Last night was a blast. In the evening, we had the opening night networking event down by the pool. I had the pleasure of meeting Jason from Recruiting.com (owned by Jobster). It was great to be able to put a face to the name. Good people over there and a great blog. There was a silent auction going on. I bid $1.75 on a $1000 minimum TV. I figure I'd pull an eBay, being we're a bootstrapped start up and all. At the time, it seemed kinda funny. Must have been the free drinks. I didn't met the reserve, I'm told.... ;)

We ended up hanging out with our friends from GetTheJob.com and OnTarget over some sushi. Workshops are great and all, but that type of thing is what conferences are all about. Tonight, we'll be stopping by a few parties, including Indeed.com's, who we're big fans of, and whose API currently fuels Emurse's job postings.

Today we sat in on a couple of the workshops; Legal issues in HR, interviewing techniques and tools, and four trends that you can't ignore. The last of which, given by Jason Warner from Starbucks, was outstanding.

The four trends in recruiting Jason mentions are focus on Retention, Transparency, Convergence, and "Flatism." With Transparency, it's all about blogs and social networks. People are going to talk about your workplace, so you might as well accept it. This of course, is one of the driving factors behind Jobster's approach, and something that is likely to continue gaining traction. The need to be authentic and open is of increasing importance (don't fire people for blogging). Convergence is all about the Business Week article from awhile back entitled Math Will Rock Your World. HR needs to catch up organized, mathematical approaches that many other business aspects are employing, Tools, analytics, statistics -- data mining altogether. Finally, "Flatism" is about globalization. The example here is of course the book The World is Flat (fantastic, by the way).

I'm not sure if we're going to come back tomorrow. There are a couple other people we still haven't touched base yet, but there will be more opportunities in the future. We came here with a specific agenda and seeking specific information/knowledge. I think in that way, it's been a success. Good times fo' sho'.

Today's Interesting Links

• Fred Wilson Says Try Before You Buy - He speaks from a VC's perspective, but from a small start up's perspective, the same is true. Try before you sell. I think he's right on the money.
  
• Recruiting.com has a new look - Fancy. A little different with the Scape/Digg thing going on, but a much cleaner look. If they had ads, I'd click them. ;)
  
• Seth Godin Spoke at ERE today, Here's his presentation at Google - Seth's a great speaker. We missed him this morning (lots of real work to do), but theres been a buzz all day surrounding his presentation.
  
• Referral based HR - Zubka's a pretty neat site we had the pleasure of talking to out here. Check `em out!