While I’m not at the NACE 2010 Conference this year, I feel like I am because of the enormous and informative tweets coming out of the conference. Thanks to everyone for sharing their great tweets. I’ve put together a quick summary of the #NACE10 tweets and themes thus far. Each tweet hopefully provides a starting point to review and evaluate your efforts in recruiting the brightest and best! Enjoy!

Day 1
The first day was buzzing around Keith Ferraazi’s Day 1 keynote address. In short, my take away from the great tweets were: leave your egos at the door: build community, connections, and relationships through generosity…interesting to see the parallels between Keith Ferrazzi’s message and the mission of the folks in attendance. Some notable tweets:

It’s about building relationships, not “networking”. – Keith Ferrazzi

A huge portion of our readership is learning and networking at the NACE conference in Orlando, Florida this week. It seems like the big push of materials and vendors are on the topic of social media, metrics, and internships.

The most interesting development to me however is the impact of Twitter.  It’s not that Twitter will help you recruit, rather the information you can gather from your peers tweeting at events you may not be able to attend.  While it would be great if NACE were as tech savvy as ERE.net and stream the sessions live to the world, those not attending the conference are learning a lot in real-time through Twitter.

Of the hundreds of tweets posted since the conference started last night, here are some of the tweets I have found most interesting so far:

I saw a presentation given by Tina Krater from Shaker Recruitment Advertising speaking about the benefits of running virtual career fairs.  I’ve seen dozens of presentations on the benefits of virtual career fairs for a decade, and before I had a chance to zone out, Tina showed a few screen shots.  Wow!

Allstate ran their college virtual career fair on October 21st from 9am-5pm CST.  The live fair targeted students at 50 campuses, but ended up receiving candidates from 150 universities.  The fair was designed to help build Allstate’s brand on campus, and to help increase applications this fall.

I spoke to Bruce Williams, the Director of Talent Acquisition at Allstate, at the  onrecExpo, and he seemed  pleased so far.  “One of the big issues we face with recruiting college students is the stereotype that all we recruit are insurance sales positions.  An event like this with different booths allowed us to show the different sides of Allstate where we could display marketing, accounting, and actuarial positions.”

As there become new medians to get information like Facebook and Twitter, there will become new job services focused on this area.  At onrecEXPO 2009, I met tweetajob founder and CEO, Carmen Hudson.

The service from my understanding is like a job agent that a job seeker can setup to receive listings, but instead of receiving an email, they get a tweet on their Twitter feed.  All job seekers will need to register with Twitter before they can receive the tweetajob listings.

Carmen thought of the idea about 6 months ago while working at Yahoo! as a corporate recruiter.  Just launched on Monday, they have a few initial clients that include her former employer.

I’m at the onrecEXPO 2009 and just finished listening to Dr. Michael Kannisto, who is the Head of Staffing, University Relations, and Employment Branding at BASF.

He gave the keynote presentation, 10 Ways Recruiting has Changed Forever and What to Do Next, in front of a pretty packed room.

Dr. Kannisto admits that a couple of these points are obvious, but there were several very insightful comments.  The ways are listed below:

I am heading out to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center outside of Chicago this week to attend The Onrec Expo 2009 and Kennedy Information’s Recruiting Conference.  I know travel budgets to attend events like this have been slashed, so I will be live blogging from the event.

This event has a very nice program, and an interesting speaker list.  I’m really looking forward to attending a handful of the sessions including they keynote where Dr. Michael Kannisto from BASF will be presenting 10 Ways Recruiting has Changed Forever and What to do Next. I am a big fan of a conference staying on topic and true to what people want to learn about. Conferences can be expensive to attend to start, and I hate thinking that these dollars are going to some person who wrote a book about a topic barely related to the conference.

Back to Onrec… other sessions I’m definitely attending include:

I recently attended the HR Tech Conference at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago.  My initial impression is WOW!  I have to admit, this was my first time at this conference and I had pretty low expectations.  It’s nothing against the organizers, the vendors, the sessions… it’s just been a rough past 12 months if your title has anything in it where you are not adding revenue and incurring cost.  You don’t need me to speak about that!

So why was I surprised?  The vendor booths were nice, very nice.  I’m talking island booths that had 10-20 seats in front of 60 inch flat screen TVs, nice.  I have been going to trade shows for 20 years in a variety of different industries.  I watched a national sporting goods show have vendors with dual level booths that had full bars and hall of fame athletes completely vanish 5 years later.  I have seen booths like these at technology shows for several years, but not on the “non-revenue” side of business.

Even more surprising was that there were quite a lot of people at the event.  I haven’t gotten the numbers from HR Tech, but overall the sessions seemed pretty full and the exhibition hall was very busy.  At a few booths I went to visit, I had to wait in a line several people deep before I got to speak to someone.  A few vendors were throwing some small happy hours, but I didn’t see anything like there might have been before the credit crunch.