Unplugged: Insights from a Decade of RecFest

Recruiting has always been a game of contradictions. We talk about innovation, but still send cold emails off LinkedIn. We obsess over candidate experience, then ghost people after three rounds of interviews. We call ourselves strategic, but most days feel like we are the McGuyvers of the hiring process, trying to assemble whatever random crap is lying around into something that will actually have some utility.

Turns out, building a bomb out of an avocado and a snorkel might well be an easier ask then trying to figure out how to create an “AI Stack” out of a legacy ATS and a boatload of point solutions with open APIs but minimal configurability.

Thing is, the recruiting industry tends to be so myopically focused on the tools and the technology of the trade that we tend to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Recruiting gets a bad rap, but here’s an overlooked truth: it’s one of the most rewarding, and most meaningful, careers out there.

Your job, ultimately, is to match people with opportunities, and every req filled, done right, not only improves business and bottom line results, but more importantly, also improves the quality of life, career trajectory and economic mobility of the candidates who ultimately become our colleagues.

It’s easy to forget this at most conferences, given the fact that their agendas reflect the vendors who fund them, and the products in the expo hall are unilaterally given pride of place over the people who are there to build their professional networks and skillsets.

The thing is, most of us in talent acquisition would rather talk shop than shop for solutions; we’d rather trade war stories than case studies, and we’d much prefer getting to know each other over drinks than getting to know some solution over a demo.

There aren’t a ton of events that put the needs of practitioners over the needs of the sponsors first, or who focus more on building a meaningful community that’s more than a mailing list, or where exchanging ideas and exploring possibilities is more important than exchanging business cards or scanning badges. Where attendees aren’t an ICP, but are free to be themselves.

Fortunately, though, there’s RecFest – an exception to the HR and TA trade show rules, and one of the highlights of the overcrowded conference calendar year. Which is why I keep coming back year after year, both in Knebworth and in Nashville.

In fact, this years #RecFestUSA2025 represents something of a seminal moment for me – it’s the ten year anniversary of my first RecFest. Which makes it basically the longest and most stable relationship of my professional life – and probably, long term, one of the most meaningful, too.

Live Forever: Remembering 10 Years of RecFest

Every year RecFest has absorbed lessons: more story, fewer decks, more bruising. Now I host Inspire not because they needed a name, but because they want a guardrail, a shock‑test, a place where you leave unsettled.

The growth is real: what used to be a compact UK affair that could literally pack all attendees and vendors into a small boat docked off the Embankment has grown big enough to pack the house every year at Knebworth, one of the largest festival grounds in the UK and host to shows from a veritable Top of the Pops lineup of British musicians (I can always say I played the same stage as Freddy Mercury and Oasis, which is pretty f-ing cool).

That same festival energy has, of course, carried over to the U.S., spanning multiple stages in the heart of Music City, USA. What was once a boutique recruiting event in London is now circled as a must attend event for American practitioners and talent leaders, too. That arc matters, partly because I’ve watched it, partly because, in some small way, I’ve shaped some corners of it.

Flashback to 2015. I had way more hair, way less body fat and absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into when I first stumbled into the RecFest orbit (shout out to Posh James, where ever he might be). Back the, I flew to London at the invitation of Jamie Leonard to present the opening keynote at #RecFest2 on “Killer Recruiting Content” (click here for my 10 year old write up of that event, Only Fools, Horses and One Lost American: Reverse Imperialism, Recruiting and #RecFest2).

At the time, I was sort of new to the now well worn genre of event recaps, but felt a debt to Jamie Leonard and what was at the time the Reconverse Crew for trusting me to open to a “room full of … right proper, very British and very posh recruiters,” who had no bloody idea what to make of the American in the hat and hoodie talking about content marketing.

That early event had swagger: tight format, a captive audience trapped in close quarters on a boat, an open bar starting at noon, meaningful conversations and a midway full of carnival games in the middle of the Thames. The event was small, scrappy, and had more heart than any other event I’d been to.

I’ll admit it, I was hooked.

Over the intervening years, I’ve spoken at RecFest, tweeted snark from the back row, written recaps, and occasionally gotten into trouble for calling out sacred cows on stage. I’ve watched Jaime Leonard take this thing from a weird little festival in the UK to a global event that everyone in recruiting now circles on their calendar.

