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!

We're working out of Hollywood, FL the next couple of days and attending (when we can.. damn you Steve Jobs!) the ERExpo. If you are in attendance and would like to say hey, fire me an email at alex at emurse.com. We love meeting with and talking with our users!

I just had the pleasure of sitting (well, standing) in on Shally Steckerl's presentation, "From Sourcing to Cold Calling, Recruiting the best Passive Talent." Shally's the author of a tremendous resource guide called Electronic Recruiting 101. This type of presentation is the reason we came down today. For us, we view the job hunt as a continual process that is, in fact, mainly passive. Nobody wants to turn down a great opportunity when it knocks. Our users are always able to have their most updated resume, formatted, and ready to go at a moments notice. Shally's presentation noted just how easy it is to find folks using Google and MSN. There are more and more web resumes every day.

Emurse is still going strong, amazing us more by the second. The word of mouth on this project is incredible, almost all of our growth has been completely organic. In the last 60 days, we've blown past our year end goals and still haven't finished implementing the most viral aspects of the site (some announced, most not announced ;). Once we get a few more of the pieces in, the march towards critical mass can officially begin. We've become relatively known on the web2.0 circuit, but its the non-techies that we're ultimately after.

We've been pretty silent on it all, as we're preparing a pretty major release. We're going to start breaking it up into smaller, more digestible components to get it all out the gate. Expect really neat things soon, some you can probably guess, but as always, there will be at least a few surprises ;)