One of our goals with the new community is to reach out to the entire recruiting profession to participate in our conversation, not just those who visit the website each day. (Don’t worry — we’ll always love you best!) To that end, we’ve opened up the conversations on ERE.net in a couple of new ways.

Email

We received a lot of pushback from the community about our decision to do away with the email group discussion digests with the full text of each post in the group.  We originally did this because we were trying to cut down on the volume of emails that you receive from ERE.net, but doing away with it altogether was a mistake.

The team here has created a new email digest that I think will meet both goals. It has a personalized email with the full text of all the groups and discussions that you are following, and at the same time you’ll have fewer emails cluttering your in-box. In fact, it looks a lot like the digest that we had before we made the big change! Of course, if you prefer the new emails with just the synopsis, you can still get that.

To sign up for the new email digest, you need to click on the “manage” link at the top right of the ERE.net website (make sure you are logged in).

On your manage account page, just scroll down to the “Newsletter Subscription” section of the page, and check the box next to “ERE Discussion Digest.” After you check that box, you can choose to receive the “personalized” version (only messages from discussions you’re following or from groups you’re a member of) or the “all messages” version. Be sure to click the “change subscription settings” button when you are done!

Twitter

There are more recruiters every day who are active on both ERE.net and Twitter (and so am I), so I’m excited that we can now link those accounts and automatically let our Twitter followers know when we post to the ERE.net community!

To set this up, you must have a Twitter account! If you do, go to the ERE Community, click “Settings”, and then “Broadcast”.

Now check the box to enable the Twitter connection, save your changes, and finally click on the authorize link.

Here’s an example of how it looks – my status update on ERE about this post!

Give the new options a try, and let me know in the comments (or on Twitter!) what you think!

Our community has evolved as well, expanding to include over 50,000 recruiting professionals, and growing more every day. Today, I’m proud to announce the next step in that evolution of the ERE community — community.ere.net.

When you check out the new community site, you’ll recognize many of the same discussion groups and people that you have followed for years, but you’ll also see lots of new features.

Some of the features that I have been using the most are:

• The new activity feed. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring how to make this more visible on our home page, because it does a great job of showing just how much activity is happening in real time.
• Voting. Finding ways to separate the wheat from the chaff has always been one of the most challenging aspects of running a professional community like ERE.net, and the new voting system will let the community collectively decide which posts bubble to the top.
• Blogs. A select few have had blogs for a long time on ERE.net, but now every ERE member will be able to express themselves in their own personal space.  We will be featuring the best of the blog posts more prominently on the site.
• New discussion emails. We’re trying to cut down on the number of emails that you get from us, so we’ve consolidated our community emails into one community newsletter that will be easier to navigate and read.

Jim — who did a great job developing the site with Hunter — put together a video to introduce you to the features of the social network. Check it out, and then give the new features a try!

Jim, Hunter, & the rest of the ERE team will be spending the next couple of weeks responding to your feedback and making changes, so don’t be shy. Tell us what you think and how we can make this a better tool for you to share your ideas and connect with other recruiters!