Vendors and conferences and flipping the funnel

I'm going to the Electronic Recruiting Exchange Conference this week. It's a recruiting industry conference with a trade show floor for vendors and programmed sessions for practitioners. I always have fun at these conferences if for no reason other than networking.

What I noticed this year is EVEN MORE mail (e, voice and snail) from vendors who will be at the trade show letting attendees know who they are, where they are going to be (booth #), etc. To some extent, I think this whole thing is a little backward. I'm not really in the market for anything right at this moment. I'll walk the trade show floor to see what's doing, but have never spent a bunch of time there. In some sense, it's a buyers market...lots of vendors competing for the limited attention of recruiters. Plus there's so much noise, web 2.0 this and ATS integration that....blah, blah, blah. I don't have time to care about all of the messages....I don't even have time to figure out which ones to listen to.

So I am going to flip the funnel, just for fun. Attention vendors: I am going to be at ERE in San Diego. I will reserve three fifteen minute time slots to talk to three vendors exclusively. You can pitch your product, ask me about recruiting at Microsoft or get fashion advice. First come, first served. Drop your name and contact info into the comment section and I'll contact you offline to make arrangements to meet.

And now I don't feel so guilty about ignoring all those marketing messages (oh, OK, I never felt guilty).

This is the ONLY time I am going to ask staffing vendors to leave their contact info here : )