CareerXroads^®Update - November 2011

By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com

Since 1996 our Update has been published 10-12 times each year and aims to share commentary, observations, perspectives and data we come across during our staffing adventures. We hope you continue to enjoy it and pass it on to friends. All are invited to register for the Update for free. Coupled with our Bellwether, a provocative monthly look at trends we share with CareerXroads Colloquium members, we are always willing to challenge the accepted wisdom or poke a little fun at the staffing industry and ourselves in the process.
We invite you to keep in touch and join us during the year at the various conferences where we speak or simply attend.

CareerXroads Notes On A Full Conference Season

We've no doubt that 2011 represents a welcome road to 'recovery' of Talent Acquisition's evolution in this second decade of the 21st century. (You might never know that the fear of a second recession is hanging over the rest of the world.) This year there were more conferences (with interesting sessions), more knowledge shared, more product and new business announcements made, and more new ideas promoted than we've seen in quite a few years.

Mindful that there were more events this fall than any one person could reasonably get to (we had several conflicts with our own meetings but we did make a few of the vendor events and a couple company 'all hands' meetings), here are a few highlights we noted.

Fall ERExpo

At the Fall ERExpo in September, arguably the first conference of the season, we had quite a few takeaways. The one that stands out was this session by PepsiCo that included Paul Marchand, Sheila Stygar and Chris Hoyt. We've seen them all speak at various times but never together and it was much more than the sum of its parts. Their session reflects how three different 'levels' of leadership operate in a transformational (read rapidly changing and innovative) environment to separately but collaboratively get in alignment with their respective business partners. All while still managing to communicate supportively up and down the organization.

Another noteworthy point: ERE has been the pioneer in developing successful niche conferences and their use of video streaming to enhance the experience of professionals who are unable to get to the meetings in person is extraordinary.

RecruitDC

September's RecruitDC in Washington D.C. was a prime example of the growing 'local' interest in quality face-to-face networking and programming. Atlanta, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Dallas, South Florida, Chicago, Boston, LA, Denver and Washington and more all have viable recruiting communities.

There is an opportunity here for someone to link these communities up in a supportive network. One might have thought from SHRM's recent elimination of its staffing conference and magazine that interest had waned for recruiting content. Couldn't be further from the truth.

mRecruitingCamp

The first mobile recruiting conference in the US, mRecruitingCamp, was held in San Francisco. Michael Marlatt, one of the key figures behind the conference, brought together a fascinating and diverse group of speakers that engaged an audience needing little convincing about the importance of mobile recruiting tools and technologies. John Philips' (Microsoft) allusion to Amazon's 'check out cart' was our favorite comment: he warned us all not to overhype mobile's near-term impact on recruiting if the ability to apply remains as much an obstacle as it is today.

Still, mobile is driving, among many things, an explosion of apps which only lately have begun to emerge in staffing and HR.

OnRec's Staffing Conference

Onrec's Staffing Conference in November had excellent sessions and a few experiments in presenting content - clearly it was a turnaround credited to Anna Brekka's efforts. Sessions like Kristen Weirick's (Cargill) keynote on the past and future of Staffing as well this one on social media by Intuit are part of the reason for their success.

SourceCon

The SourceCon events (hosted at Yahoo this Fall) are always an amazing experience for the geeks in our space who want to dig into bench level tactics and tools. Sessions handled by Shally and friends were eye opening. (Congratulations to Jim Schneider for winning the SourceCon Challenge!)

HR Technology Conference & Exposition

We're still absorbing the sessions at the HR Technology Conference & Exposition in early October. Without a doubt it is the premier event for the HRIS & IT pros on both the Employer and Vendor sides that have to support the business of HR. This show is also arguably one of the strongest recruiting conferences of the season by virtue of the number of new business/product announcements as well as the quality of the sessions and size of the audience. The news about consolidation in the industry, announcements of new products and some excellent case studies by folks like Mike Grennier on the use of video in staffing at Walmart were all icing on the cake. It was well organized by LRP although the heart and soul of it is Bill Kutik.

We most enjoyed listening to Professor John Boudreau whose contributions to our field will truly stand the test of time. We also enjoyed facilitating a conversation entitled Social Media: Bubble, Bauble or Boom with Job2Web's Doug Berg, SelectMinds' Anne Berkowitch, Deloitte's Frank Wittenauer, Verizon's Justin Jesser and Credit Suisse's Neal Wendel. When you get smart people with interesting opinions to have a conversation with each other and the audience - lots of learning ensues. (In case you are wondering, the boom still is on its way.)

Candidate Experience Awards

We were most ecstatic, however, over the completion of a six-month journey with Elaine Orler, Mark McMillan and Ed Newman plus assorted friends, sponsors, partners and other volunteers to find, vet and announce the 2011 Candidate Experience Awards.

