Even though ERE Expo ‘09 (Spring) ended more than a month ago, I thought of writing this piece connected to that event. Thanks to an invitation from Todd Raphael of ERE, I flew down to San Diego from India and enjoyed making a presentation on “10 Secrets-to-Success of Employee Referrals in India.” It was one of the breakout sessions and obviously many had other choices to attend. To those who I missed interacting with, I am now making an attempt to share my thoughts again through this medium.

Before I got into the main theme of my presentation I shared some thoughts about India. I assumed that most in the audience would not have experienced India and hence a small introduction helped them to appreciate the context. My PowerPoint presentation is embedded below, along with this write-up. It will be good to go through that with the following synopsis in mind:

The introductory part:

• India is one-third the size of the U.S., but has almost four times the population. The U.S. is more than five times richer (GDP) than India, which is still largely an agricultural economy. However the Indian population is considerably younger. This is a huge opportunity — and also a challenge — for the leadership.
• India is a land of contrasts. This is bewildering to outsiders and exasperating to Indians. Things are changing faster than ever before but not as fast as all of us want.
• One of the reasons for the contradictions is India’s complexity.
• The IT industry is currently the best-known face of India in many parts of the world. It has had impressive growth. Even with the general slowdown it expects to do relatively well. This means that it will continue to need skilled manpower.

The hiring environment in India and the importance of “references”:

• Meeting manpower requirements is a major hiring challenge, given the complexity and contradictions in the country. Recruiters have to cope with problems of access, unique expectations, and the multiple influence groups. The bulk of what follows is an attempt to cope with much of this.

About my employer, Aricent:

• Aricent is an international leader in the field of communications software. It believes in restricting its business to niche communication software development, testing, and maintenance rather than spreading thin into multiple application areas. It has operations in 19 countries worldwide. About 80% of development work happens in India.

• Some of our top co-creations with our esteemed “who’s who” list of customers in this line of business have been amazing.

• Aricent’s success in the field of communication software also lies in its capabilities of hiring the right people at the right time, and doing so using the most cost-effective channels and processes. One of the salient features of hiring at Aricent has been its employee referral program named “iRefer.”

iRefer: The Case Study

I presented Aricent’s iRefer program to illustrate the theme of my presentation, “10 Secrets-to-Success of Employee Referrals in India.” Let us now see what these 10 secrets are:

Inspiring Awards and Recognition:

• A successful participant of this program can easily earn 10% to 15% of his/her annual salary through referral bonuses, plus many other special awards in kind.
• Special monthly/quarterly/annual prizes for winning referrers have always been a big draw amongst the employees.

Adhering to Service Level Agreements:

• The members of the recruitment team are committed to certain SLAs with the referrers as part of the program. Data showed that the adherence to SLAs have been approximately 95%. This gives the confidence to the employees to participate in such a program.

Enhancing Participation:

• The team focuses on increasing participation in different ways. The participation has grown from 9% to 35% in the last seven to eight years.
• Transparency in process, timeliness at every stage of process, personal engagement with individuals and groups, and effective internal communication have been the essential factors in enhancing participation.

Branding and Communication:

• Unlike in many organizations, the internal branding and communication for an employee referral program are handled by the recruitment team itself. These activities are not outsourced to the corporate marketing or the communications teams. This helps to reduce the cycle time considerably since there is exclusive focus.
• The essence of branding and communication has been to feel the pulse of the employees and build themes around that to inspire them to participate in all the programs under “iRefer.” In fact, the brand “iRefer” too was a result of an all-employee global contest for proposing the most appropriate name for the referral program. In the below presentation, one can see various creative uses of different communication methods.

Special Hiring Programs:

• These are the “toppings” on the base programs. Special programs are announced over and above the regular plan to fulfill short-term requirements of either special skills or some specific levels of people within a specific period of time.
• Two such special programs have been showcased in the presentation. One of them helped us to hire a certain number of engineering college graduates in an off-season. We did an off-campus drive and had amazing gains in a short period of time at 25% lesser cost per hire. The second program gave us great results, too, when we set out to hire people with special and specific skills which were slightly different than our usual needs.

Catching “Boomerangs”:

• iRefer’s contribution to our multi-channel “ex-Factor” program was significant. 57% of “boomerangs” we hired through the “ex-Factor” program were through “iRefer.”

Analyzing Metrics and Success Measures:

• We are all aware that “data without analysis is paralysis.” Like the way an immense amount of data mining is done in the whole recruitment function, “iRefer” too captures a lot of data. We have tools and processes to do so. The success of the referral program is dependent on how swiftly we can respond to different situations and requirements and how we can consistently improve our processes and systems to respond so. Correct and timely analysis of data makes us learn and improve fast.
• One such case study showing how a change in communication methodology helped to increase the flow of resumes.

Feedback Mechanism:

• Taking feedback from referrers and potential referrers is as important as giving feedback. While the recruitment team is committed to give timely feedback on the referred candidates to the referrer within the defined SLAs, it is also important to take feedback from the referrers at regular intervals.
• The feedback from referrers is taken through an internal satisfaction survey and through a structured chain of escalation hierarchy. In addition to that, we have an “iRefer” help desk on our intranet.

Benchmarking Industry for Improvement:

• Learning from good competitors and sharing with them are always great ways to improve. This is true for all industries. The recruitment team of Aricent has been benchmarking its own “iRefer” program with many big names in the industry through formal and informal sources. Some of the data given against each competitor could be estimates and are based on the best possible information available.

Overcoming the Negatives:

• Employee referral programs also have to deal with certain negative perceptions universally. The main perceptions which we focused on are (a) possible lack of transparency in the system; (b) possible nepotism; and (c) the fear of “money” affecting relationships. The need to communicate upfront, educate employees correctly about the processes/norms, and ensure robust policies are the essential ingredients to overcome these possible negatives.

I had ended the session with two additional slides on how “iRefer” would operate in the current recessionary environment and posed some questions for the future.

I hope all, particularly the ones I left behind at San Diego, enjoy going through the presentation. If anyone wishes to connect with me, post a comment here.

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

(Click here to read part one.)

Category V: Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young

In a conservative industry and in a segment of recruiting that offers little innovation, Ernst & Young has led the way for several years in a row. It has been ranked #1 on the BusinessWeek “Best Places to Launch a Career” list and has an astonishing 90% conversion rate for interns.

