While workforce planning is essential for keeping ahead in the competition for talent--many of the concepts behind sound workforce planning strategy remain largely misunderstood. Building on last year’s well-attended workshop, this year we will focus on taking the mystery out of workforce planning and setting the stage for a successful planning effort.

The workshop will be led by presenter Ed Newman, industry expert and president of The Newman Group, a leading provider of talent acquisition and management services to today’s Fortune 500 companies. In this session, Newman will provide strategic insight as well as in-depth analysis of key details that drive workforce planning. In the process, he will cover critical questions and issues that are essential to getting your initiative on track, including:

• Understanding “where you are” in workforce planning
• Defining workforce planning
• Defining the problem
• Defining the process
• Defining roles
• Building the plan
• Execution
• Measurement

This is an ideal session for anyone involved in leading or contributing to a workforce planning effort and a great chance to gain a clear and practical perspective on a subject that is crucial to talent management success for today’s enterprise.

As the war for talent accelerates, our ability to insure that we are selecting the best and rejecting the rest is critically important. In a market where talent is increasingly scarce, we all need to insure that we’re screening in top talent and not inadvertently rejecting high quality candidates. The focus of this program will be to provide you with practical, proven tools and ideas to dramatically improve your selection systems. This is an ideal workshop for those interested in enhancing both their candidate quality and recruiting processes through a cutting-edge competency model that integrates people, process, and technology.

Over the past year, ConAgra Foods has been building a next-generation competency based interviewing process. The program it has created integrates customized (functional & leadership specific) competencies with the interviewing process and applicant tracking technology. This holistic methodology makes it easy for hiring managers to interview for the right competencies through an automated tool that assigns competencies, manages the process, and tracks results.

• The competency methodology used to create both its leadership and technical competencies.
• An overview on how these competencies will be used to enable an integrated process for interviewing, performance management, leadership development, succession planning, etc.
• The process, forms and methods used to interview, assess, and measure results.
• The supporting applicant tracking technology infrastructure.
• The roll-out and interview training program for line leaders.

Every sport has rules, even pickup games. We even have rules for our kids, when they can watch TV, play video games, go to bed, etc. In business we have rules for how to fill in expense reports and what to wear and when to take vacation, but no rules for hiring top talent. In this hands-on workshop Lou Adler sets the record straight with his version of The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent. This is based on his bestselling book Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 3rd Edition 2007) and his Nightingale-Conant audio program Talent Rules – Using Performance-based Hiring to Hire Top Talent. If you want to learn how to source, interview, recruit and close top talent this is one workshop you won’t want to miss. Even better, Lou will show you how to keep score, teach the rules to your clients and to how become the referee.

Critical-sourcing survival skills will be demonstrated by two of the industry’s pre-eminent Internet recruiters in this two-part event (sign up for either or both). Successful recruiters can hardly make time to data-mine the Internet for leads, much less spend hours on end digging through hundreds of search results. With all of today’s online resources and tactics, it has become even more difficult just to navigate what’s available to you and figure out where to start. As time demands grow and competition stiffens, recruiters need to increase efficiency in their daily activities to remain competitive. To ensure your job is not outsourced, learn how to best use sourcing technology and productivity tools to get the most out of your day. Free up your time to close candidates and add value.

In this half-day lab, you’ll see how to easily source passive candidates for your open requisitions in just 10 minutes per search. Stop wasting time with complex Internet search techniques that take months to master and days to execute. Bring your toughest requisitions and your laptop and we’ll get online together to solve real-life challenges you’re facing and build a pipeline of leads in class. During this practical hands-on lab, busy recruiters will learn where to start and how to apply the quickest sourcing methods for any kind of requirement. Become an expert in several techniques you can use to generate leads daily without disrupting your busy day including:

• Easy-to-use search engine commands that quickly reveal hidden leads
• Source from dozens of Web 2.0 and "new media" resources
• Get results from LinkedIn in ways you never even thought possible
• Let your research work for you with simple automation techniques

While workforce planning is essential for keeping ahead in the competition for talent--many of the concepts behind sound workforce planning strategy remain largely misunderstood. Building on last year’s well-attended workshop, this year we will focus on taking the mystery out of workforce planning and setting the stage for a successful planning effort.

