Making virtual connections actual at the Fall Recruiting and HR Conferences

For the past decade, members of the HRmarketer team have been a part of many HR, Recruiting, and Employee Benefits conferences and expositions.

We’re increasing our rate of participation each year. We attend. We exhibit. We sponsor.

This fall you’ll be able to see us at the ERE Expo Fall 2009, HR Technology, HR Southwest, and the Onrec Expo & Kennedy Information’s Recruiting 2009 Conference and Expo. We’re also a supporting media partner for the second annual RecruitFest! produced by RecruitingBlogs.com

All of these experiences support our primary business goals as well as enable us to provide good counsel to our clients who are making decisions on trade show and event participation.

We also like to do our part to cheer-lead for these conferences.

While many raise questions about the long term viability of industry conferences due to travel costs, increased media fragmentation, and the availability of so much real-time thought-leadership content online, we still believe that the live conference has irreplaceable benefits. The revenue model may change, as is happening across nearly every other media format, but live events will be a part of our professional lives for the foreseeable future.

As our Kevin Grossman has commented, the forces behind Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online conversations have only heighten the impulse to connect face-to-face with industry peers, partners, vendors, and customers.

Personally, it’s quite a cool feeling for me to attend an event where so many people are already a part of my online social circles. It makes the initial in-person meeting almost instantly more productive and enjoyable.

In the coming days, we’ll be posting fresh content, reports, and even a free giveaway as part of our participation in the upcoming Recruiting events.

We have a soft spot for the Recruiting events. They all have a unique approach and area of focus and the organizers below have asked us to participate in unique ways to help get the word out about their events. For the third-party and corporate recruiters out there, you’ve a wealth of choices.

• Jocelyn Cook and I will attend the ERE Expo Fall in Hollywood, Florida, September 9-11. We will report on the event with posts, tweets, and maybe a few podcasts or videos.
• Maren Hogan of RecruitingBlogs.com invited HRmarketer to help them promote RecruitFest in Toronto, September 23 & 24. We’ll be giving away a free ticket to this “un-conference”-style gathering of recruiters and leaders. Check back here next week for details.
• Capping offer the fall season will be the newly combined Onrec Expo and Kennedy Recruiting Conference. We’re working on conducting a series of “speaker previews” that we’ll be providing as podcast interviews with a select group of the awesome line-up of speakers on the bill for this event in Chicago, November 3-04.

Let us know if you’ll be attending, exhibiting, or otherwise participating in these or any other shows this fall.