If you work as a meeting and event planner for a corporation, there are very likely hiring policies and procedures in place that make the process of hiring new staff members clear and simple; however, if you are a self-employed planner looking to expand your staff, it may feel like more of a challenge to determine how best to acquire new talent. Fortunately, there are always folks looking for work; therefore, the task is simply to find someone with the skills, experience and personality to be a good fit for you and your meeting or event planning business.

Starting with people you know is usually a good first step. This does not necessarily mean hiring friends or family members, as this is sometimes a good idea and sometimes not. But, it does mean that you should keep an eye out for potential candidates at networking socials and events you attend, as well as letting people you work with know that you are looking to hire.

A great place to start can be the folks that work as event staff, such as servers, bartenders, check-in staff or security guards. Some of these people may have taken these jobs as a way to get into the event planning field and begin to make connections, or to cover expenses while they complete their college degrees.

Any meeting planner who has worked with medical meetings knows it’s a different kind of animal. That includes pharmaceutical meetings as well. However, the guidelines for their meetings have changed again. On first sight they may not make it easier on the planner, but if you look deeper you may find that they make things more efficient by removing choices.

Sure, meetings across the board have changed and rules have become stricter. However, remember that when you remove choices, you remove time spent evaluating things that have already been evaluated by someone else. For instance, if a rule states that you can only have four security guards, then you don’t need to hassle with convincing a client that she needs six.

You could say that stricter rules for pharmaceutical and medical meetings has taken guesswork out of what is best practice for a particular meeting. In fact, best practice in some cases is not even a consideration. In the above case of security personnel, it wouldn’t matter if six were better–you can only have four and that is that. Read the rest of this entry »