Tag Archive | "#shrm-2011"

This week’s announcement of our BeKnown professional networking app for Facebook is the latest example of our drive to provide career minded people and our employer customers with solutions that help them grow and succeed. We believe the value proposition is clear: BeKnown brings the worldwide leader in connecting people to job opportunities to the world’s largest and most active social network. But it’s one thing for me to extol the value of our offering. The experts are now weighing in on the power of BeKnown:

If you’re in an HR or recruiting position, you likely interact with a lot of job seekers and employees, and you may believe that you already know everything you need to know about their mindsets and attitudes. After all, you’re in the people business.

Reinvent is defined in the following way: “to recast something familiar into a different form.” This is what is happening in the recruitment industry right now, and at the heart of this reinvention is social media. Social media is revolutionary, and it’s quickly transforming how we approach business and recruitment. The concept is simple but effective: giving people the power and tools to influence others.

The ‘Why does my company need a career site?’ question is thankfully all but gone but there still remains much confusion and angst around building a great careers website. Most organizations now recognize that their career site is a powerful recruiting tool and yet many sites are not designed with the Candidate experience in mind and therefore fail to engage and capture the right talent. It’s an issue that many organizations struggle with for a number of reasons.

If you have been following the Twitter stream, you already know that the excitement for SHRM National 2011 has been building for weeks. For me, it’s been building since the close of SHRM 2010 in San Diego. This is the Super Bowl of HR Conferences, and against the backdrop of glitz and glamour that is the Vegas Strip, it has the potential to be an epic event.

Carrie Corbin knows a thing or two about the value of networking. After all, as Associate Director of Talent Acquisition for AT&T, her team’s responsible for the recruiting and talent selection strategy of a venerable global employer where connections are both the brand and the bottom line.

But for Corbin, and AT&T, keeping connected means keeping up with the changing evolution of technology and consumer demand, something that’s evident in AT&T’s talent acquisition strategies.

“May you live in interesting times.”

That may ring familiar, and while the source is frequently (and incorrectly) attributed to an ancient Chinese proverb, the source, like many sayings, is not as important as the message contained within. Many people would be tempted to type a word other than “interesting” when describing the current global employment climate.

For those who have never attended SHRM (or even if you have), the sheer enormity of the event can be hard to grasp. It’s non-stop, wall-to-wall HR, which, for those of us who live and breathe this kind of thing, is pretty much heaven. Thousands of practitioners and professionals, influencers and insiders crammed together inside the world’s largest convention space to hear keynotes by A-Listers (like Teen Wolf), fill swag bags and network at dozens of events running the gamut from Tweet Ups to Toby Keith. It’s HR with its hair down, and that doesn’t happen often. But when it does, it’s kind of cool.

I’ve been a speaker and attendee at more conferences than I can count. One thing I’ve learned is that in order to get the most value out of your time and money is to set yourself up for success with a little pre-conference planning. Here are some of the ways you can boost your conference experience as well as improve your networking.