As we have said many times before, without the generosity and support of our sponsors we wouldn’t be able to continue what we do week after week for our community.

So we want to thank ResumeBucket for their support. ResumeBucket is a site where jobseekers can post their resumes and employers can search the database for free. If you think you may be interested in what they do, check them out and you can thank them as well for their support of the ERE community.

That’s thanks to the generosity of our sponsor, iCIMS, who is graciously underwriting ERE.net this week. We’ve wrapped ERE.net in their brand — woven their ads and colors into our navigation, look and feel.

Why are we doing this?

It’s old news by now, but run-of-the-mill banner ads are getting less effective by the day. The team at ERE Media is always looking for good ideas that help our sponsors get the attention they deserve for their support, because without them we wouldn’t be able to bring you our recruiting goodness each day.  At the same time, we don’t want to interfere with or compromise your time on ERE.net with ads that interrupt your experience. The site wrap achieves both goals.

Most important of all, the high quality and independence that you expect from ERE.net will not change.

If you have feedback for us — kudos, complaints, whatever is on your mind — put them in the comments. And if you are interested in wrapping ERE.net in your brand next, email our ad sales team at sales(at)ere.net.

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!

There’s a preview up at http://beta.community.ere.net/, and we’re looking for your feedback on how to make it better before we go live on the main ERE.net.

So what’s new? Here are some of the highlights:

• Easier to use. You will find it easier to post discussion messages, and you’ll be able to add links, pictures and HTML without jumping through hoops.
• Threaded Discussions. To make it easier to follow conversations in the longer threads, all the discussions are now threaded.
• Community voting. We’re testing a new voting system for determining which discussion messages are most valuable to readers.  The best content will be voted up to the top of threads by the community.
• Activity Feed. There is now a central activity feed for all activity on the ERE Network, so it will be easier to see where the action is!
  
• Blogs. Every person in the ERE Network now has a Blog! Blog posts will have more prominence within the community, and we are working on integrating the best posts into the main feed on our home page to highlight the best content created by ERE members.
• ERE Forum. We’re bringing back the ERE Forum — a single, central place to post messages where everyone can see them without joining the smaller, specialized, groups.
• Following. Everyone has their favorite contributors on the network, and we’ve made it easier for you to follow just the ERE Members that you want, so you can see their content anywhere on the Network! This will replace the notion of “friends”, which as several members pointed out does not have a lot of practical use.

Why are you still reading this? Go kick the tires over at the preview site, and don’t be afraid to post messages to test it, because messages posted on the preview site will not appear on the main ERE.net.

Let us know in the feedback thread what you would change about it before we go live – we’re listening!