It’s been a while since I have been to the west coast so when the team at Phenom People offered to sponsor my travel to Talent Acquisition Week in San Francisco, I couldn’t pass it up. 

Arriving at my hotel by noon I got a chance to walk around Market street before grabbing a sandwich and getting a much needed nap before evening festivities.

Stories Inc and Recruitics hosted a dinner at Bereta in the Mission District and I got to reconnect with conference friends like Corey Kapner (Recruitics) Derek Murphy (Kindercare), Lori (Rally Marketing) and a few others. I met TA and employer brand execs from orgs like the Gap, CDW, Ecolab and CBS interactive. Anastacia who runs TA for CBS Interactive regaled us of her hikes up Mt Everest and Kilamanjaro. Who says HR ladies are boring?

Interesting conversations. I asked one recruitment marketing leader about her experience with Google for jobs and her answer totally surprised me. She hadnt even heard of it!

So I pulled out my iphone and showed how her jobs show up on Google results first and she was unaware she even gets this kind of traffic. After that exchange I wondered how many other TA execs are unaware of this free traffic they may be getting. Shows you that even 3 years later G4J is still unknown to some in the industry.

DAY 2 NOTES

Sessions abound, great talks on recruiting analytics, social media and the candidate experience especially by Tracey Parsons.

• Director of TA at Toyota NA says when they moved from CA to TX they brought along 70% of their existing employees, unheard of in corp relocation circles.
• They get 60% of their jobs filled through internal movement.
• Toyota has a mobile app they give to new hires for onboarding.
• Aaron Krijev says to quantify the Quality of Hire you must survey 3x—day one, 90 days and 6 months…with hiring mgr and candidate.
• Ryan from UTA says use local facebook job groups to share your jobs…dont join groups with less than 1000 members
• #workwithuswednesday hashtag for companies hiring
• Went from 105 applications without using social and 147 when using social media
• TP go through all you comms and explain up front what your hiring process will be
• No login during the apply process…Cox Media example
• Shoutout to Symphony Talent for their cocktail and dinner party.

DAY 3 NOTES

• Sara Erickson from Ecolabs presented their employer brand makeover. They are a client of Symphony Talent. When she took over they had a 75 click apply process! 
• 61% of job seekers start their interaction with Ecolab on a job description.
• They switched to the Workday ATS and now have a super friendly mobile experience.
• Cand Exp Study: 200k candidate responses in North America in their dataset (90% of them dont get hired)
• Companies who do well have more info about working there, more brand advocacy programs and higher NPS
• Trends, more consistent cand communication from pre-appl to onboarding…..setting expectations….asking for feedback….
• What are employers focusing on this year? 83% Empl Branding 81% cand experience
• Company career site is the top choice of candidates for researching the company 53% (on the decline however with sites like GD)
• Kimberly Clark gives coupons to rejected candidates and generated millions.

Nearly 400 people were in attendance and the combination of 3 conferences in one EBrandCon/SRSC/Sourcing Strategies seemed to resonate well with the crowd. I met lots of corporate employers and TA leaders and made some really good connections. Andrew Gadomski emceed much of the event and he is always a great host. I did some vendor interviews and recorded a few of the sessions so look for that audio on the RecTech podcast very soon.

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I’m told the next GMSI event will be in Chicago in July as a combo EBrandCon/SRSC event so get ready to book your tix to the windy city this summer. Chicago is my kind of town.