Conference Chair John Vlastelica kicks off ERE Expo Spring and sets the stage for two days of learning and collaboration.

Companies need to change their approach to talent management. Russell will provide an overview and examples on how companies that are initially focused on employees and managers can break new boundaries by saying “How can we deliver value to the community?” You will understand how talent teams can offer value to stakeholders, from local to global. The results will leave you refreshed and have you thinking of ways to break new ground.

The economic downturn: it was both personal and global, and we’re all glad it is almost over.

News headlines tell it all. It has been survival of the fittest with only the most resilient companies and talent leaders weathering the storm. Only a select few survivors, however, have used the time in the downturn to plan for the upturn.

Please join moderator and talent acquisition guru Jeremy Eskenazi of Riviera Advisors and a panel of survivors as they discuss the current state of talent acquisition and share survival tactics and key insights from the talent trenches. Panel members include: Paul Martin, vice president of global staffing & diversity at Sony Pictures Entertainment; Ginny Eagle, director, talent acquisition for T-Mobile USA; and Corporate VP of Talent & Employee Engagement at Harrah’s Entertainment Brad Warga.

Hear about the various business challenges each of them faced this past year and the many lessons they learned. Discover how each of them is getting their talent acquisition “house in order” for the upturn and beyond. The group will share stories from the trenches and provide real-world strategies and tactics on keeping a talent acquisition team motivated and engaged, and what steps you should be taking to get your house in order for the new decade.

Here you’ll learn more about the companies and the people who were named winners and finalists of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. Find out what they did to excel in such areas as employee referrals; college recruiting; employment branding; and recruiting technology. Ask them your questions about how they overcame obstacles in a tough year.

Enjoy a buffet lunch in the exhibit hall – mingle with other attendees, chat with speakers, and check out the latest and greatest from the recruiting industry’s leading vendors.

Creating recruiting reports is not analysis. Tom Becker will discuss how COMSYS, a 37-year-old IT staffing leader, is transforming its organization by understanding its process, metrics, and data to position it for growth. You will learn how to better use recruiting performance data to develop dashboards and improve your key metrics.

Shrinking budgets. Recruiter headcount pressure. Unrelenting demand by students to maintain your presence on campus. Now more than ever, companies need to tap into line professionals to carry their brand and execute on campus. But with so many other demands on their time, how can you ensure that they maintain a consistent presence both broadly and at the individual candidate level? In this session, participants will learn about the Ernst & Young “Client Service Model” approach to campus, including tips on motivation, engagement, measurement, and resource deployment. In addition, the following topics will be addressed, complete with tactical tips and strategies that can be applied to any campus recruiting function:

• Branding on campus to a new generation
  
• Redefining your image
  
• Getting into the classroom: presentations and tactics
  
• Assessing your effectiveness on campus
  
• What’s next for college recruiting?

Join Dan Black, who has more than 12 years of experience managing college recruiting, for this lively and interactive session. If you would like to suggest additional topics to include in the session, please email Dan directly at daniel.black@ey.com and he would be happy to include them.

In this session, Sodexo will share approaches as to how to build engaged, interactive talent communities that are scalable to a company’s specific needs and resources. It will look at ways of:

• Building a strategy that will meet your company’s current and future needs for talent, and expand your employment brand
  
• Overcoming organizational reticence to adopting social media approaches
  
• Creating concrete goals and actions to drive results
  
• Helping your recruiters embrace innovation in their approaches to sourcing and connecting with top talent
  
• Identifying ways to measure outcomes and examine new emerging approaches that will drive enhancements to your strategy

Sodexo has been in the forefront of using technology and social media to build its competitive advantage in the market for talent. Its innovative use of new media recently earned it the prestigious Excellence in New Communications Award from the Society for New Communications Research for its application of social media to talent acquisition.

You’ve seen it, and you’ve lived it. The company values on your mission statement sound great, but aren’t helpful when it comes to evaluating talent in the recruiting process, evaluating performance, or thinking about succession within your company.

Does it have to be so lame? Kris Dunn leads this session designed to evaluate the connection between company values and your recruiting practice, and how getting values right upfront drives success, which in turn drives a performance culture and (gasp) internal succession. You want the connection? Then you’ll have to be an advocate for making your values meaner and making people uncomfortable. Session requirement: Come ready to think and apply values in a judgmental fashion.

