The first day of SHRM seems to always be a wash. You are exhausted from traveling and you just get thrown into the middle of something that is already going. Being as the conference was in New Orleans, it was litterally impossible to get here before 2:00pm without a red eye flight.
This means I missed Jack Welch which was a little disappointing. If we get a video of it online, I’ll be sure to link to it. Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBrief did a good cap on it here. and Michael Long (The Red Recruiter) has a good post too.
I got the opportunity to meet up with the folks from SonicRecruit/Cytiva. Their ATS just received a big time upgrade on the social recruiting side of things. Everything from native integration with LinkedIn (so you can check to see if you are connected with someone at the company you are applying to) to sharing jobs via Twitter, Facebook, etc… In talking with Ian Alexander, VP of Marketing and PR, more companies have been asking for this functionality. I hope to see more and more ATS providers do this.
We had a press briefing at 5pm and as John Hollon with Workforce.com confirmed, SHRM president Lon O’Neil was not in attendance. SHRM’s PR person explained there were scheduling conflicts because this was his first annual conference as president. There are scheduling conflicts all of the time when you’re the president of an organization like SHRM though so it seems like it is more a matter of prioritization. It will be pretty difficult to get much of a sense of where the organization is going without hearing from him.
The press briefing was decent except this whole embargo thing. I have to hold onto a story for 48 hours that may not even be that interesting depending on how the rest of the conference goes.
Looking forward to my packed day tomorrow and meeting in person for the first time with many of you. If you are around SHRM and want to hook up, leave a comment or e-mail me! Doesn’t have to be formal or anything.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Looking forward to chatting some more Lance
Embargos are pretty standard when it come to PR releases.