Busy Day In The Big Apple

Heading home on the train from NYC as I'm writing this post after a long, long day visiting our New York office, and attending the Select Minds CONNECT Conference. The day started with a productive strategy session with our local recruiters, and I think we came away with some ideas that should raise the bar and generate more candidate flow. After lunch, I headed a few blocks over to the Sofitel Hotel for the Conference.

I've been keeping my eye on Select Minds for a while as I like what they are doing in the alumni portal and corporate social networking space. There were several good presentations, including the always interesting and entertaining Mark & Gerry. Also got to meet our new sales rep and the charming CEO of Select Minds, Anne Berkowitch, in the process. It was nice to see Jennifer from Bearingpoint again too.

Much of what I heard confirmed things I already knew. But there were a few juicy nuggets that I was able to walk away with too. Will we go with Select Minds as a vendor? Hard to say right now as we are in the early stages. But the clear consensus from some of their key clients was that it would of been much more costly to build out similar functionality on their own. Up until last week, my scope in this space was solely focused on building an alumni program. But I'm becoming more convinced that an alumni program is just part of a larger corporate social networking strategy, one designed to more effectively leverage knowledge, relationships, career growth, retention efforts, and business development opportunities. Corporate Social Networking is anything but a fad IMO, it is becoming more and more of a component of overall business success.

Thanks again to Doug at Select Minds for convincing me to attend today, and thanks to the crew on Sixth Ave. for a productive morning and a nice lunch.