The Story of #TASCON23: Building India’s largest Recruiting Conference

Sarang Brahme
4 min readDec 28, 2023

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#TASCON23 was India’s biggest Talent Acquisition event ever! Building a successful event is a team game, and it’s all about people, just like in recruiting. Here are a few learnings and thoughts I wanted to share.

Community is everything: For us at Recruiting Adda, most decisions were made by putting our TA community at the heart of everything. It’s a 7k+ strong TA community we interact, engage and listen to every day through our WA groups, webinars, meetups and all the messages we receive. As someone mentioned, it’s a compounding effect that has built this event from all our past experiences and our zeal to serve the community. Our sourcing lab is one such effort where we had live demos of tools, chrome extensions, and ChatGPT open for everyone. True to our purpose, if our community gets value, we do as well in the process. It’s not the other way around!

Content is king (and speakers): Right from our first version a few years ago; we’ve kept a first approach, which means we gave the stage to well-known leaders who speak at other conferences and many first-timers. Our teams ensured that the content was aligned with the theme and expectations of the community. We tried new formats like the BIG Debate, AI masterclass and ChatGPT live sessions. We worked closely with speakers to provide them with context and insights to help them build exciting conversations and content. Yusuf’s international experiences enabled us to attract global TA speakers to offer a broader perspective to our TA community.

Take failures on the chin: As a core team, we’ve discussed our misses in the past event more than our successes because we’re passionate about what we do and want our community to reflect the purpose. We’ve had countless debates and discussions about improving, trying new things, and learning from the feedback! All those conversations pushed us to do better, and this time, we improved our logistics by getting more hands from the outstanding RA team members and volunteers steered by ever-dependent Mitch. Special mention goes to Chinmay Chavan for his attention to detail while multi-tasking.

It takes a village to build an event: I remember Yusuf and I planning our first event in Pune with 100 participants and some of the core team members. As we grew to 600+ attendees, it was only done with people who voluntarily put aside work hours to do everything needed for the event despite their busy work schedules and personal commitments. Our RA team worked behind the scenes for the past 2+ months on marketing, event arrangements, and attracting community members, sponsors, EmCees and speakers — big kudos to Sachin Pilwan and his team. Yusuf jokingly calls him his boss and for a good reason :D

(Trip down the memory lane for our first TASCON in 2015)

(Speakers of our first event TA event at Recruiting Adda)

Passion triumphs over everything: Putting together TASCON23 has been one of the most challenging yet most satisfying parts of all of us. It’s a challenging year for the recruiting community with uncertainty about the economy and the impact on hiring. Whenever we hit the hurdles, our passion for the recruiting and our community helped us pick up ourselves and push the impossible. We had to make the event to December, and despite being a slow month, our belief that good content and intent would bring the community together kept us going.

Of course, we owe significant to our sponsors, who believed in our purpose and supported us in building this event. It was the first time we put up the booths for them in an expo area for over 600 attendees.

It’s not a thank you note but a reflection on our journey as a recruiting Adda team. This is a community contribution beyond our regular jobs for all of us at the core team. We strongly believe the recruiting community deserves an inclusive, dedicated, and passionate platform to share its voice, network, and learn from each other.

All the feedback, comments, and constructive criticism we received after the 2023 event validate our belief and passion. “Recruiting” is as core to the business as any other “core HR” process, and although many of us may have entered into recruiting by accident, we’re here by choice.

See you in September 2024 with another TASCON!

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Sarang Brahme
Sarang Brahme

Written by Sarang Brahme

Employer Branding Leader. I write everything about HR, employer branding & life :) Views are personal.

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