Some best practices include:

• Executive involvement. It convinced over 1,500 client-serving partners to take time away from their busy schedules to service selected schools, just as it services clients. Even Board members visit a select number of assigned schools each year. Each business unit has specific goals and is held accountable for successful college recruiting.
• A pipeline approach. It provides leadership development programs for freshmen and sophomore students, both to increase the supply talent later on and enable early identification of potential candidates.
• Resources. Ernst & Young maintained a staff of 75 dedicated college recruiters, and holds an annual 1,800 person, 4-day leadership conference to develop its interns.
• Competition. Sponsors “Your World, Your Vision,” a student competition where students design an initiative that benefits their local community. Winning schools were awarded funding to make their initiative a reality.
• Technology. Uses nearly every technology approach to recruiting and employer branding, including the use of a dedicated Facebook page to service students and to build its brand.

Notable college recruiting features at other companies:

• Qualcomm. Funds labs and faculty research projects on targeted campuses. Also has an on-campus ambassador program.
• Genentech. Uses a Customer Relationship Management system to capture information on targeted candidates early in their campus career in order to enable relationship-building throughout their college lifecycle.
• Microsoft. Uses a five-year quality-of-hire study to make the business case and to prove the positive ROI of college recruiting. This research justified maintaining budget allocation levels, regardless of the state of the economy.
• Aricent. Focuses efforts on specific student streams (versus on entire campuses). In addition, hiring managers and the employment brand manager conduct postmortems in order to troubleshoot failures.
• MillerCoors. Uses real-world management projects sponsored by individual managers as the primary focus for its summer internship programs (i.e., project-based consulting).

Category VI: The Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo

As we all know, Yahoo has been undergoing turmoil in recent years, so it’s particularly amazing that despite the turmoil, coupled with the economic downturn, its HR team put together an amazing Web 2.0 rebuilding effort. The result of this transformation? A career site that went from being ranked as one of the worst sites (on the prestigious CareerXroads ranking) to one of the best sites, all in a short period. The redesign tripled the amount of content consumed by its visitors, which led to increased conversion rates.

The website has some notable features, including:

• Technology everywhere. Not all career websites at technology firms use the wide range of technologies available from the Yahoo site. It offers numerous interesting videos, including “a day in Yahoo life” and “the spirit of Yahoo.” It also provides access to what your employees are saying on Twitter, a company blog, and employee profiles. It also enables visitors to other websites like Twitter and Facebook to post Yahoo’s jobs that might be of interest to their network.
• Awards. Visiting this site makes the viewer immediately aware that Yahoo is an award-winning company. The site highlights Yahoo’s outstanding record of appearing on Fortune’s Best Place to Work List.
• Integrating products. Many career websites seem to operate independently of the firm they represent. Yahoo has made a concerted effort to integrate its wide range of products into the career site and vice versa. This includes providing numerous pictures highlighting the Yahoo experience on its photo and video sharing website, Flickr, and the opportunity to join “Yahoo! Groups” related to recruiting. Other integrated features include maps, my Yahoo personalization, and Del.icio.us. (social bookmarking).
• A combined approach. In addition to its use of the Web, Yahoo also uses other effective recruiting media, including radio and billboards, to push traffic to the new site.

Notable features on other corporate careers websites:

• Microsoft. An award-winner in several other categories, it developed several websites that enable the company to microbrand to smaller, more defined candidate populations. Sites include view, the genius lounge, and youatmicrosoft.com.
• DaVita. Provides a narrated video tour of a DaVita facility.
• IBM. Has extensive ecofriendly messaging, extremely interactive use of multimedia, and very simple navigation. The site is one of the few that can realistically be classified as “global.” It contains “day in the life” videos, Digg, live chat, business-unit specific information, and flash video.

In the remaining two categories, the winners are next-practice innovators; someday, everyone will seek to emulate these practices.

Category VII: Most Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft

Each year, technology becomes a more impactful part of recruiting. No one seems to realize that fact more than the talent management team at Microsoft. Its website, and the numerous innovative things they’re doing with technology, can only be classified as amazing (especially the talent community work pioneered by Marvin Smith).

To the uninitiated, the power of these tools might take some time to appreciate, but I assure you, they are on the leading edge, even ahead of famous competitors like Google:

• Micro-segmentation of talent communities. This represents the future of recruiting, and no one else even comes close to what Microsoft is currently doing, no less what it is planning. Micro-segmentation is a powerful concept borrowed from advertising and marketing. Micro-segmentation means that instead of treating every potential customer or candidate exactly the same, you tailor messaging and the candidate experience to meet the unique needs of a more defined market segment. Firms currently make elementary attempts to segment in college recruiting, but this new approach breaks candidates into smaller segments known as “talent communities.” Microsoft defines talent communities as “targeted, qualified, active & passive prospects that Microsoft… staffing can develop into a self-sustaining source of engaged talent that will be harvested for years to come.” The information needed to make a job decision for an electrical engineer would be different from a software engineer; both would differ significantly from the needs and interests of a sales professional. Delivering messaging unique to the population you are going after and tailoring the experience they get is microbranding. While some companies may segment by function or region, Microsoft’s new approach enables segmentation on steroids, producing hundreds of segments that could be as narrowly defined as a job family or as wide as a certain diversity classification in a certain demographic region. The talent communities are enabled by software that includes CRM, content management, talent profiling, and job-matching components. The concept and its execution were so compelling that the initial pilot program for a Microsoft hardware engineering unit was paid for by hiring managers.
• Knowledge sharing. The Microsoft talent community approach is broader than just filling jobs. It includes finding ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they don’t take your job. It moves away from the more traditional transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting with networking and knowledge sharing components. The design is based on the Chinese principle of Guanxi, which is a connectivity or relationship-building concept. Over time, it is assumed that the talent communities will become working professionals “virtual 3rd place” to hang out. Over time, they will become self-maintaining. Despite this multi-purpose, employment opportunities are always only one click away thanks to widgets running on both their LinkedIn and Facebook pages.
• Real messages. One of the most common errors in recruiting is “perfect messaging.” Most websites and employer branding messages are so “flawless” and generic that they are simply dismissed by candidates as propaganda. Microsoft is one of the leaders in providing “real messages,” or messages that agree that everything isn’t perfect and counter why that is a bad thing. Such messaging is considered significantly more credible.
• Shareability. Most of the website content blocks are shareable, meaning that visitors can share content they find of value with a broader audience through the use of popular social networking tools like Facebook and Digg.
• Compelling website. The award-winning View concept www.viewmyworld.com is not one website, but rather a network of sites that enable unique messaging to micro-candidate segments. The average visit on the website is 26 minutes, an astonishing amount of time. Its messages and videos are some of the most exciting and compelling online. They make it easy to “feel the passion” and the excitement of those working at Microsoft. Diverse candidates can also explore their likely experience via www.YouAtMicrosoft.com.
• Many options. All sites leverage the latest in social networking, RSS feeds, Multi-media (video) and employee blogs (Microsoft was one of the first innovators in recruiting blogs). Even Microsoft’s talent communities will include both virtual and live events.
• Connected. The sites contain links to non-Microsoft-owned pages that talk about Microsoft. (Microsoft censors this content, so it is perceived as being much more credible.)
• Quality-of-hire metrics. Microsoft is beginning to use quality-of-hire metrics to assess the effectiveness of its recruiting programs.

