ERE Expo Fall 07 Recap - Day 1 & 2

The week I've been looking forward to for over a year is finally here! I arrived at the Wardman Park mid-afternoon yesterday to get started on the heavy-duty networking that makes this conference great. Almost immediately, I was able to reconnect with Joel Cheesman, Jeremy Langhans, Mendoza, Ed Newman, Gerry a former colleague (Suzanne), and numerous others. Joel and I had a particularly useful conversation regarding SEO. Soon, the networking spilled out to the welcome reception hosted by The Ladders, which was very nice, but dinner was still necessary. So a group of us headed over to the Adams Morgan neighborhood for a very nice dinner at the rooftop restaurant, Perry's.

Got home late, slept fast, got up early, and headed back to the conference again this morning. Got to reconnect right away with my old team at MITRE, a nice start to the day. In regards to the Expo itself, I won't go into too much detail here regarding the sessions, you can get that at the ERE Expo Blog. I enjoyed most of the sessions I attended today though. Learned a few interesting things from Anne Ceruti from Disney, including their heavy Accounting recruiting efforts in Burbank. I knew that Jim Larranaga's session would be great as I've heard him speak before. He energized the room and was a hard act to follow.

I was off then to check on some email and to start work on this post, when I ran into Steve Levy, who I've exchanged communications with many times before, but was now meeting for the first time. Lunch soon followed in the the Exhibit Hall with Steve, Mendoza, and Steven Rothberg, another blogger who I was able to meet for the first time.

After lunch, sessions followed learning about the Dell Talent Acquisition Academy (very timely since we are planning our own recruiters conference coming soon), and about how American Express is building their talent pipelines. Most of this I am writing as I'm listening to Mark and Gerry wax poetic about everything from SLAs to data integrity, trends, recruiter requisition load, and more.

Soon we will be heading off to a great dinner, followed by the Charity Poker tourney. More on that tomorrow, and pictures will be up soon as well.