ERE.net

It’s hard to believe, but ERE has been running a community for recruiters for more than 10 years. In that time online communities have radically changed, morphing from from listservs to forums to today’s never-ending cascade of social networks.

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! keep reading…

The ERE team has been working on the next evolution of our community for months, and today we’re ready to show it off!

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!

We ran a webinar today with Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion about what changes we should expect from recruiting technology in the next year.

I learned a lot on the call, but one of the polls that we took really made me stop and think. Here it is:

keep reading…