Notable features at other companies using technology:

• Dun & Bradstreet. Uses workflow modeling software to identify delays in recruiting cycle/process.
• Firstsource Solutions. Uses short message service (SMS) to support candidates throughout the hiring process.
• Fluor. Uses live webcasts featuring executives to attract talent. They also offer in another feature that is becoming more common, live chat sessions with recruiters.
• Foster’s Group. Made its process paperless. Candidates get offer electronically via a secured website. Candidates are informed of their status following each stage of the process via SMS text messaging.

Category VIII. Recruiting Department of the Year — DaVita

This final category covers overall excellence by the recruiting department. After judging its application, I can only classify it as a “WOW.” Not only were DaVita’s actions amazing, when you consider that it is a leading kidney dialysis provider and part of the ultraconservative healthcare industry, you can’t help but be blown away. The DaVita story is one that truly demonstrates what focusing on talent can do for an organization.

Just nine years ago, DaVita was on the verge of bankruptcy. At that time, its CEO focused on refining the talent in the organization, not just at the leadership level but throughout the enterprise. Despite tough times and hardship, it took aggressive actions that characterize a true “war for talent,” and turned the organization into a wildly successful enterprise. The work of Tony Blake and his team can only be classified as spectacular.

Highlights of DaVita’s accomplishments:

• Business case. The biggest difference between well-supported and underfunded recruiting functions is the ability to quantify in dollars the business impact of talent management. For example, DaVita demonstrated that by cutting vacancy time down from 63 to 45 days, it could save the organization over $5 million in contract labor and overtime costs. It also reduced costs by cutting external recruiting fees by 41%, saving another $3 million. It’s hard not to be a hero when you can demonstrate that you saved the firm over $8 million. Last year alone it filled over 3,200 nursing positions.
• Boldness. Few recruiters can be accurately classified as competitive and bold, but the DaVita team is an exception. The team labels its competitor-recruiting approach as a “targeted strike.” Last year, it executed a targeted strike on a competitor that resulted in 113 experienced clinical hires, $2.8M savings in training costs, and took 7% of its competitor’s workforce. Whether you agree with the approach or not, you have to give them credit for aggressiveness, and accept that its patients will always have access to the best care because little will stand in the way of acquiring top talent.
• Position prioritization. Another difference between great and good recruiting functions is having a formal process for identifying which jobs should get a disproportionate amount of recruiting resources. It realizes that not all jobs have an equal business impact, so it doesn’t recruit the same way with the same amount and quality of recruiting resources.
• Recruiter development. Of the 40 teammates in clinical recruiting roles, eight of them were promoted last year — demonstrating that it is constantly increasing bench strength and growing its our own recruiting talent. In addition, it keeps its requisition loads low. Field recruiters only carry about 25 openings at a time, on average, down from 60 in 2006.
• Vacancy rate. Its excellent recruiting strategy and approach has resulted in an amazingly low 3.8% vacancy rate among the nursing staff.
• Secret shoppers. It is one of only two firms that I have found with the courage to use secret shoppers to go through its recruiting process in order to find errors. The team secret shops its own process twice a year, evaluating the process at competitors at the same time.
• Satisfaction. Few have the courage to measure it, but DaVita measures hiring manager and new-hire satisfaction every quarter. Departmental satisfaction ratings by managers improved from the bottom five to the Top 25 (among 70 departments) within two years.
• Employer referrals. It operates an excellent employee referral program, which demonstrated that referrals have a 200% lower turnover rate than other new hires. It also donates a portion of the referral bonus to a local charity, which increases the number of motivators available to encourage employees to make referrals.
• Awards. DaVita won a Taleo innovation award for its automated survey process.
• Military recruiting. A dedicated military recruiter hired 27 diverse, retired leaders from the armed forces to assume director and manager positions within DaVita.
• Recruiter assessment. The formal process for assessing recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as dismal. In direct contrast, DaVita takes an aggressive approach in assessing and improving its recruiters. It uses a monthly scorecard that actually force-ranks recruiters, a one-in-a-million approach.
• A pipeline approach. It uses a continuous recruiting pipeline approach called “relentless recruiting.” It’s much superior to the “reactive” approach used by most firms.
• Boomerangs. DaVita targets former employees in order to get them to return later in their careers.

Notable features at other companies:

• GE Healthcare. Uses Six Sigma methodology to “model” its recruiting processes and identify breaking points; leveraged technology to automate sourcing (i.e., stored boolean strings); and conducts weekly process audits.
• Microsoft. In addition to the other things highlighted already, it is developing a sophisticated workforce-planning model.
• Seagate Technology. The company significantly shortened onboarding from three days to 2.5 hours. In addition, the team now measures quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted in this article have clearly pushed the envelope in recruiting and talent management. Despite tough economic times, they have focused on the “big 6″ elements of strategic recruiting (technology-centered, a dollar-focused business case, an emphasis on referrals, prioritized recruiting, a focus on employer branding, and a continuous pipeline approach).

If you’re still focusing on transactions and cutting costs, you are way behind the curve. It is highly unlikely you will be adequately prepared to “explode out of the box” when the current economic downturn subsides.