Many companies do not view HR and recruiting as a true business partner. An internal recruiting department can be seen as a group that the business units have to work with to get a requisition posted and ultimately filled because that’s the process. The perception can be that HR does not really know the business side of the house. The reality is that companies need to identify, contact, and engage the talent that will drive the business forward. The “post and pray” method will work for many positions and requisitions, but not the ones that will be seen as the difference makers.

This session will show you ways to become a trusted and a valuable resource for the decision-makers in your company. The discussion will center around how to prove that internal recruitment can find the best candidates available and set up discussions with “the big boys” at the company. We will prove that an internal executive search function can identify, sell, and close the best candidates possible to drive the business forward. We’ll talk about:

• Finding the right project to attach yourself to in order to get started
• Who you need to partner with
• How a successful initial search or project propels you forward
• Proving that you are more effective than a search agency
• Showing that you are a revenue generator in your company

This conversation will present techniques and methods to make you more successful in landing that hard-to-find candidate. This is not a presentation about how to find people. It’s about what to do with that list of people once you have it. We will talk about establishing a value proposition to candidates and creating a closing strategy to get them to “yes.”

Harnessing the true power of social recruiting is about nurturing active talent communities to enhance the relationship between candidates and your employment brand.

When you succeed, you contribute directly to the success of the business strategy and differentiate the employment brand.

Is your recruiting strategy designed to meet yesterday’s needs, or tomorrow’s? The social web is a pathway to building sustainable talent communities and another tipping point in the evolution of recruiting. It also increases your organization’s competitive positioning. By integrating social recruiting into your talent attraction strategy you can transform your entire approach to recruiting and deliver increased value to the organization and strengthen your personal equity.

We’ll use our collective minds and develop a topline view of the interdependent elements critical to developing a leading-edge recruiting strategy positioned for a new decade.

From there we’ll dive deeper to develop a community-centric strategy that supports a sustainable and adaptive talent model.

You’ll learn about:

—Leveraging interdependencies to align talent and business strategies through an adaptive model.

—Identifying what it takes to attract talent to your community, engage them, and give them a reason to keep returning.

—Processes and supporting technologies that can help you convert a community member to a hire.

—Creating greater value for the organization and enhancing your personal equity through enhanced talent strategies.

Even if you’re not the size of AT&T, you’ll likely relate to this presentation. AT&T is a very conservative company, so it had to dip its toes into social media slowly — and various mergers made things even more complicated. Find out how the talent attraction team at AT&T (just over a year old) has revamped its employment brand and decreased spending by using strategic media planning to include careful execution of social media. See how it has focused recruiters’ time on filling jobs, not administration. Hear what the company has learned using media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as using mobile recruiting technology.

Wind down the day with drinks and appetizers in the exhibit hall — a great opportunity to see what fellow attendees learned that day. Don’t miss out on this chance to engage your colleagues in discussions about the challenges facing our industry.

Conference Chair John Vlastelica recaps yesterday’s sessions and highlights today’s discussions.

Starbucks is one of the most prolific users of social media. You’ll find out how the employer brand and sourcing teams partner to take advantage of the largest consumer fan base on Facebook and all their Twitter followers. Learn how the employment brand and consumer brands work together to attract and engage passive candidates. Find out the results of Starbucks sourcers and recruiters using widgets and a powerful CRM tool and finally, find out how the company decides where to spend recruitment advertising dollars, and how it measures results.

The shift is on. With the economic downturn abating, the corporate recruiter is now forced to compete on a different playing field. As part of this rapid evolution, you must be a nimble hunter who can find the best talent before the marauding herd of external search firms. If you didn’t use the slowdown to build-up talent pools of top prospects, you’ll need to find the remaining talent using stealth, technology and a “survival of the fittest” mentality to outfox their competition.

Lou Adler will hyper-speed you through the metamorphous of the corporate recruiter of yesterday into the headhunter of tomorrow. As part of your journey, you’ll discover how to use the latest tools to not only survive but thrive as you find the best people before anyone else. Specific topics include:

• How to use LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Broadlook, Twitter, and Talent Hubs to outmaneuver the agile and quick-witted agency recruiter.
  
• What it takes to tame 500-pound gorillas (aka your hiring managers) into submission, or at least to have them understand their leadership role in hiring the best.
  
• Using advances in evolutionary psychology to outsmart your rivals by learning to compete on opportunity and growth rather than compensation.