The workshop will be led by presenter Ed Newman, industry expert and president of The Newman Group, a leading provider of talent acquisition and management services to today’s Fortune 500 companies. In this session, Newman will provide strategic insight as well as in-depth analysis of key details that drive workforce planning. In the process, he will cover critical questions and issues that are essential to getting your initiative on track, including:

• Understanding “where you are” in workforce planning
• Defining workforce planning
• Defining the problem
• Defining the process
• Defining roles
• Building the plan
• Execution
• Measurement

This is an ideal session for anyone involved in leading or contributing to a workforce planning effort and a great chance to gain a clear and practical perspective on a subject that is crucial to talent management success for today’s enterprise.

• How do the best recruiting leaders structure their teams and focus their teams on the top priorities for their organization?
• How do top recruiting leaders create a more consultative culture within their teams?
• How do the best recruiting leaders develop high-performing recruiting pros?

This highly interactive workshop is strictly limited to HR, Recruiting and Staffing leaders who manage recruiting teams or an organizational recruiting function. No vendors or suppliers allowed. The workshop is designed to address the key leadership and management skills necessary to effectively lead a high performing corporate and organizational recruiting team and provide a toolkit for recruiting leaders to optimize the way they lead and manage a recruiting function. Using a consultative recruiting model, we will discuss key concepts in how to prioritize, structure, staff, lead, and problem-solve in the complex world of corporate recruiting and staffing.

• Prioritizing organizational recruiting needs
• Aligning the recruiting function against priorities
• Identifying in-sourced and outsourced resources
• Identifying the best recruiting professionals for your team

• Leveraging contracting within the recruiting function
• Managing challenging recruiting situations
• Top-level overview of project management techniques for recruiting professionals

• How to motivate and lead recruiting professionals
• Increasing recruiting professional teamwork and collegiality
• Developing recruiting professionals
• Leading through problems and performance issues

Over the course of the last few years, a significant number of articles have been written discussing the potential value of leveraging customer relationship management approaches and tools to support world-class talent-acquisition initiatives. Since the first few articles emerged, the groundswell in interest has been so strong that nearly every recruitment software company in existence have clamored to add features that can be positioned as CRM extensions and enhancements. Simultaneously, CRM vendors have started to offer enhancements and customizations to make their products suitable for talent-acquisition use. Despite the efforts of both vendor communities, offerings from the recruitment community barely scratch the surface of true CRM and offerings from CRM leaders remain too complex for the average HR customer. As a result, few HR organizations are building talent acquisition models that leverage the same CRM approaches and tools that have helped countless sales and service organizations increase efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

This workshop is designed to help organizations of all sizes understand CRM as it applies to talent acquisition. It will cover how CRM approaches can be used with or without technology to both augment and/or replace existing talent acquisition models. Specific topics to be covered will include:

• An overview of leading CRM approaches and tools.
• A primer on adapting CRM approaches to support world-class talent acquisition.
• A discussion of the legal ramifications of pre-applicant sourcing.
• Guidance on crafting the business case for using CRM in talent acquisition.
• Models for measuring the effectiveness of CRM activities in talent acquisition.

Dr. John Sullivan will present with Master Burnett.

Critical-sourcing survival skills will be demonstrated by two of the industry’s pre-eminent Internet recruiters in this two-part event (sign up for either or both). Successful recruiters can hardly make time to data-mine the Internet for leads, much less spend hours on end digging through hundreds of search results. With all of today’s online resources and tactics, it has become even more difficult just to navigate what’s available to you and figure out where to start. As time demands grow and competition stiffens, recruiters need to increase efficiency in their daily activities to remain competitive. To ensure your job is not outsourced, learn how to best use sourcing technology and productivity tools to get the most out of your day. Free up your time to close candidates and add value.