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

The applications this year were so powerful that choosing a winner in several categories was a challenge. This article will primarily highlight the practices of those organizations that won, but I simply can’t resist sharing some of the practices of other companies.

Category I: Most Innovative Employee Referral Program — Accenture

While employee referral programs have always been a top source for high-quality hires, during economic downturns, they can be adapted to become the most effective low-cost/high-quality source. Accenture’s latest employee referral program is unique because it began life as a pilot program in The Netherlands. Based on the program’s results, it now serves as a model for future rollouts around the globe. The new program radically simplifies the program’s terms and conditions and dedicates resources to marketing the program internally on a regular basis.

Since inception, just a year ago, the program has grown the percentage of hires attributed to employee referral from 14% to 32%. Employee awareness of the referral program has jumped from 20% to 99%, an astounding feat (do a quick survey in your organization — you might be surprised how few people know the details of your program and how to make a referral). The quality of referrals also improved significantly, reducing the number of referrals required to generate a hire from seven to five.

Consider some of their program’s highlights:

• Charity component. The critical component in any referral program is getting your employees to make high-quality referrals, not for the direct monetary benefit, but for the opportunity to provide their teammates with the very best coworkers. By allowing the employee to allocate a portion of the referral bonus to charity (i.e., KidsRights and local elementary schools), you have added another altruistic reason for making successful referrals.
• Focused referrals. Its referral application form makes it difficult for employees to make referrals of people they don’t really know. The process requires the individual to explain how they know the individual, that the individual’s skills are exceptional, and that the individual will “fit” within the organization. These types of features can help to limit the number of “casual” referrals that can clog the system.
• Exciting rewards. Employees receive a small reward for a successful referral and €500 is donated to charity. They also offer an opportunity for employees who make successful referrals to participate in a drawing for exciting world trips. In addition, employees also receive €100 whenever one of their referred candidates is invited in for an interview. Obviously, any candidate invited for an interview is of sufficient quality to merit at least some reward and recognition.
• Employee scorecard. Employees have their own individual online website that allows them to track the progress of their referred candidates throughout the hiring process (this increases employee involvement and transparency). It also covers the number of referrals and their accumulated bonuses both for themselves and for charity. The scorecard also lists the employee’s personal referral success rate. By allowing the employee to see how well they’re doing in their referrals, relative to others, you can motivate lower-performing employees to increase their referral effectiveness.
• Referrals are flagged. Employee referrals are flagged by the application process so that they can be prioritized and fast-tracked during the hiring process. Under their enhanced program, every referral is acted upon.
• Everyone is eligible. It’s fairly common for referral programs to exclude hiring managers and HR professionals, but this can be a mistake because among all employees, these are some of the most well-connected. Accenture’s program now covers all positions and its expanded eligibility now allows everyone, including managers, HR professionals, and recruiters to participate. Other firms that have adopted this practice simply encourage individuals to donate 100% of their bonus to charity when they see a potential conflict of interest.
• Referral cards. Referral cards can have a major impact on referral program success. Most referral cards are “paper” and are handed out individually. Accenture has taken the practice one step further, allowing employees to send electronic referral cards to people in their network. The e-cards contain a code that allows them to get credit if the individual submits an application.
• Courage. Even though it’s an intangible factor, it’s critical to referral program success. It’s easy for executives to discourage talk about hiring and winning awards during tough economic times, but the managers at Accenture had the courage to continue the development of this important program and to also follow through on the awards process. I salute them for their courage.

Other outstanding referral features from other companies:

• Acumen Solutions. Rather than the traditional passive approach, targeted referral percentage goals are set for each department in order to increase healthy internal competition. They provide a toolkit to educate their employees how to more effectively network. They celebrate referral successes publicly at all major company events.
• Microsoft. Microsoft raises the bar on employee referral related branding with their “Spreadthelove” website. This site allows Microsoft employees to “write up” their own individual story about their career with Microsoft (their story might include pictures, testimonials and video). Employees can then share the web link and “spread the love” with targeted friends, family and potential referrals. Microsoft has increased its process effectiveness by ensuring that every referral is contacted first by an employment specialist, which then introduces them to a recruiter that will manage their experience moving forward.
• Tata Consultancy. Adapted a marketing/CRM model for its referral program (i.e., the company offers a 24×7 referral help desk with a toll-free number). Another component allows newly hired candidates who have not yet joined the firm to refer their former colleagues (in order to capitalize on their “top of mind” knowledge of their networks in their previous organization). They also instituted a “Rapid Hire” process where resumes were collected at referral desks that provide “on the spot” screening followed by preliminary evaluation and instant feedback. They also offer early bird & spot prizes as well as contests between business units to foster a competitive mindset around referrals. The metrics demonstrated (as many other firms have) that referral turnover rates during the first year are significantly lower than traditional experienced hires (2.9% for referral hires versus 8%).
• CACI International. It sends targeted messages to employees for open “hot jobs” and has scaled its incentives and process referrals on a daily basis.

Category II: Best employer brand — Ernst & Young

Coupled with an effective employee referral program, a strong employer branding program can be the second component providing firms with a distinct competitive advantage in recruiting. An employer branding program is an image-building program that emphasizes the “viral” spreading of stories and information about the elements that make your organization a “well-managed” firm.

Some of the key components of the Ernst & Young effort include:

• A targeted branding effort. The most effective organizations try to segment the brand to meet the targeted population. Because Ernst & Young hires a large number of college grads, it has developed an effective employer branding segment that has resulted in them being listed by BusinessWeek as the number one “best place to launch a career” beating out Google and other well-known college recruiting powerhouses.
• Brand pillars. They have four key brand pillars including Learning and development, Workplace flexibility, Inclusive community, and Opportunity. Brand messaging is embedded in every candidate facing communication.
• Web 2.0 channels. Even though they operate in a conservative industry, Ernst & Young has chosen to use the latest technology to engage their primarily Gen Y audience. They use modern electronic tools like video, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They offer “live” question-and-answer exchanges via Facebook where real questions are submitted and then answered online and shared with all. In the experienced hire category, Ernst & Young has been ranked on the Fortune 100 Best Place To Work List for 10 years in a row.

