Accenture’s Launch, Starbucks’ Recruiter Recruiting, and Other ERE Expo Gossip

Word on the street from San Diego is that Accenture is about to launch a new employee referral program using LinkedIn. It’ll make it easier for employees of Accenture — a perennial competitor for the best-referral-program ERE award — to see who among their contacts, based on people’s profiles, might fit into various Accenture job openings.

The company has tested out the tool and is very bullish on it. Accenture’s Sjoerd Gehring will be speaking at ERE’s big annual fall conference in Hollywood, Florida (September 7-9) on using LinkedIn as well as other tools — such as smart phones — in employee referrals.

Some of the event this week is being streamed live. Here’s some more scuttlebutt from the conference and from throughout the recruiting world today:

Wanted Technologies, a company I talked about last fall, has launched what it calls a “hiring scale” for companies to measure the supply and demand of job candidates for a given job. In other words, how tough it’s going to be to fill a job. CEO Bruce Murray emailed me to say that this is a “new and distinct feature on top of what I showed you last fall … the Hiring Scale measures how hard it will be to source a position based on the supply of candidates and the demand from competing employers. It shows ‘red, yellow, and green’ based on the difficulty of filing the position.”

Starbucks has purchased an ad associated with the #ereexpo hashtag on Twitter, in order for the company to recruit recruiters. What this means is that if someone’s checking out the stream of posts about the ERE Expo, they’ll see the Starbucks ad. Smart.
Speaking of recruiting recruiters … one thing I’ve understood for a long time but not heard as explicitly as I did here last night: recruiting leaders from past ERE award-winning companies are telling me that one big result of their being finalists and winners has been multiple job offers. Expect more of that.
New guidance on the ADA is out. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group for business, has apparently given its OK to the rules. Meanwhile, on a similar topic, a new site has launched related the hiring, mentoring, and careers of people with disabilities.
William Tincup believes a deal will soon be announced involving a major Learning Management System vendor acquiring an applicant tracking system vendor. Tincup says that Naomi Bloom is in agreement. Speaking of Tincup, Steve Boese captured a photo of his memorable booth.
Kenexa’s business, its reps tell me, is doing “amazing.” The company also launched a new service for companies that want to hire a lot of people quickly. Beyond.com says it’s hot too, quadrupling it sales force this year from 7 to 28 people. A mid-size applicant tracking system vendor tells me, with not much of a smile, that business is “slow.”
I’m hearing that Cognizant is hiring in very large numbers, like tens of thousands in the coming year, the majority — but by no means all — in India.
Keith Watts, here from the big employment law firm Ogletree Deakins, tells me that attendees’ most common areas of inquiry relate to social media and discrimination; what liability you may face, for example, when you know from Facebook what an applicant looks like.
PepsiCo’s launching a new mobile app for jobs-seekers. Right now, it includes Twittter feeds, blog feeds, and job listings, with the latter targeted to the location of the smartphone (or iPad) user. Expect more features as the year goes on.
PepsiCo Careers Mobile Possibilities

All told, so far at least, the atmosphere is unusually upbeat, something I was just talking to LinkUp’s Adam Luckeroth and others about. There’s little time being spent on “Are things better? Are they worse? Are we there yet?” and mainly just talk of how to hire and onboard and retain employees better, quicker, and smarter.