Ready to be blown away? Join Glenn and Shally to elevate your sourcing skills to new heights. If you think you have mastered sourcing with nothing left to learn, you will be shocked and amazed at how much more these two experts will reveal. In this course, designed for the seasoned professional researcher, you’ll learn techniques that will allow you to penetrate traditional sources deeper and faster than ever before. Join Glenn and Shally as they explore the new frontiers of Internet research including:

• Using regular expressions with search engines like Exalead and Google Scholar
• New search engines that revive search commands like NEAR and linkdomain: in ways you have never seen before
• Elegant yet simple negative search terms to remove the spam and garbage from search engine results
• Master the art of search-jutsu with little understood, yet easily applied, field search syntax
• Multi-window bookmarklets that bring up search-specific results from various channels in just a few keystrokes to ensure you don’t skip relevant sources.

What's making or breaking corporate success today is recruiting. The ability to attract and keep better employees than others in your industry and your region is the difference between record profits or lagging sales.

The third annual ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards are your chance to share how your success is helping your business — and in many cases furthering the recruiting profession. Whether it's your diversity program, your careers website, your referral program, retention program, your branding initiative, or another talent strategy, this is your best chance to showcase what's working at your organization.

Presidential candidates of both parties are in the midst of promising you everything under the sun. Congress is considering major changes to the tax code. The Federal Reserve wants to avoid an economic slowdown. Wall Street is volatile. Economist Gene Stanaland will help you understand how what’s happening in Washington and New York in this election year will affect you. He’ll whip out his crystal forecasting ball to help your future planning. And he’ll take your questions about economics, employment, and how politics affects both.

Miranda will share with you how she used unconventional ways to recruit 4000 extras and cast them into orcs, elves, hobbits and even humans in the epic movie trilogy of Lord of the Rings.

How do you source, interview, select and cast thousands upon thousands of people for different roles at different locations at different times?

Here’s a chance to hear from the world’s largest express-delivery firm whose good days and bad days are often looked at as a bellwether of the entire U.S. economy. You’ll hear about FedEx has used a comprehensive view of the significant relationship touch-points between candidate and employer to drive a better candidate experience, achieve higher candidate quality, and produce a measurable ROI on its recruiting efforts and process improvements.

This session is a deep dive into the candidate-centric approach FedEx applies to all sourcing, screening, tracking, onboarding, retention, and “boomerang” employee communications, including a glimpse at the metrics that drive the continued success of this industry-recognized talent generation engine. The success of FedEx as a company has been the result of an unwavering dedication to delivering upon the promises made to consumer. The FedEx recruitment team has extended this same dedication to delivering upon “consumer” expectations to include the candidate and in doing so has revolutionized the employee brand-relationship cycle. In this session, you will learn the necessary steps to improving the critical candidate/employer interactions that, if implemented will have an immediate and lasting impact your recruitment ROI.

Path 101 is a NYC-based startup company focused on what it calls “career discovery on the web.” The site helps everyone from college students to professionals in late-career transition figure out their next career steps using analysis of publicly available resumes and profiles, community powered advice, and personality assessments. Job candidates can figure out what "people like me" are doing with their careers and the site aims to be the first stop for career research – what it calls "pre-Monster.com". Founder Charlie O’Donnell will talk for about 10 minutes, and then take your toughest questions about this new technology. It’s a free-flowing q-and-a, not a normal session presentation. This session is not a paid-advertiser session; it was put together by our editorial team.

Standout Jobs is a Montreal-based startup company focused on helping companies brand and promote themselves more effectively to prospective candidates. Its product, Reception, allows companies to easily create a dynamic, engaging Career Site using widgets and social media tools to attract and build an audience of candidates, develop relationships and improve the quality of hires. Reception also provides a candidate tracking tool for managing people through the hiring process and helping small deals collaborate on applications. As well, companies can market their jobs more effectively through Reception's job posting distribution platform. Founder Benjamin Yoskovitz will talk for about 10 minutes, and then take your questions about his new startup and their product. It's a free-flowing q-and-a, not a normal session presentation. This session is not a paid-advertiser session; it was put together by our editorial team.