Other notable features of other companies:

• Microsoft. Adopted a micro-segmenting or micro-targeting approach to employee brand messaging. They used extensive market research to identify the appropriate brand messaging by segment and then the optimal brand messaging channels. Both View and “youatMicrosoft.com” enables a targeted storytelling approach to branding that can be targeted at specific population segments, large and small.
• Johnsonville Sausage. Surveyed employees to identify weaknesses in brand messaging, then created task forces to address the gap between the targeted employee experience and the actual employee experience so employees could become true brand ambassadors.

Category III: Best Retention Program/Practices — American Cancer Society

Retention is always a hot issue, but will become “red hot” when an economic turnaround begins and employees begin to think of “getting even” as a result of their treatment during budget cutbacks and layoffs. Most companies don’t even have a director of retention, nor do they offer formal companywide retention efforts, so invariably, there is a lot that can be learned from best practice organizations.

Some of the key features of the American Cancer Society’s retention program that you should consider adopting include:

• Significant results. The most important feature of any retention program is the results that it produces. As a not-for-profit organization, the American Cancer Society is limited in its ability to offer significant pay and benefits to retain workers. However, even under those constraints, this program produced breathtaking results, namely a 2% turnover rate among program participants compared to the organization’s 37% overall turnover rate.
• Business case. Even though they are not-for-profit, they use metrics to make the “business case,” demonstrating the dramatic impact that employee turnover has on organizational objectives. In particular, they showed a direct connection between high staff turnover and the ability to recruit volunteers in local communities. In addition, they put a dollar cost on employee turnover ($11 million per year) so that managers could better see the impact of losing talent.
• Program elements. The program is called the talent opportunity program. It is a three year, three phase development plan for developing early career professionals. It offers a 5-point support system (online community, a local buddy, a local mentor, a local manager, and a career coach). The program has an electronic component that meets virtually via web 2.0 tools including Facebook and Blogger (used to facilitate a weekly book club).

Category IV: Best Diversity Program — Microsoft

Microsoft has adopted a long-term perspective for diversity recruiting. Rather than just meeting recruiting targets and offering scholarships, they have attempted to actually increase the supply of qualified diverse candidates with technical skills.

Some of the best practices include:

• A pipeline approach. The recruiting begins early (high school) and contains elements that continually identify and build relationships with potential recruits. They sponsor DigiGirlz, a technology camp for young women in high school and they hosted an annual minority student day to get students excited about careers at Microsoft.
• Targeted website. They launched an extremely powerful and targeted website, www.youatmicrosoft.com, a micro-branded website offering diverse candidates an inside look at Microsoft from a several different diversity perspectives. This site spotlights the authentic, personal stories of diverse individuals at Microsoft who have forged successful careers in technology.
• Dedicated diversity recruiting team. Their team has full life-cycle recruiting responsibilities with a special emphasis on executive recruitment.
• Identified challenges. They convened a panel of engineering and diversity experts to help identify the problems and challenges involved in building a multicultural workforce.

The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR.

It should be obvious from both the attendance and the tone of this year’s Expo that the “war for talent” is still going strong.

The rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing. The one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more “business-like.”

Stay tuned for part two of this article, which will cover the four remaining awards:

Category V: the best college recruiting program – Ernst & Young
Category VI: the best corporate “careers” website – Yahoo!
Category VII: the best strategic use of technology – Microsoft
Category VIII: the recruiting department of the year — DaVita

Congrats to this year’s winners:

• Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young
• Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo
• Best Diversity Program – Microsoft
• Best Employee Referral Program – Accenture
• Best Employer Brand – Ernst & Young
• Best Retention Program/Practices – American Cancer Society
• Best Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft
• Recruiting Department/Function of the Year – DaVita

Of course, none of this could have been accomplished without the incredibly hard work of our esteemed judging panel who graciously volunteered hours of their time to go through the entries.

If you want to learn more about what they did, tune in this afternoon to the live stream from ERE Expo at 11:15 a.m. PDT to watch the special panel session where many of the winners and finalists (including Valerie Kennerson, pictured, from the American Cancer Society) plan on sharing information about their winning strategies and tactics.

In our communities, we’re constantly coming up with and discussing great ideas about initiating change, but all of that is worthless unless we can execute and implement those ideas. In this new year, change is a real buzzword — but rightly so! Because we have to change and flex every minute of the day, planning for difficult times and good times alike require excellent change management skills. And as someone who has learned some hard lessons over the course of my 25-year career in not knowing how to manage change, I speak from experience.

For instance, several years back, when I was head of staffing for a large, multibillion dollar company, the whole company participated in a global reengineering initiative. In HR, we decided to take advantage of this effort to implement some changes of our own. We decided to combine all of the staffing functions in the separate business units into a centralized, shared-services model. As the leader of the staffing area, I figured that since the whole company was going through change, there was no need to have any additional communication with our clients about our staffing reorganization — after all, it could be considered as simply another element of what we were all going through. Thus it wasn’t until the head of HR of a business unit and my boss were sitting in my office, complaining about my team’s dwindling performance in the wake of this change, that I realized just how important it is to communicate extensively about, and have a comprehensive plan for, implementing change.

It’s not that I didn’t communicate at all about what was happening; it’s that I didn’t “get it” in terms of what was necessary with respect to engaging others and making them “partners” with me in this change. I was subjecting my plan to what we like to call “Death By PowerPoint” — I was going around with my little PowerPoint presentation tucked under my arm, informing everyone as to what was going to happen versus truly engaging and communicating with them.

Though the change was ultimately implemented, the cost was high — people we wanted to keep within our recruiting organization left and some of our customers were alienated.

Thus when I was asked to facilitate a panel at the ERE Expo Spring 2009 this coming April, I could not think of a more important subject in today’s climate of almost constant change. So the question I introduce in this article (and which we will cover more thoroughly in our panel entitled “Managing Change: A Dialogue With Recruiting Leaders on Leading Through Change” in San Diego at the upcoming ERE Expo Spring 2009) is “What are the key elements involved in successfully managing change?”

The first step in this process is to realize that whenever change is involved, there’s always something called “S.A.L.Y.” in the room. SALY stands for “Same As Last Year.” SALY is that urge in all of us (in some stronger than others) to resist change. It’s the urge to say “Let’s stick with what we did last year,” to cling to the familiar, the comfortable. So before anything happens, it’s always important to realize SALY’s in the room.

