iCIMS Hire Expectations™

On November 2nd, I attended the Northeast Human Resources Association’s (NEHRA) fall conference in Framingham, MA. The theme of the conference was the utilization of technology within the HR business function. The event was well attended by numerous businesses based primarily in New England. I had the privilege of speaking along with the Sr. Manager of Talent and Development from LL Bean about selecting and implementing a talent management system that best fits an organization's needs. 

Leading this session was an interesting and valuable experience because I needed to remove myself, in a way, from my role as a CRD with iCIMS. While I was from iCIMS, I couldn't talk much about iCIMS. My goal for the session was twofold: to explain where the industry has been and more importantly, where it is going; and to provide a platform of dialogue that would allow these HR business leaders to try to make sense of what “talent management” means at their organization and how a tool like iCIMS can drive it.

What I found was that every single person there had questions. Not just a few specific ones, but questions that were very broad and abstract. The general consensus was that all businesses now realize that they need to work smarter with the workforce that they have in place and the workforce that they need for the future. It's no longer just about resume and requisition data management. It now needs to encompass the full talent scope and provide efficiencies and effective tools for managing it. The attendees all understood this, but their question was all the same: "Where do I start in putting all of this together at my company?" Hopefully our session allowed people to gain more of a vision of how the effective use of the right technology can make a difference.

The keynote speaker at the conference was Dr. John Sullivan. His message was about all of the different and evolving HR ideologies occurring across industries. For example, he spoke about companies like Google and how their culture and employee policies, as counter-intuitive as some of them may seem, are providing a real and measurable increase to the bottom line. Scott Kirsner, a Boston Globe columnist who has a weekly “Innovation Economy” column, also spoke at the conference. Scott’s discussion looked at New England businesses throughout history that were innovative in nature and are now household names. His story about the company ‘Technicolor’ was particularly interesting.

Through speaking with different attendees and from listening to Dr. Sullivan and Mr. Krisner, it provoked the thought that all businesses in history that have "changed the game", so to speak, were extremely innovative. Innovation itself is nothing new, but the way that innovation presents itself is always new and different.