Hear a few brief words from Clint Heiden, who’s the CEO and cofounder of VisualCV. Then ask your questions. It's a free-flowing q-and-a, not a normal session presentation. This session is not a paid-advertiser session; it was put together by our editorial team. VisualCV is a new approach to creating an Internet-based resume, building and managing an online career portfolio, and securely sharing professional qualifications with employers, customers, partners, and colleagues.

JobScore operates an online employer-to-employer resume sharing network. The product empowers in-house recruiters to supercharge sourcing by building candidate pipeline and exchanging the resumes of their non-hires for qualified, interested candidates (with candidate’s permission, of course). Company CEO and Co-founder Dan Arkind will run a brief pre-launch “preview” of JobScore and answer questions from the audience.

How a Fortune 250 company took traditional manufacturing Six Sigma tools to identify flaws in the process and opportunities to build an entirely different infrastructure to address the talent shortages anticipated for 2010. You'll see how--step-by-step--the company designed a process to address recruiting needs in the most efficient and cost effective manner. You'll come away with a better understanding of whether six sigma is a tool for your own organization or whether they're other tools that might be a better fit. You'll learn from Trane's mistakes to make your job easier. You'll learn tools such as "process mapping" and "failure mode analysis" and more.

Employment branding is a concept that has been around for quite some time, yet one few organizations fully understand and use to their advantage. While many organizations now have formal employment branding programs or initiatives, in reality most practice little more than generic employment advertising. Employment branding is about much more than communicating generic points of differentiation that when polled most employees would say never materialize. Employment branding is about managing how the organization is perceived by targeted segments of the labor market using sources those segments trust. During this session attendees will learn about one of the most successful approaches Dr. John Sullivan has used to help organizations holistically manage their brand. While never shared in public before, the tools and approaches to be covered in this session have helped organizations like Starbucks and Wegmans Food Markets earn top spots of FORTUNE’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” annual ranking. Specific topics that will be covered include:

This is a chance to get real-world best practices regarding the selection and development of researchers to enable them to make greater contributions to their employers. This is a rapidly growing area of recruiting and one many corporations have underused in the past. It's getting more expensive to generate candidate names, so this session will not only help you gain a competitive advantage but will hopefully save you money as well.

• Why building this resource is strategically significant.
• Defining competencies that predispose people to succeed.
• Why mentoring and communities of practice are critical to success.
• The case for ongoing internal and external active development and why it's not optional.
• The potential to leverage the research skill as a portal to senior leadership positions; it's not as far fetched as one might believe!
• Creating an environment where your Researchers can excel and how to coach them to rapid development.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, a past ERE Recruiting Excellence award winner for employment branding, is renown for its success at recruiting top talent, particularly Gen "Y" or Millennials. The company’s core focus on exceeding customer expectations even comes through in how it recruits--defining best practices across the spectrum, from recruitment branding, service to candidates, and selecting top talent. Join Marie Artim, assistant VP of recruiting at Enterprise, for an insightful look into how the company is merging the “traditional” recruiting best practices with tools like objective assessments to pinpoint top talent. Not only does this increase the odds of the making the right hire the first time, but it helps Enterprise provide exceptional service to candidates--a true high tech/high touch model that continues to enhance its employer brand.

Learn why an exceptional candidate experience – from attraction through decision--is now more critical than ever.

Understand the importance of objective assessment to pinpoint top-quality candidates, and learn how objective assessments can be deployed successfully within the candidate experience--and even how it can enhance it.

Discuss how recruiters must use a mix of tools, including objective assessments, to manage the ever-increasing amount of candidate information available to recruiters.

Jigsaw.com features an online directory of more than 7 million business cards and says it is causing "disruptive change in the way corporate information is gathered." Its members, including many recruiters, buy and sell contact information on people -- who may not have given permission to be contacted.

Jigsaw can be valuable -- but is it ethical? Who's responsible for protecting people's privacy -- Jigsaw, or the recruiter who uses Jigsaw?