Enjoy a buffet lunch in the exhibit hall – this is the last chance to check out the cool gadgets, gizmos, and technology available from our exhibitors. It’s not about what you need today, it’s about finding that answer to the challenge you will be facing tomorrow.

Dave Lefkow built a 12-year career in the recruiting industry with companies like Monster and Jobster. And he occasionally also ate pork products.

In 2007, his career took a sharp turn, and he began building a bacon-flavored empire that has seen him appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, ABC News, Good Morning America, Fox News, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, The Tonight Show, The Daily Show, and a host of other national and international programs and publications.

Along the way, he nearly forgot the one most important thing he’d been working on for the last decade: that it’s all about the people. Here’s an entertaining look at how a former recruiting industry veteran learned the hard way how people matter most, and just how important recruiting and HR really are.

You’re not a Fortune 500 behemoth. You’re selling widgets, not cool shoes or cutting-edge software. How do you attract top talent to work for you? Ben Gotkin leads a discussion group where you bring your stories about what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Recruiters love to describe themselves as “full lifecycle.” It depicts their breadth of experience and versatility. In a smaller environment where demand is low, that can be valuable. But in a larger company with high volume, it just doesn’t work. The acquisition of talent requires three primary activities, and it’s nearly impossible to be great at all three. They are:

• Finding and attracting, aka “strategic sourcer”
• Connecting and selling, aka “relationship manager”
• Facilitating and Managing, aka “operations expert”

The most efficient talent acquisition organizations in the world organize for success by these three disciplines, allowing them to focus and specialize for lower costs and higher productivity. Managed well, an engaged team of strategic sourcers, relationship managers, and operations experts can deliver hires locally, regionally, or globally. And when this model is highly developed and deployed throughout successive time zones in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, recruiting can happen 24/7. Join Erin Peterson of Hewitt Associates for a discussion of the challenges and joys of a truly international, integrated talent acquisition model serving a global organization.

The candidate experience is a subject often discussed by recruiting leaders, but one few organizations ever dedicate any significant effort to executing well. Despite numerous studies that demonstrate candidate experience impacts an organization’s ability to hire, as well as its employment brand, new-hire time-to-productivity, and new-hire retention, nearly all organizations rely on recruiting processes that were designed from an organization-centric, administrative perspective that leaves candidates’ expectations dangling in the wind. Little thought is given to how the actual candidate experience supports or contradicts messaging about the employer brand, or provides candidates a realistic view into what life as an employee of the organization would be like.

This session is designed to introduce practical approaches to systematically identifying what candidate experience is needed by the organization, to communicate and align expectations among everyone involved in recruiting, and to execute a candidate experience that helps the business. Specific topics will include:

• Understanding the known impacts of candidate experience
• Mapping candidate experience goals throughout the recruiting life-cycle
• Establishing candidate expectations with a candidate “bill of rights”
• Driving accountability with advanced candidate experience metrics
• Measuring the impact of candidate experience management efforts in your organization

Most small-medium businesses want to “make it big” some day. Typically the solutions include more process, funding, or increasing the already frenetic pace. Why be like everyone else? This session will include breakout roundtable peer discussions as well as William Uranga sharing about his recovery while at TiVo and how you can start yours.

John Sumser has been interviewing the key senior leaders in and around the recruiting industry as a part of his Top 100 Influencers project. In each conversation, he asks about the future of the industry. There’s a consensus. Recruiting is going to morph dramatically.

As the economy moves out of the downturn, there are lots of changes in store for recruiters. New models, new tools, new demographics, and new economics are conspiring to change the face of the profession. John Sumser reviews the key forces, the impending changes, and the best career strategies for adapting. While everyone else is benchmarking last year’s approach, find out what it takes to be a part of the new wave.

This session is all about adding value to your internship programs both existing and non-existing. Lauren Berger, The Intern Queen, will present new programming ideas, highlight employers with highly ranked internship programs, and explain how to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate your internship programs. Keep in mind, over 70 percent of college students have internship experience on their resume. This is a program not to miss!

Here’s one last chance to find out from other attendees about the sessions you may have missed, the tools they heard about but maybe you didn’t, and the contact info you wanted to get but didn’t catch. We’ll have a free-for-all discussion where you can share your biggest takeaways from the conference and ask any final questions of your peers.