Quick notes from onrec 2007

I'm just back to nyc from the onrec conference in San Fransisco but leave soon for Atlanta where I'll be leading a track at John Sumser's Recruiting Roadshow. Details to follow.

Here are some quick notes from onrec.

General Notes

• Few corporate recruiters in attendance. More vendors.
• I'm going to have my blog translated into Japaneses to supply what seems to be considerable demand for info on search engine marketing for recruitment coming from Japan.
• It was great to see yahoo get the respect it deserves for its position in the new online recruitment landscape. Indeed used a yahoo search screen to demonstrate the general engines and cheesman shouted me and yahoo out during his google slide. Neither is a big deal but each shows the growing awareness of yahoo's position in this space and marks a welcome change.
• Deloitte has a good whitepaper out there about connecting generations in the workplace.
• Affinity Circles is cool. former-hotjober, Chuck Taylor is involved
• Jeff Hunter is probably one of the most respected hr professionals in the space

Gerry Crispin

• Crispin's presentation was good
• Points out some great and poor corporate career sites and was spot on
• Employers must reach, engage and respect top talent
• Was quick to warn employers of the pending threat of international companies stealing our top talent. (That's something that I never thought of before.) It's happening today and will continue to happen as the global economy becomes less dominated by the US and emerging markets mature and require more experienced talent like that which we have here in the US.
• I believe him as I was asked to advise a group launching a job board on a particularly large continent that I can't mention right now.
• I need to get my hands on Crispin's whitepaper and need to take his advice and spend a day with Yahoo! recruiters.

Peter Weddle

• I always knew his content would be solid but it was great to see him deliver it. True pro.
• Your corp career site should nurture a solid relationship with the best talent. It should facilitate a dialogue and represent the company with community. It should provide personalization, content and dialogue appropriate for rare skill holders.
• Eli Lilly's corporate career site has departmental landing pages on its corp career site mapping seekers to relative jobs in the fashion of a career path. (very cool)
• Microsoft also has this. (again..cool)
• Rare performers want to talk. They want an engaging type of experience.
• Points to honeywell blog
• Why not get the best and brightest at your org to blog? At Honeywell, employees compete for 3 months. The winners of the competition get to write on the blog and get a bonus. (this is the coolest thing I've heard of to date.)

Kevin Wheeler

• Kevin Wheeler was spot on. I've heard him criticized as a know it all but everything that I heard come out of his mouth made sense to me but what do I know.
• He talked of the net gen, gen y and millennials and how each works differently, requiring different career paths than baby boomers
• Some are making their own jobs (that's exactly what happened with me) and that companies that fail to adapt for this will lose this talent.
• Those who do adapt will be rewarded with innovation and as much loyalty as can be expected from this group.
• He mentioned wikinomics. (i read it. awesome book.)
• Recruiting gen y is your ultimate challenge
• Pre-employment experiences, and test rides for employers and candidates should be and will be used
• Points to phplive as a means for communicating with talent on your career site by chat
• Blogs are important and valuable adjuncts to recruiting because they are authenticity.
• Points to Heather Hamilton's blog. It's professional and loyal to Microsoft.
• Talks of podcasts for recruitment
• Makes fun of career fairs
• Talks of itzbig and jobfox as the next wave of job boards and speaks to their ability to match jobs to seekers in an eHarmoney like fashion. (I have to start making a bigger deal of Yahoo! HotJobs'  job matching technologies and show kevin what we are up to in that regard)
• Candidate relationships with marketing priciples and crm tools. (ie. salesforce.com)
• Severe local shortages of talent
• Shift to virtual recruiting tools, email, web sites, online assessment (I hope he doesn't mean second life..i don't think he does..i think he means like password protected websites that demonstrate the job to pre-qualified candidates)
• Global reach, sourcing and brand critical for big companies
• Think of talent as supply chain (this makes sense to me...look at the limitation that a the media planner shortage has put on media companies in nyc)
• Focus on gen y recruitment and retention (let them work in small core groups)

Blogger panel

• Jason Goldberg suggests that markets outside the US are where we were 5 years ago. (I think he's right and that's likely why you see monster and careerbuilder rushing to exploit that space. Why innovate if you can simply turn-key in new, rich and less informed markets? They'll make some great money but should have trouble trumping the top local job boards in each respective market. I think Indeed is best positioned globally.)
• There is a lot of opportunity for Web 3.0 (applications and widgets) in the recruiting space. It will be interesting to watch. I think jobster and jobs2web could do well here considering the work that jobster has done to date with its facebook app and the jobs2web applications.
• Joel Cheesman (recruitment blogger) suggests giving little snippits of information in blogs. Short, quick and informative is a good bet. He's growing cheezhead into a little media platform. For instace, check out xtra and the wiki.

Comments

[Amybeth]

Matt, thank you for sharing this information! I am passing along the corporate blogging thing that Peter Weddle talking about b/c I think that is cool as well. Great summary!

[matt martone]

kevin wheeler mentioned you in his presentation.

[Alex den Haan]

Hi Matt,

Just picked this one out of my feedreader. Could not attend Onrec, so thanks for the summary. Have to make one remark though, about the markets outside the US. Please do not forget about developments in Europe. Just because players overhere are below the rader, does not mean the are trailing far behind.

May I suggest http://www.online-recruiting.net/ for further reading on Online Recruitement from European view? And taking about search engine for jobs these guys http://www.careerjet.co.uk/ (not from the UK, but this is an english front)are at it since since 2000 and have about 7,000,000 international jobs (and fierce competition in their homemarket, France)

Once again, great article, just a little addition :-)

[matt]

Hi Alex,
Thanks for commenting and thanks for the suggested reading. I'll be sure to check it out.

http://www.recruitment-views.com is another European recruiting blog...uk i think.

South America is also interesting to me. At onrec I met the guys who run http://www.multitrabajos.com. They claim that it is the leading job board in Ecuador

Very nice guys and it sounds like that market is on fire as well.

As Gerry Crispin mentioned in his presentation, company’s outside the us are looking to steal our talent. If that’s the case then the guys at multitrabajos.com maybe a great partner to someone like me as I can sell us targeted recruitment media on yahoo to those Ecuadorian companies. Maybe a stretch but we’ll see.

It’s interesting to see all this growth outside the us. Def. something to watch. Thanks again for the resources.

[Pauline]

This is great!! You should check this out: http://ckrinteractive.com