Jim Fowler, Jigsaw's CEO, as well as Susan Pierce, of the non-profit organization PrivacyActivism, will discuss these privacy puzzles in a friendly but illuminating debate. Dennis Smith, a recruiting leader known for his wirelessjobs.com blog, will moderate.

Staffing leaders need to know how their recruitment organization relates to their entire company’s external environment. The simple strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats analysis is a tool used to audit an organization and its environment. While typically used by marketers, this instrument can be easily applied to mapping your talent-acquisition landscape and figure out which areas of improvement to make your priorities. A SWOT analysis can reveal critical needs that must be addressed and pinpoint unknown capabilities to leverage.

• The basic ground rules for creating a practical analysis
• Identifying what strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are related to recruiting
• A recruiting SWOT analysis sample case study
• Suggestions on strategies that could be formulated as a result of the SWOT analysis

Brainstorm with your peers solutions to challenges regarding everything from employee referrals, hiring returnees from Iraq, managing the job-candidate experience, gaining influence within your company, and using the Internet to fill the hardest-to-fill jobs. This session, led by Conference Chair, Trudy Knoepke-Campbell, is designed to provide attendees with an open discussion format to converse about specific challenges and learn solutions from colleagues to their toughest recruiting issues.

VistaPrint is winning the e-commerce war for talent by turning all of its employees into recruiters. The program called "Everyone Is a Recruiter at VistaPrint" has allowed them to add hundreds of people to the organization all over the globe with a very low cost per hire. In the last 12 months it has increased its employee referral channel from 19% to well over 40% of their hires. Come learn from the vice president of global recruiting how to build a world class employee referral program.

United Rentals is the largest equipment rental company in the world, with an integrated network of nearly 700 rental locations in 48 states, 10 Canadian provinces, and Mexico. As a thriving, evolving organization, United Rentals realized that recruiting and staffing were core to its success and growth. However, in 2004 it realized that its recruiting organization was not poised to support the growth and needs of the company. Learn how United Rentals underwent an e-Recruitment transformation and created a recruitment organization and technology platform to achieve talent acquisition success. This includes:

• Organizational analysis & redesign
• Technology platform
• Career-web-site makeover
• Strategic use of recruitment process outsourcing
• Change management and execution

It's true that generation Y is shaking up the workforce, but they're doing it as one of the most conservative generations in history. Generation Y wants security and guidance, which look like revolutionary requests at the onset, but in fact, these young people are just trying to follow rules, get their work done well, and shine at the office because they've been raised to shine everywhere they go. Penelope Trunk will talk about how to address these issues in the face of baby boomers who think they themselves are the real workplace revolutionaries, and gen-xers who have turned out to be more revolutionary than anyone expected--and have no patience for the group-thinking of gen Y.

Here you’ll learn more about the companies and the people who were honored at Monday evening’s ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. Find out what they did to excel in such areas as employee referrals; college recruiting; employment branding; and recruiting technology.

Free session to network with other attendees

Everyone wants to find that elusive "passive candidate," and many are hiring experienced agency recruiters to conduct the hunt.

What are the issues involved with try to find these people, and more importantly, how do you turn them into corporate recruiters? Is it possible to blend the often-conflicting profiles of the aggressive, "pay-per-hire" mindset of the agency recruiter with the political savvy, cultural, and institutional fit, and compliance needs of a corporate recruiter inside HR?

This session will focus on how one Fortune 100 organization has tried, and sometimes succeeded, at constructing a team with both sets of abilities. Nationwide will show you the power that comes from a recruiting team functioning smoothly--and the spectacular implosion when it doesn’t.

You’ve probably read “The Diversity Recruiter’s Dilemma” by Raghav Singh and Chris Callahan, and read or heard about the controversial articles “Debunking Diversity” and “Redefining Diversity.” As a follow-up to those articles and the online discussion that followed, Singh and Callahan will describe their view that organizations spend vast amounts of money on diversity recruiting but diversity programs are rarely considered effective, and evidence that they provide much value is lacking. Hiring managers are unwilling to mention the shortcomings of diversity programs because they risk being labeled as ignorant or bigoted. Much can be done to make diversity programs more effective, from changing the definition of diversity to increasing integration. This presentation will discuss these issues and present prescriptions for making diversity recruiting more effective.