And while the speakers, sponsors, and stages have gotten bigger, the DNA has stayed the same: this is a community-driven event where the bullshit stays at the door.

That’s why I keep coming back. RecFest is the one place where recruiters can admit that the market is brutal, the job is overwhelming, and that none of us actually have it figured out. It’s also the place where we remind ourselves that titles and company logos are temporary, but relationships last.

Recruiting has undergone some seismic shifts since 2015. What hasn’t changed are the people I’ve met at RecFests along the way: these are the colleagues I text when I need advice, the ones who share their failures as honestly as their wins, the ones who remind me why this profession still matters, and the ones I refer to as “friends” without the slightest hint of irony.

Really.

Roll With It: RecFest Unplugged (and Unfiltered)

I’m particularly excited about this year’s event, mostly because, well, I’ll be hosting the Unplugged Stage – which is, let’s face it, pretty on brand. Looking at the (amazingly on point) agenda, it’s pretty clear that Unplugged is pretty much a microcosm of what makes RecFest special: candid stories, no fluff, no scripts – just some of the best and brightest minds in the industry talking about the stuff that really matters to front line recruiters and hiring leaders.

We’ll be covering what really happens when you try to build more efficient and effective recruiting processes, implement new tools or tech, scale hiring, make sure hiring managers, candidates and internal stakeholders are all happy – and keep some semblance of sanity in the process.

If you’re showing up expecting to be dazzled by big decks (I said “decks,” sickos), slick vendor pitches or the latest round of buzzword bingo (agentic for the win), you’re in the wrong tent. If you’re here to hear about practical tips, tactics and tricks of the talent trade, you know, the stuff that actually helps you survive (and thrive) in TA – welcome home. And bring booze.

So, what should you expect from Recfest Unplugged?

If I could tell you, it’d kind of defeat the point. But there are two themes that will essentially underscore every presentation on the stage: honesty, and transparency. Yeah, I know, I said no buzzwords. But I mean this literally, not as corporate jargon designed as a dog whistle for when a company is being opaque, evasive or straight up lying.

The agenda was built to feature sessions designed to cut through all the noise and abstract theories that dominate industry content (if you can predict the future of work, my dude, why are you a talent consultant and not an ML/AI engineer?). I mean, OK – you’ll probably hear a ton about AI: what’s hype, what’s real, and how to spot the difference.

Expect stories about internal mobility, balancing personalization with automation, and how to keep employees and candidates engaged when the budget is gone, the headcount is frozen, and the anxiety is real. Expect panels that don’t pretend every initiative was a sweeping success, that case studies and customer success stories are synonymous, and speakers who aren’t afraid to admit what they got wrong before (if) they got it right.

Listen closely for the contradictions: when someone admits their “total talent strategy” or “change management initiative” or “digital transformation project” created unexpected fallout or unintended consequences, or when a panelist tells you the benchmark they built wasn’t predicated on the metrics that actually matter – those are the insights worth writing down.

You learn more from failure than you do from success, sometimes. And in an industry where LinkedIn humblebrags, crowded competition and a ton of market uncertainty create the perfect conditions for what the kids call “fronting,” what the management consultants call “brand optics” and what normal people call “stretching the truth,” this is the stuff that’s going to be worth writing down and remembering.

Unplugged is also about listening for the themes and topics that connect the seemingly disparate sessions. You’ll hear a ton about AI in one panel, and a dialogue about skills based hiring in another. You’ll hear about the power of employer branding in one presentation, and about the concept of “recruiters are the new marketers” in the next.

Pay attention to how these proverbial megatrends overlap and interplay, because somewhere in the middle of the vendor venn diagram of “thought leadership” lies the truth about where we’re actually headed as an industry and as a profession.

Sure, there will be some Recfest presentations that are going to feature a bunch of polished predictions and speculative statistics, skewed anecdotal evidence and implicit endorsements for products disguised as market analysis. I like those kind of sessions, too – but that’s pretty much the sort of stuff that dominates the agenda of every other conference or event in the TA trade show calendar.

Unplugged, though, is all about sharing lived experiences, experiential learning and emerging patterns. This stage is where big ideas and small suggestions alike can cross-pollinate in real time, where you realize that the solution that someone hacked together for campus hiring or the internal mobility process another company implemented could actually apply to say, your technical hiring or executive search funnel.

In an industry that’s so often siloed, Unplugged will be wholly holistic. Which should be a refreshing change.

