A committee has already run your first screen
Every industry event runs a selection process you do not pay for. Someone reads the submissions, asks around, and picks the people worth putting in front of a paying audience. The result sits on a public web page: a name, a title, a company and the title of a talk.
For a recruiter that page is two things a database row is not. It is a shortlist somebody else curated, and it is a statement, in the person's own words, of what they know. "Head of Data" tells you little. A talk on moving a bank's risk models off a mainframe tells you what the last three years of their job looked like.
It is the candidate-side twin of working the exhibitor list for business development. Same page, opposite purpose. There you want the company's hiring manager, on a work email, before the doors open. Here you want the person on stage, on a personal channel, whenever the search needs them.
What you get back
A table with one row per speaker: name, title, company, talk, the LinkedIn profile where the match was certain, the dated history behind the score, the score and the reason. For the ones who passed, a personal email where one exists and a drafted first message that opens on the talk. Drafts are held. Nothing is sent.
Variations worth knowing
Run several years at once. People who speak at the same event year after year are the recognised names in a niche. People who spoke once, four programmes ago, are often the ones nobody is calling.
Use the talks as a map. Group the programme by topic before scoring and you see which employers send people to talk about which problem. That shows where a skill sits in the market, and it feeds a full talent map.
Count panels and workshops. Keynote speakers are the most approached people at any event. Workshop leaders and panel members are closer to the work and get far less recruiter mail.
Where this goes wrong
Mistaking a stage for a fit. Vendors buy speaking slots. A good part of any programme is founders, evangelists and sales leaders who are there to sell. The score step separates practitioners from promoters, and it needs real must-haves to do it.
The right name on the wrong profile. Matching a name to a profile fails quietly. The play leaves the profile blank when company and title do not line up, because a wrong profile poisons the history, the score and the email that follow.
A generic message with the talk pasted in. "Loved your talk" from someone who was not in the room reads as what it is. Say what the talk was about and why it matters for the role, or leave it out.
Treating it as the whole search. A programme is a few dozen people. It supplements a proper search. It does not replace one.
