Before you invite people into your home, you’ve got to get your home in order.
Yes, it’s a cliché, but in many ways, it speaks to the essence of the upcoming ERE Recruiting Conference, taking place Nov. 7-9, in Atlanta. Essentially, what it means is that you cannot effectively attract and select candidates to come work for you unless you’ve first optimized the way your talent acquisition function…well…functions.
In other words…get ready for another cliché…it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
There will be a palpable internal focus at the event, with sessions geared to help you develop strategies, practices, and processes to elevate the inner workings of your talent acquisition department. It’s not that the more external-focused activities are less important — after all, things like creating a stellar candidate experience and implementing effective interview techniques are critical. But none of your external practices matter much unless they’re rooted in a solid foundation internally.
With the economy headed — well, who knows where it’s headed… With ongoing uncertainty in the labor market, there are certainly many things you can be doing right now to plan for the present and the future.
And that’s the problem: There are myriad actions you can take. The real challenge is figuring out which ones to take to ensure that you and your team are working from a well-grounded base. Which is why at the upcoming conference, there will be an array of sessions — most led by in-house TA practitioners — to help you develop the right processes and practices to manage today’s toughest hiring challenges. Here are some of the event’s highlights:
It’s No Longer 2019: A Talent Acquisition Strategy for Traversing Tough Times. Deb Andrychuk, the global director of talent attraction at PlayStation, will kick off the event by tapping into her years of experience to reveal better ways to structure your department and redefine roles and responsibilities. Yes, she’ll talk strategy — but like all the sessions, Deb will approach it from a very tactical perspective because as we all know, theory is nice. But what actually works in practice? You’ll hear it here.
The Purge: How to Remove Inefficiencies to Improve Hiring Productivity. A hiring process that’s not efficient is not effective, and in this session, Asal Naraghi, Philips’ global head of strategic priorities, informatics, and innovation, will explain how she deployed Agile methodology to hire better and faster. It’s a great opportunity to learn how to analyze your current processes to determine what’s working and what’s not.
How Much Should — and Shouldn’t — You Engage Hiring Managers? ERE strategy columnist and principal at IA-HR Mary Faulkner will lead a panel of TA pros to answer the Goldilocks conundrum: What is too little, what is too much, and what is just right when it comes to involving hiring managers in your recruiting activities?
You’re Not a Traditional Employer of Choice for Certain Skills. Now What? Let’s face it, not every company can be an employer of choice for every type of role. Even if you are a Google or an Apple, you’re not an employer of choice for every role in your org. That’s why this presentation by John Deere’s global skills lead Jarron Rice is so important. Jarron will explain what John Deere has been doing — and what you can do — to leverage talent intelligence to reinvent skills profiles, target internal talent pools, and place people in those hard-to-fill positions.
Taming the Wild West of Recruitment Advertising: A Data-Driven Approach to Reach Job Seekers at the Right Time and Place. Recruitment advertising can feel overwhelming, because it often is. Particularly when you are facing a talent shortage, getting it right is paramount to your TA activities — even more so if you are DaVita Kidney Care, which must contend with a perennial nursing shortage. John Owen, the company’s programmatic media and insights leader, will provide an inside look at what DaVita has been doing to attract job seekers effectively and efficiently.
Identifying Technology Solutions That Will Have the Most Impact on Recruiting. The name of this session says it all. Lance Haun, ERE’s tech columnist and VP of market insights for The Starr Conspiracy, will lead a panel discussion about how to balance good, fast, and cheap when evaluating software. In doing so, the group will offer insights on what real impact really looks like, and how to use tech to attain it.
Making Metrics Matter: Tying Recruiting Analytics to the Business Bottom Line. Improving quality of hire, time to fill, cost per hire, and other recruitment numbers is important. But to whom? Israel Gutierrez, Axios’ VP of talent acquisition, will present a data-packed session on how to connect TA actions and metrics to overall business results. (You know, so it’s relevant to your CFO.)
Starting From the End: Developing an Assessment Strategy That Connects to Business Outcomes. At Spectrum, Jennifer Tracy, VP of talent attraction and acquisition, isn’t just using assessments to gauge candidates’ skills and competencies. She’s ensuring that their hiring assessments connect to performance and business results. Go inside Spectrum to discover how you, too, can better leverage your assessments.
Chapter 1: Your Company’s Story Begins With Transforming Employer Branding Into Recruiter Enablement. What if employer branding weren’t just a means of luring job seekers but rather a set of tools that all of your recruiters could use? Cristal Mikenas, the global employer branding leader at Takeda, will explain how to pull the right data from your recruiters to develop employer branding that they can then take advantage of.
When Hiring Halts: Creating Internal Mobility for Recruiters to Build Skills and Avoid Layoffs. As an increasing number of companies freeze or curtail hiring efforts — and for those that don’t — it’s worth planning for how to manage your recruiters. Rather than have layoffs or furloughs, there may be better options for your org — just as there were at Credit Karma. Rafael Rice, the company’s senior manager of TA, will explain how Credit Karma found new internal posts for its recruiters, enabling them to grow knowledge and skills.
The event will also feature roundtable discussions that will enable attendees to exchange ideas with and learn from fellow attendees. Additionally, because the conference overlaps with Election Day, attendees will have ample opportunities to vote — in polls covering today’s top topics in recruiting.
More speakers and sessions are being added; you may view the most updated agenda and register at www.ererecruitingconference.com, where you’ll be able to take advantage of an early-bird discount that ends on Sept. 6.