• 23 employers won the first Candidate Experience awards. Out of 58 who applied.
• 11,500 candidates completed a detailed survey about their experience (as candidates of these 23 firms) confirming that they deserved to win.
• Chad Godhard who is responsible for why Sage was one of the winners "with distinction" has since written an excellent article on ERE: We did Something about the Candidate Experience.

Much more will be written about this subject in the coming months. In the meantime, a hearty congratulations to all the 2011 CandE Award Winners:
Adidas Group, Automatic Data Processing, Inc., The Bozzuto Group, Cliffs Natural Resources, Covenant Health, Crowe Horwath LLP, Deloitte, Deluxe Corporation, General Mills, Harris Interactive, Herman Miller, Inc, InfoReliance Corporation, Intuit Inc., Ontario Systems, LLC, Pacific northwest National Laboratory, PepsiCo, Principal Financial Group, Rex Healthcare, RMS Inc., Sage, State Farm Insurance, SunTrust Banks, Inc., W. L. Gore & Associates, Whirlpool Corporation

Standout Conference of the Fall: Linkedin's TalentConnect

Sekou's last line: "It takes one to know one" coming as it did at the end of a performance art piece (one of the best we have seen) is a classic answer to what it takes to identify a quality candidate - a recruiter of equal quality. This piece has all the right word pictures and attitude. Genius at work.

The three-minute standout monologue was also a sample of the incredible amount of work that had to have gone into the preparation of the entire conference.

It wasn't just the quality of the speakers, keynoters and other presentations. Nor was it the size and quality of the primarily corporate staffing leader audience they brought to Vegas. To us, the surprising takeaway was the scale of the behind-the-scenes effort to ensure a positive experience was had at every level by the nearly 2000 attendees and VIPs.

As an observer of many of these events, this was less a conference and more a show where even the attendees had a role. Activities ranged from professional photos and expert advice to help 'pimp your Linkedin profile,' to receptions with Vegas-style production values to sit-down luncheon discussion groups that made you wonder about the logistics required to accomplish the matching that went on behind the scenes and, of course, the fan-boy counselors to train and guide product demos. Few stones were left unturned. All went off flawlessly.

The centerpiece, an announcement of the Linkedin Talent Pipeline, aptly described by John Zappe in his article as their new CRM offering, caused more than a few heads to turn and discuss the impact of allowing recruiters to import non-Linkedin documents, lists, profiles, resumes etc. and attach them to Linkedin profiles, organize and search the content, build touch-points, follow 'work flow' and 'status' maps and communicate via an existing recruiter account at no extra cost. Hmmm does sound suspiciously like an ATS in the making although four ATSs have an 'exclusive' partnership related to this offering.

We expect plenty of critics and 'fan-boy' discussion groups to weigh in on this move. Capability aside, issues like privacy and compliance will be hotly debated. The flaw, for the moment, is that each recruiter can only attend to his or her own work. There are no corporate-wide feeds into Linkedin - - - yet.

Time will tell if the days of ATS-centric recruiting are really over with future hiring models pivoting around earlier stage development of prospect pipelines while the ubiquitous ATS backend diminishes in importance (and cost).

Meanwhile, Linkedin is in an enviable position as a rising star and, as long as they understand what our culture tends to do to 800 pound gorillas, is getting plenty of rope.

A shift in language

Earlier this year at ERE's first of two Innovation summits (we were in London when they had the second), we noted how the language of HR/Staffing is rapidly changing. The word 'curate' for example was used in at least four different ways at that conference.

Personally we're good with the notion that curated content evokes helpful imagery about the complexity of organizing and communicating information in today's multi-media environment. However, when speakers use the term in the context of 'curating' people, the word brings up some musty and medieval images we don't think worth the effort.

This subject of rapidly shifting language is important. We're obviously changing 'HR' to 'Talent Management' (give or take) and, at the same time putting Talent Acquisition at the [military] point of TM. (That conversation has been ongoing for a while.)

Language shifts have always been one indicator of major changes in power and 'influence' [an ongoing conversation John Sumser has been working to define in issues of his HR Examiner]. Care should be taken however to avoid using cool 'in' words when simpler words would suffice. This was evident during a 1-day HREvolution conference in Las Vegas. We loved the experience and energy of the event's many supporters and organizers (and especially the work that many of the session facilitators did to prepare a truly interactive conversation). During one of the sessions the terms 'engage' and 'talent' were used in nearly every sentence - at least until Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia) made a well-articulated plea that 'participate' and 'people' would have been more appropriate in the majority of cases.

Marcia's intervention is more important than many of us might think at first glance. As the world of HR and Staffing shifts, new words need to be crafted that better describe the nuance of where we are going, not where we've been. At the same time, an audience that has not had time to absorb the newest definitions and speakers that may be using them inappropriately could cause more confusion than enlightenment. 'nuff said.