shown that mentorship is the key to retention. Mentorship allows employees to be seen, heard, and valued while increasing their likelihood for growth through raises and promotions. 

• • Teams with diversity – Teams comprised of members from different backgrounds provide greater strength to overcome and avoid errors than teams with homogenous members.

By incorporating these concepts and empowering women, companies can take the first step towards addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, helping to shape a safer and equal future of work for all.

Building Your Tech Stack Confidently 

The second Staffing World event discussed building your tech stack confidently. The main discussion points during this event were centered around:

• • Adoption – There was a lot of discussion around building the tech stack based on a company’s values, taking a step back to identify what your company is really trying to accomplish, looking at your mission and vision statements, breaking it out, and building a tech stack around this. “It forced us to look at this differently,” said Leigh Ann Pagnard.

• • Leveraging Communication to create a personal connection with candidates and clients – When selecting the right tool, companies need to think about how to create a personal touch that differentiates and does not anonymize recruiters. Depending on the type of communication tool, the messaging from an email versus a text message matters.

• • Refusing to bandaid buy – Companies often recognize a need for a system to solve a particular issue without understanding the unintended consequences of how it affects managing your tech stack as a whole. So avoid bandaid purchases, and instead, do your research and ask vendor partners what features and integrations fit your current tech stack.

Key Takeaways from Guest Speakers

The keynote speakers, Sekou Andrews, entrepreneur and national poet champion, and Reita McGraff, award-winning author and professor at Columbia Business School had different takes on having a competitive advantage in your industry.

Sekou Andrews provided an interesting take on how we can learn from the challenging times we have faced during COVID to return better than ever, for example:

• • “If a fall breaks you, you are broken in the best way – broken to reassemble into something more beautiful than before”, says Andrews. 

• • 2020 made right-handed people work left-handed, but you can come out of it ambidextrous with more ways to serve more people. 

• • The new hunters and gatherers are headhunters.

Reita McGraff ended the conference by highlighting:

• • Companies need to change the way they fulfill their ‘why’ by identifying and exploiting a competitive advantage.

• • How to innovate to promote growth and development to transform internally.

• • What to do with a great idea, the process it takes to bring it to the right people, who then can identify the opportunity it matches.

We can glean many takeaways from these events, from how to improve our tech stacks and corporate culture, and with continual pursuit, to create a more diverse, inclusive, and safer future of work in our organizations. We hope you enjoyed reading and diving deeper into the insights provided at this year’s Staffing World event. Be sure to subscribe to our blog for even more industry insights and keep abreast of the latest SmartSearch developments.