• The value of diversity: is there any empirical data proving that it has improved the performance of U.S. corporations?
• Why is the definition of diversity limited to race and gender? Expanding the definition.
• Making a business case.
• Integrating diversity with recruitment and business objectives.

In this session, O'Connor introduces you to Diigo, a site that allows you create your own database of candidates on line for free. Diigo was not created with the thought of recruiting in mind, but he explains how it can be a hidden gem for a few select recruiters and researchers in the U.S. who have been lucky enough to understand how to get the most of it. You'll learn how to do Boolean searches across multiple search engines in just seconds. You'll learn more about bookmarks and tags. You'll learn how to create your own database of candidates online--for free. And more.

This session will focus on developing and implementing an effective brand to attract passive job seekers in a highly competitive environment.

Toyota is recognized as a global leader in manufacturing processes. In this environment, continuous improvement is a cornerstone of the company's culture. Finding talent that embraces the company's values is a challenge with increased competition in the technical fields. Toyota has implemented cutting-edge strategies to attract top talent in the passive market. In this session, we will outline some of the strategies and tactics recently implemented to reach the passive job seeker.

Free session to network with other attendees

There’s no temptation quite like the variety of temptation one encounters when developing an employment brand. What with cut-throat competition for a shrinking talent pool, clever competitors stealing all your best workers, and your senior leaders looking at you with such hope, it can be tempting to stretch the truth a little when describing your company’s culture to prospective employers. But this can invalidate your brand entirely, confuse your current employee population, and turn that happy collection of benevolent executives into an angry mob bent on your annihilation!

Developing a compelling and truthful recruitment brand requires that companies engage in profound self-reflection to a degree that many have never experienced before. It can be painful, enlightening, shameful, and exhilarating--all at the same time. Managed well, it will provide your organization with information about what makes you idiosyncratically unique as an employer, and will allow you to target job-seekers who are a perfect match for your culture. This session will discuss the strategy behind good employment branding, provide insights about how your organization is likely to react to the experience, alert you to challenges you may encounter when managing a branding initiative, and show you the value created for those organizations who choose to "do it right the first time."

Led by Conference Chair, Trudy Knoepke-Campbell, this afternoon brainstorming session is an informal chance to connect and commiserate, to explore challenges to your toughest challenges and share your biggest successes with others in your industry.

You might know him as Shally's, Glenn, Jim's, Gretchen and Zoe's boss at Microsoft. You could have read about him and his many articles and on ERE relating to Passive Strategic Sourcing. Or you could have read his original definition of `Sourcing' on Wikipedia.

We are excited to offer a unique opportunity to sit down with Rob in a frank 1-hour fireside style chat around all things sourcing. No traditional slide decks, no canned presentations, but a frank Q&A session and the ability to ask the tough questions. Attendees can send in questions ahead of time, if you wish, using the ERE Expo blog (coming soon)

Don’t pick up the phone unless you’ve prepared a passive candidate recruiting strategy first.

For 20 years Lou Adler was one of the top executive recruiters in the country, placing managers and executives in mid-market companies around the country. And all of them were passive candidates. In this hands-on session Lou will reveal what you need to do to recruit passive candidates, get referrals of top passive candidates, and how to negotiate and close offers that get accepted. However, according to Lou, none of these great tactics will work without a passive candidate hiring strategy in place before you Google for resumes or pick up the phone. During this session Lou will not only discuss the tactics of passive-candidate recruiting, but also these five cornerstones of a passive candidate recruiting strategy:

• The economics of passive candidate recruiting
• The psychology of passive candidate decision-making
• Implementing a strategic compensation plan
• Job knowledge and the creation of an employee value proposition
• The critical role of the hiring manager and hiring team

If you’re now recruiting passive candidates, or are thinking about it, this is one session you won’t want to miss.