However, knowing this can help frame how to begin to address implementing change. The other important thing to realize is how people deal with change. My experience is that, though everyone deals with change differently, generally people meet change with the following reaction I call S.A.R.A.H.: Shock, Anger, Resistance, Acceptance, and Help.

So knowing this, what are some guidelines for leading people through change? This topic is so important I decided to reach out to other recruiting leaders for their thoughts. I have asked some really well-spoken, highly experienced people to join me on our upcoming ERE Expo Spring 2009 panel and I have asked them some of their thoughts on change management.

“Not having an effective change management plan is usually the death of projects,” says Rodney Moses, vice president, Global Talent Acquisition, Coca-Cola Enterprises. (CCE is the world’s largest bottler and distributor of Coca-Cola products.) According to Moses, CCE is a constantly changing environment in which they are rolling out new processes on a regular basis. In fact, change is so frequent, they have developed a Global Change Management Program, including a guidebook. But as far as plans go, even that isn’t enough. “For each change”, says Moses, “we have to have a change plan and internal and external change communications plans. Without those plans, not only is it confusing for everyone but it ends up costing the company money.”

So in order to manage change, we have to have at least one, but perhaps several, change management plans. This was the beginning of the mistakes I made in my scenario above. Since I figured our change would be part of the larger change plan, I did not feel the need to create a separate one for us in staffing.

But because change in an area as vital as staffing affects so many, it really can’t be successfully implemented without a plan. An effective change management plan will focus on many levels, the broad as well as the specific, and will include an emphasis on everything from the organization, to your team, to individuals. In fact, the act of putting together the plan will be enormously helpful because it will not only require identifying who the stakeholders are and who will be affected, but it will also require strategizing about how to approach and engage them in the implementation. Importantly, having a plan will enable you to plan for mistakes, which is a vital and valuable part of any new venture. How will a plan give you the opportunity to make mistakes? Because the cornerstone, foundation, and lifeblood of any change-management plan is perhaps the most vital element in the whole change-management scenario: Communication.

“When we were planning to start up a corporate recruiting function, we engaged people from the very beginning”, says Vicki Perry, director, Strategic Staffing, for Avery Dennison Corporation, the world’s leading manufacturer of pressure-sensitive labeling and other retail, office, and packaging products. “By using focus groups, we not only got people involved who were going to be affected and shared our vision and proposed process, but then we listened and prompted them to help us figure out how to really make this work.”

She adds: “Since this was a new concept for everyone, it was critical to engage stakeholders and then communicate, monitor, and adjust our process continuously. It’s a constant process of educating hiring managers, HR partners, and key business leaders and getting feedback. When communicating we try to mix it up and entertain, so people remain interested. During our focus group meetings we used interactive voting devices to keep the audience engaged in answering questions and giving feedback. In our rollout of the new process we made a video showing the recruiting process in action with a touch of humor to keep it fresh. In our monthly written communication we would hide a question related to the recruiting marketplace and give a prize to the first few people who answered it; we would also use a ‘Myth Of The Month’ whereby we debunk the latest ‘myths’ that have surfaced with respect to the new processes. Through the use of hiring manager and candidate surveys, we are constantly monitoring to determine what is or isn’t working properly, and then adjusting accordingly.”

But sometimes, even that level of communication isn’t enough. “You know that old rule of when you pack for a trip, you lay out all your clothes, and then take away half? I think of change management communication as the opposite of that,” says Aziz Chowdhury, VP, Talent Management, for Baker-Hughes Corporation, the global leader in oilfield engineering services to the energy industry. “No matter how much I plan to communicate with respect to change management, I always take that concept and double it.”

“Here’s why this is important”, Chowdhury continued. “Whatever the change is you’re implementing, it’s not about it being a good or the right idea, it’s about bringing everyone along with you. One of the things people in staffing management often don’t understand is that communications is not just about making sure you and your ideas are heard, it’s about making sure everyone is with you. It’s a bit of a paradox: in order to do what you want to do, you need to focus less on that and more on the communication needs of those affected. Because in the end, that will help you get to where you want to go. You need to focus on what your clients and stakeholders need to hear and know so that they’ll arrive at where you want them to be.”

Aziz’s perspective comes from years of talent acquisition experience in both international and domestic environments, but in particular from his current experience of repositioning the role of recruiters at Baker Hughes from those with a more hands-off, removed “sourcers-only” approach to more hands-on, vested, and partnership-oriented recruiters, with a greater ownership stake in the entire hiring process.

Nonetheless, this underscores yet another mistake I made in my scenario above: I was so focused on communicating my change and insuring I was heard, I didn’t focus on the communication needs of my clients and stakeholders.

However, when it comes to managing change, there is nothing more important than communication. And as with a change management plan, constant communication gives you the room to make mistakes.

In summary, here are some guidelines for leading people through change:

1. Prepare for the change before it occurs
2. Provide a clear description of the change and a picture of success
3. Find and remove obstacles before the change occurs
4. Allow adequate time for people to accept the change
5. Involve affected people in planning the change
6. Provide motivation for people to embrace the change
7. Find and use resources and people that support the change
8. Allow the change to be shaped by ongoing feedback
9. Provide clear implementation objectives for all people involved in the change
10. Continually monitor the change and adjust resource levels
11. Reinforce the new behaviors through formal and informal methods
12. View leading others through change as an ongoing process

So please join us for our panel discussion at ERE Expo Spring 2009 where I will lead Rodney, Vicki, and Aziz in further discussion and detail into this topic and provide more specifics on the above. Between now and the Expo, I know a lot of change management challenges will confront you. I welcome your thoughts and questions about managing change (just post in the comments section of this article), and I will look forward to incorporating them in future articles and in our panel discussion at the Expo.

Remember, though there are a thousand great ideas out there, only when you’ve developed a plan, and successfully executed on that plan (and SARAH has met SALY!) will you have developed perhaps the most important skill there is as a Recruiting and Staffing/HR manager and improved your value in your organization. Happy New Year and welcome to the year of change!

Taking to heart the message CEO Sal Iannuzzi has been touting that users are as important as recruiters, the company is set to roll out a new look and new features on January 10th. Monster was previewing some of what’s coming at its well-trafficked booth, and what we saw suggested the kind of career and succession planning tools found in higher-end talent management systems.

