I am heading out to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center outside of Chicago this week to attend The Onrec Expo 2009 and Kennedy Information’s Recruiting Conference.  I know travel budgets to attend events like this have been slashed, so I will be live blogging from the event.

This event has a very nice program, and an interesting speaker list.  I’m really looking forward to attending a handful of the sessions including they keynote where Dr. Michael Kannisto from BASF will be presenting 10 Ways Recruiting has Changed Forever and What to do Next. I am a big fan of a conference staying on topic and true to what people want to learn about. Conferences can be expensive to attend to start, and I hate thinking that these dollars are going to some person who wrote a book about a topic barely related to the conference.

Back to Onrec… other sessions I’m definitely attending include:

• Corporate Career Sites: What Separates the Best from the Rest
• Recruiting in a Web 2.0 World
• Leveraging Mobile as a Supplement to Recruiting
• Virtual Career Fairs for College Recruitment

If you are going to be out there, send me a note as I’ll be looking to interview people to get their thoughts as well.

WARNING:  The information about recruiting has ended, and I am now going to delight (or bore) you about my take on locations of conferences.

I took a look at the lineup of past conference locations and immediately see some great locations… I am a big fan of the Park Lane Sheraton in London, which I happened to stay at this summer ($160 on Hotwire instead of $400 through the hotel).  Take a left out the front door and you are at Piccadilly Circus in 10 minutes. Go right and walk 10 minutes and you are at Harrod’s, and directly behind the hotel is Sheppard’s Market which is just one great pub crawl area.  Other cities where past conferences were held included downtown venues in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and New York.

So why did they need to choose to have this conference outside of Chicago, and not downtown.  As a Chicagoan, you want to show off the city when you get a nice big international crowd.  The steak at Gibson’s in Rosemont tastes as good as the one on Rush Street, but the atmosphere is just blah.  Downtown Chicago has great restaurants, world class shopping, lively jazz and comedy clubs, not to mention fun watering holes. Try naming another city in the world that finished 4th in the running to host the 2016 Olympics (sigh).

As the CEO of eCampusRecruiter, we threw three user conferences.  One in Milwaukee, one in Indianapolis, and one in Las Vegas.  Guess which one was most successful?  Milwaukee had some fun moments thanks to Safe House, and Indianapolis was nice and quiet, but everyone loved Las Vegas.  We had several people show up at morning sessions in the Luxor with eyes as red as the Bloody Mary’s they were double fisting, but you could tell they felt alive, energized, and inspired. We had good attendance not only for the sessions, but to all the networking events we held before and after the conference.

The key to a great conference is energy.  You want to build excitement to make sure your audience is both attentive and participating.  Don’t get me wrong, good content can make any conference successful, but the purpose of events like these is to spur innovation.  Innovation needs energy.

I’ll go to the conference in Perdido Beach, Alabama just like I would go to one at the Javits Center in New York, but to those groups throwing conferences “just outside” of the city… please have it outside of San Diego at Hotel del Coronado. I never mind reliving the merengue scene from My Blue Heaven.