Why RecFest Rocks

What makes RecFest so different, and so much more powerful, than most any other TA conference is that the connections and conversations you have here somehow stick. Literally yesterday, I had a catch up call with a founder who I hadn’t talked to since we first met at a RecFest four years ago.

But even that fleeting interaction was enough to build a meaningful connection – something you’re not going to get handing out your business card during coffee breaks or in the lunch line.

At most events, you get an avalanche of infomercials disguised as thought leadership, collect a stack of useless swag and glossy sales collateral, and then come back to the office to an inbox full of sales reps burning through the registration list trying to find a “time to talk.” And when that time comes, pretty much everything you learned or any insights you gained from the actual conference content has normally been long forgotten.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Matt Charney (@mattcharney)

Recfest, though, hits different. The stories you hear, the people you meet, they stay with you. Maybe it’s the vibe – half outdoor festival, half family reunion (it’s like the Isle of Misfit Recruiters, and I’m here for it). Maybe it’s because people tend to be more candid, the conversations more personal, and there’s more willingness to share the messy realities and manifold challenges of recruiting than the standard “everything is fine” vibe.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because the whole thing is built around the concept of community, not commerce. In a world where talent attraction and hiring success increasingly feel depersonalized and automated, RecFest is one event where people come first and everyone feels more human than human resources.

It’s that humanity that matters now, more than ever. The recruiting market is in a constant flux. Many industries are freezing hiring, while others can’t fill roles fast enough. We’re working with algorithms built on billions of discrete data points, but not an official monthly jobs report (or a functioning Department of Labor, for that matter).

AI is rewriting the rules of recruiting, adding as much complexity as it does efficiency. Most reqs are deluged with hundreds of applicants, yet many employers are finding it next to impossible to source the candidates they actually need for critical open reqs.

Budgets and belts are tightening, and recruiters are being forced to do more with less than ever before (somehow, AI doesn’t seem to really help with the short term stress of balancing dozens of reqs and infinite uncertainty). Recruiters are caught somewhere in the middle of the reality of today and the existential angst of future unknowns.

This isn’t the time to hide behind dashboard, build out aspirational career pages or cling to the same SOPs and playbooks you’ve been using since before the Pandemic. The world has changed a lot since 2019, but for some reason, we’re still talking about optimizing LinkedIn profiles or developing employer value propositions or candidate experience (even as it’s being automated out of existence).

Now is the time to come together, to swap war stories, to figure out what we don’t know and to share what we do, and to support the function, and the industry, that we’re all unhealthily codependent on. Group therapy always helps, though.

That’s why I’m still coming back to RecFest a decade later.

How to Make the Most Out of RecFest: Top 10 Tips

Here’s a secret: some of the best value at RecFest doesn’t come from the sessions at all (or the speakers, present company most decidedly included). It comes from the conversations you have afterward, the collisions that happen as you move between stages, the chance encounters you’ll make waiting in the coffee line.

Introduce yourself to the people sitting next to you. Don’t look at their badges to see if they’re someone you can do business with; look at them, like all attendees, as someone who gets what you go through, who shares your aspirations and frustrations, and who – vendor, CHRO, analyst or random blogger in a hoodie – has something worth sharing. Whether that’s a tactical tip or spilling some tea, don’t sit in sessions taking notes or fill your schedule with tightly curated networking meetings.

Leave some room to chance – and chances are, if you’re willing to give advice, insights or just friendly support, then you’ll come away from Nashville with way more than you flew in with. And I don’t just mean a vicious hangover and a few blisters.

Here are 10 tips from a 10 year veteran on how to make the most out of your time in Tennessee.

Why RecFest Still Matters

RecFest is not about perfection. It’s about perspective. It’s about laughing at the absurdity of recruiting while still believing that what we do matters. It’s about remembering that even in a market this tough, we’re not alone. On the Unplugged Stage, expect to hear the unvarnished truth.

Expect to laugh, cringe, and maybe wince at stories that sound a little too familiar. And expect to walk away with more than just ideas: you’ll leave with community, clarity, and maybe a few new scars of your own.

That’s what makes RecFest different. That’s why I’m still here. And that’s why, no matter what happens in the market, I’ll keep coming back.

Because at the end of the day, this isn’t just about jobs. It’s about people.

And that’s the only thing that matters.