Virtual Edge Power Summit Recap

I'm home now from the ADP/Virtual Edge (VE) Power Summit, held at the beautiful Hyatt Coconut Point resort in SW Florida. It was an informative, fun 3 days here and now more than ever I’m looking forward to moving forward with our implementation. In addition to the resort being wonderful, the food was great, and the networking was even better. An unexpected surprise was seeing The CHAD, who was there to do a presentation about what to do post-AJB. Chad is a great guy and his presentation provided some very useful and timely information.

Other highlights included the opening session with Jerry Thurber, Anne Nimke and Sue Marks’ take on The 10 Demandments (chock full of examples of great candidate-friendly career websites), Nury Plumbley’s discussion on how she gave Agilent’s career web site an ‘extreme makeover’, Ed Newman’s Workforce Planning session, and finally a peek at Pure Discovery’s new Semantic Search capabilities.

I always enjoy listening to Ed, and today was no exception. He offered one bit of advise in particular that really resonated with me: Don’t measure metrics like cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, then attempt to reduce those numbers just for the sake of lowering costs or improving efficiencies. Accept that certain jobs may cost more, and take more time to fill than others. Use those metrics instead in your workforce planning and sourcing efforts, and as a result, take a more proactive stance in Recruiting. I knew this already, but Ed reinforced the point once again in a clear, effective manner (better than I just did here at least).

I made some new friends on this trip, and spent some quality time with a couple of my teammates as well. Kudos to VE for putting on a great show. I look forward to working with them closely in the coming months.