The sold out SHRM Staffing Management Conference is still causing me to pause and consider whether the recession has really hit - other than the obvious folks like retail. The fact that 1500 paid attendees showed is fascination.

 

The majority were new and many of those newbies to staffing or HR generalists attempting to upgrade their staffing knowledge.

 

Presentations by Marie Artim (Enterprise), Linda Glass (Starbucks) and Tony Blake (Davita) were spot on and kudos to these experienced leaders sharing their good days and bad days via stories and case studies. The transparency of their challenges, thinking through the problems and pbstacles they overcame during change management is just whats needed now.

 

Mark and I put a very directive show together for this crowd- essentially touting the 25 practical things they should do to ramp up their website's staffing pages. It went over very well and nearly half the attendees chose it at one or the other sessions where I presented. (We noted that all the web "design" folks also found their way to our session- perhaps wondering if we were going to offer services in designing webs). My opening line disabused that notion when I said "We don't design websites, we criticize them".

 

Mark and I both found ourselves fascinated by the Colonel (who reprised his talk at ERE last year) on the challenges of "hiring" 100,000 "army strong" kids each year.

 

It is amazing that the army's approach is much more related to executive search on a galactic scale than it is to anything a firm would do to hire large numbers of non-exempts. Imagine having 9000 recruiters...who at best can hope to get 1 contract a month after spending 350 million on advertising on top of an estimated 2.2 billion in other costs to hire. Yikes.

 

The one area I just couldn't understand is how few firms took advantage of one of their most innovative programs. The army touts that 287 firms "promise" to interview men and women transitioning out of the service. This is a layup. It sgould be 2870 or 28,700 firms in this program.