Many weeks ago I contacted my local career blogging colleagues about getting together for lunch or dinner and take some time to get to know each other. We read each others blogs and some of us have met each other but I am not sure if any of us had met all of the others.

While this conversation was taking place Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com was attending a national conference and had a chat with John Sumser who has taken the lead of Recruiting.com.

John has been writing for many, many years a daily called Electronic Recruiting News. His main site is interbiznet.com and is a fantastic source of information for anyone whose job relates to recruiting or supporting someone who is a recruiter.

John had an idea of taking to the road so to speak, I figured an airplane would be more involved than a car, to meet with recruiters in cities across the country.

As a group we decided that we should try and be the first city to host John and what is being called the “Recruiting Roadshow Unconference”.

I first wrote about this a few weeks ago, Minnesota A Career, HR, And Recruiting Blog Hotbed, but I was kind of vague as we were working out details. Our idea was to do it in June but we decided that it made more sense to take some time in planning the event, so July 20^th it is.

The event is free. Yep, no cost.

What is an “unconference”? Frankly, I am a little unsure exactly as this is sort of a new trend from what I can see. But the feel of it is a very informal gathering of professionals to share information and experiences. In our case we are inviting HR professionals, recruiters, search firm folks, and anyone related to the recruiting function like a web developer who works on a career site.

We have the topics picked out (these are not the titles of the presentation):

-Differences in generational recruiting

-Using blogs for recruiting and branding

-Recruiting and networking on MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networking sites

-Tips on optimizing corporate career pages, use of RSS feeds, and using newsletters

John Sumser and all of the local bloggers will be presenting. There will be networking opportunities and lunch is included. We expect the event will start around 9 am and go until 1 pm but we are still working out specifics.

For sure the location is at the Best Buy Headquarters in Richfield, a suburb of Minneapolis.

Steven Rothberg wrote about this yesterday, Minneapolis Recruiting Roadshow Unconference Announced and John Sumser today, Recruiting Roadshow.

Steven is giving me credit I do not deserve. All of my colleagues are volunteering their expertise in one form or another. I posted on Steven’s blog that I am just the “Cruise Director”. I like that better than party or event coordinator. Maybe I will bring a sailors hat with me that day.

Next week we will have a Word/HTML marketing piece that will be sent out and a web page to take care of registrations.

For my colleagues around the country John says in his post that other cities he would like to visit include Miami, Atlanta, Washington DC, New York, Boston, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Austin and Toronto.

John is looking for someone to help plan/host these other events. We will be sharing our material so the amount of time spent preparing future ones will be minimal. This has been a lot of fun so far and is a great networking opportunity.

If you have any questions about this event please send me an email, paul@mnheadhunter.com