“It’s a seeker-centric appoach,” Monster’s VP of Client Adoption, Eric Winegardner, told us during a tour of the features.  There were no live demos because Monster’s development teams are still making tweaks.

But the slides showed tools that should appeal to passive candidates, as well as the traditional active seeker.

In three steps, a worker could learn what rungs others in the occupation have taken up as they worked their way up the ladder. Using the benchmarking tool, a candidate can learn how they stack up against others. Using the Career Snapshot, a worker could research related occupations by title, skills, and the like.

Just like a quality talent management system, Monster’s tools will help career-minded workers do a gap analysis and see what they need to do to ready themselves. The advantage Monster has over any single company is that it taps a database of millions of resumes to create aggregate pictures of career movement for nearly any occupation and industry that exists.

Where it doesn’t have the data, it reaches out to get it, pulling in things like average salary for a searched occupation in the specific geography. Every job, Winegardner tells us, will have salary data — if not from the employer, then salary ranges Monster will provide.

We asked Winegardner about the integration of the job-matching technology it bought when Monster acquired Trovix. Winegardner laughed. Almost everyone who he talked to asked the same question. “It’s coming,” he said. Some parts are there now, others will begin to appear in December, but the complete integration won’t happen for the Jan. 10th launch.

There are also some changes coming on the recruiter side. One of the more useful is the matching of candidates to job postings based on keyword. It won’t replace resume searching, but it will prove useful to smaller companies since they’ll be able to see resumes and then decide if they want to buy access to the candidate.

Winegardner said that 90 percent of the user experience — seeker, especially, but recruiter as well — will be changed. And Monster will get a new look. No previews there, since the design is still being developed. But he did give us a hint: What users get might very well be a personalized homepage.

Dr. John Sullivan is scheduled for broadcast at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, talking about recruiting during the downturn. Krista Bradford will discuss passive candidates at 3:15 p.m. Eastern. Also look for a panel called “How well do you know  your company?” at 1:30 p.m. Eastern.

Also on the agenda from the “posh” Westin but not broadcast: Coke’s talent-acquisition director; AIRS; a session on building pipelines of candidates, by the Recruiting Roundtable; Tony Blake, who has written a killer article for the Journal; Mr. Ted’s demo of its new ATS; and the vendor smackdown — where “job-matching” sites will strut their stuff.

As for yesterday (which, was in a sense, a cloudy day): Jobfox’s Rob McGovern released a white paper PDF warning that hiring won’t stop even in this slower economy); Kevin Wheeler said it will be “economic suicide” for companies to insist on keeping jobs in the U.S. that could be outsourced; attendees talked about the challenge of attracting out-of-towners who can’t sell their homes; Penelope Trunk and Jason Warner talked blogs; and speakers touted new tools like the Insider Referral Network and Ping.fm. On Wednesday, the focus was less about the slowdown, and more about passionate recruiters leading the way in their companies.

“We want to let everyone know about us,” explains JuJu’s Euan Hayward. Around since 2006 (with the JuJu brand) and with respectable visitor numbers, Hayward says it was time for the company to reach out to recruiters. “This is our first booth experience.”

A job search engine with roots in the late 90’s, JuJu is nearly identical in concept to the better known Indeed and SimplyHired, both of whom are also at the Expo here in Hollywood Beach, Florida. Like them, it “scrapes” job postings from commercial and corporate job boards making a jobseeker’s search a one-stop effort.

Does the world need another vertical — or meta — job search site? Hayward thinks so. “There are some additional opportunities,” he says. “Innovation is not dead in this market.”

There was other evidence of innovation on the show floor.

Take CareerAthletes for instance. Much to my disappointment, it’s not a job board for athletes at least not in the way I was hoping (”Quarterback wanted for NFL team”). It is, however, a means for companies to hire college athletes for more typical jobs, such as in sales, marketing, engineering, and the like. It is the product of a merger between Career Athletes and Athletes4hire.com.

Working through college athletic departments, CareerAthletes provides a branded networking-oriented site for the athletes and former athletes. The focus is on community, and a site might include alums of a particular sport mentoring current athletes and sports news and similar types of content. There’s also a job board, which is supplemented by a resume-like database of the college’s athletes, which, over time, can grow to be quite extensive.

What sets CareerAthletes apart is the company’s campus-based orientation for the athletes. “We’ve done over 800 on-campus presentations,” company CEO Chris Smith says. “We are hands-on with the athletic department.” These presentations, made to the athletes, include on-the-spot sign-ups for the site, ensuring their participation and availability to recruiters.

At the other end of the showroom, AllianceQ was making a first appearance. A consortium of several large employers, AllianceQ enables these firms to share resumes of employees they don’t hire. Besides cutting the cost of sourcing candidates, the resume-sharing opportunity can salve the sting of rejection. Before sharing a resume, the candidate has to agree. And not every candidate is shared. Participating companies get to decide whether they want to share a particular resume — a precaution against losing a hot prospect for whom there may not be a position just now.

There are also at least three companies exhibiting here that focus on helping employers market their jobs through search engine optimization, a term which means tweaking a Web page in such way as to improve its placement on the results a search engine returns.

We’ve seen Jobs2Web (profile; site) before. It helps employers manage their websites and job listings to increase visibility and traffic. Also showing at the Expo are SEO4Jobs and OptiJob. Both create microsites for job listings, with OptiJob focusing exclusively on the individual job posts and SEO4Jobs also providing some additional careersite optimization.

I asked OptiJob’s VP of Business Development Chad Hensler what he has been hearing from recruiters. “It’s a mix,” he says. Most recruiters understand the value of a high Google ranking, but many are uncertain how those search results (typically called organic search) differ from search engine marketing (which, in this context, means paying for a position on the search results page).

“We do a lot of explaining,” Hensler adds. “This is a critical part of recruiting.” Not to mention having some fun. OptiJob is giving away toy rockets that fire a good 20 feet straight up.

Jonathan Duarte of SEO4Jobs was even more of an evangelist. He says search engine optimization and search engine marketing are things recruiters absolutely need to know about to be competitive. “We’re getting a lot of (recruiters) stopping to ask us all sorts of questions.”

And then he pitched a workshop on the topic at the next ERE Expo, which comes up the end of March 2009.

She talked about the world economic conditions and her own challenge selling a home after four years on the market for less than the mortgage balance. She illustrated the negatives and positives (yes, there were and are some) of the creative financing that is fueling the financial collapse, but which also enabled a young couple to buy her parents’ home with 104 percent financing.

“Imagine,” Hopkins told the audience of about 400 as she referred to President Bush’s call for a world financial summit, “we’re talking about rebuilding the financial structure of the world.”

For recruiters, Hopkins said, the economic conditions mean:

• Morale needs to be boosted, especially among workers whose options and 401(k) plans have taken a big hit;
• Compensation plans need to be rethought;
• Plan for the possibility of more mergers and acquisitions;
• Difficulty in recruiting workers who have stable jobs;
• Growing interest in unions, fueled in part by the security of pension plans.

Now is the time for HR to be more proactive, Hopkins says, to “take a seat at the table, closer to the power.”

Turning to the audience, Hopkins began an interactive exchange, asking about the challenges recruiters were facing.

One recruiter said he finds it hard to attract experienced manufacturing workers because they can’t sell their homes to move. Turning to the “Wisdom of the Crowd,” a theme conference chair Jason Warner of Google sounded earlier, Hopkins coaxed solutions from the group, including one where a company seeking to relocate workers from a community looks for companies bringing workers into the community to work out a house swap.

Warner, in his introductory comments, encouraged recruiters to look for solutions by tapping into the collective wisdom of the group. Putting the economy in perspective, Warner of Google took the stage this morning flashing images of Time magazine covers from years past. Those dealing with economic conditions hailed from recessions past with headlines remarkably like those of the past several weeks.

And ERE’s Expo is being broadcast this year on www.ere.net. Today we’ll plan on streaming on www.ere.net the following (among other videos):

• Jason Warner, from Google

• Jan Hopkins, former CNN anchor

• Kevin Wheeler (tour of the recruiting world)

• Gerry and Mark’s panel on cutting-edge technology

• Michael Marlatt on the future of recruiting

• Mike Beckman from Freddie Mac

and others.

That means most candidates are lost as soon as they stumble on one of these sites, Crispin told a pre-conference workshop at ERE Expo on Tuesday.

As you contemplate your own system, check out a few other insights Crispin shared with attendees:

On virtual career fairs:
“I see some pieces to this, but I don’t see it adding value to the candidate experience. If the company doesn’t provide any additional data or value, in the end, it doesn’t add value to your candidate experience,” he says. 

He points out that Phillips has the “most interesting approach” to this, with a series of people willing to talk to you.

On checking your careers site:
“I challenge any company to check their own jobs at least once a month,” he says. Many sites, he says, lose credibility with broken links, outdated job postings, etc.

On internal movement:
More positions are filled with internal employees than any other source, he says. 

“It is kind of fascinating to me,” he admits.

The most important thing is a map on the corporate careers site to show how people move within organizations. Look at source of hire, be transparent, and let people choose to come to you.

“You say you develop employees, but not a single company in the United States publishes internal employee movement. Most won’t even reveal it to their own employees,” says Crispin.

“The only company I know that does it in a transparent way inside their company is Pepsi. Every month they publish how many people were promoted from division to division, level to level, etc. Those figures are then broken down by race and gender,” he says.

On managing job expectations:
“You have to be able to say why you come and why you stay,” he says.

He points to RIM’s site, as well as KPMG’s site.

At KPMG, for example, prospective applicants get deep data in terms of a profile of an individual and why they are there.

“Different value propositions can let you search on profiles of partners. If that person isn’t like me, it’s very simple, and I can navigate it quickly, and that adds a lot of value to me,” he says.

Dozens of recruiters are attending these special workshops and pre-conference events. In all, some 800 registrants are expected over the Expo’s three days. It formally kicks off Wednesday morning when conference chair Jason Warner of Google offers his welcoming remarks.

Today’s pre-conference sessions are focused on recruiter skills. Judging from the attendance and some of the comments, the world economic condition has not had much of an impact on the recruiters.

Hands down the biggest attendance was at the sourcing workshop run by Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher. There, some 50 recruiters from the U.S., the Netherlands, and elsewhere, learned the secrets of Internet sourcing and such remarkable bits of information as only .18 percent of the Internet is accessed via search engines. (The rest is in password protected databases or otherwise similarly hidden.)

Here’s a tip from the session: Want to find resumes that keywords don’t turn up? Use the command intitle:. Too easy for you? Then the afternoon’s Master Level Sourcing workshop is for you.

Across the glass walled atrium of the Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa, Ron Katz was teaching techniques to connect and vet the candidates you recruit. President of Penguin Human Resource Consulting, LLC, Katz was talking about the differences in interviewing Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials. To develop rapport with Boomers, “Show respect.” With Gen Xers, “Answer their questions — cut to the chase.” And with Millennials, “Sell the opportunity.”

Elsewhere, Dr. Robert Rodriguez, assistant dean of Kaplan University School of Business, was teaching about the Latino culture and methods of reaching the Latino talent pool. He also showed examples of best practices from a variety of companies, including Target, Aetna, and General Mills.

Three other workshops during the day are focusing on Strategic Talent Planning, The ROI of Talent Management, and a CareerXroads session taught by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler on how to turn prospects into candidates by building relationships.

Tonight Monster sponsors the welcoming reception and silent auction.

If you can’t be here in Hollywood Beach, you can still see parts of the conference live online at ERE.net.

The ERE team works hard to introduce new aspects to ERE Expo every time we run one. Last show, we experimented with Twitter, running a live feed on screens in the front of the room so attendees could share their comments with the entire audience. (You can still follow the official ERE Expo twitter feed here).

On Wednesday morning, and throughout the ERE Expo, visitors to ERE.net will be able to share in our latest ERE Expo experiment. We’ll be broadcasting large portions of the conference for free, live on the home page of the site! You’ll see a live video feed from many of the sessions, and also be able to share your thoughts about the presentations with other recruiters via chat.

Nothing is the same as being at the event, but this is our way of saying thanks to you for being visitors to the site. Enjoy, and let me know what you think once we start broadcasting — I will be hanging out in the chat as often as I can during the show!