On Monday, May 13 just over 100 Executives from the HR Service and Technology space got together in San Francisco for the inaugural InfluenceHR Symposium.

I created the event based on continued questions from many of the Executives that ended up being in the room.  They were asking for access to real actionable content about understanding the HR Buyer and how best to market to them.  They wanted more than just content, though.  They wanted a conversation with their contemporaries.

There was a lot of excitement and momentum leading up to the event.  I was thrilled with the result.

Most of the presenters mirrored those in the audience – CEOs (more than half of the attendees) and Customer Facing and/or Strategy-Driving Executives (the other half).  Some of the biggest brands in the space were represented – several even sending teams.  Emerging, early stage startups were there, and EVERY size vendor in between.  There was a broad cross section of industry segments represented in the room, also.

Most importantly, InfluenceHR was the conversation we had hoped for.  An open, honest conversation about existing and new strategies.  About what’s working and what isn’t.  About what actually helps the buyer.  About how we can do a better job understanding the buyer, and in turn communicating with them.

I was humbled by the talent in the room.  Honored that they were there.  Every single person at InfluenceHR , speakers and attendees alike, contributed to make the day an incredible learning experience.

Once again, based on the interest of all involved, we’re going to keep the conversation going.  This October in New York City.

We’ll have a fresh agenda, taking into account the feedback from those that were in San Francisco.

We have speakers with exciting topics already lining up.  We’re days away from formalizing and announcing the location and firm date.

This time we’ll have a selected panel of HR Buyers in the room to give some direct perspective.

We’re also keeping the conversations going between now and October.  Those in attendance in San Francisco will receive an InfluenceHR membership, where they get exclusive access even further exclusive content and analysis about marketing to the HR Buyer. Exclusive opportunities to continue the conversations we started at InfluenceHR with selected speakers, other attendees, HR Buyers, and new experts we are inviting into the conversation.

The energy around InfluenceHR has been amazing.  It’s a true testament to those that attended and their desire to help HR win.  Take a look at the Storify we created from the Twitter stream around the show.  It will give you a good sense of what it’s all about.

See you this October in New York!

Over the course of one day, InfluenceHR will share marketing secrets with CEOs, CMOs, and customer-facing executives who market and sell to the HR buyer.

Some executives are comfortable with social media, blogging, and tweeting. Some aren’t. One thing is certain: Social media is here. We can’t stop it. We wouldn’t even try, anyway.

To that end, we have very minimal guidelines for social media coverage at InfluenceHR:

• Be polite and respectful. This covers all forms of interaction at the bar, in the hotel, and on all social media sites.
• Attribution is required. Attendees are expected to be clear about who is saying what. Use quotation marks if you’re quoting someone. Attribute the comment or idea to the person who’s speaking. If you don’t know the name of the person speaking, ask the conference organizer.
• Embrace the mystery. Please honor a speaker’s request and do not broadcast or share information that someone designates as proprietary, confidential, or otherwise privileged.

InfluenceHR is not your typical conference. For one day, we’re pulling back the curtain on HCM marketing.

Let’s not ruin a really good time, OK?

Startups can make a big name for themselves if they have the right product, the right strategy, and the right people. Just look at Gild, an innovative recruiting technology provider that helps match companies with in-demand tech talent.

Co-founder and CEO Sheeroy Desai will be speaking at InfluenceHR on May 13, providing a behind-the-scenes look at how to achieve rapid growth in a competitive market.

That’s right. You can hear directly from the source how a startup can see dramatic success in a fast-moving and demanding industry.

Sheeroy’s session, “From 0-60 mph in 30 Seconds — An Inside Look at Gild’s Rapid Growth in HR Technology,” will address how a clear vision, a quality product, and a solid strategy allowed Gild to increase its customer base by 900 percent and recently close an $8 million Series A round of funding led by Baseline Ventures.

Sheeroy will share how Gild overcame myriad challenges, including a relatively small target market and the requirement for hiring teams — its target market — to modify traditional behaviors. Attendees will hear about Gild’s hiring strategy, Gild’s iterative product strategy, discontinuous innovation, and how understanding “customer experience” can inform the company’s strategy.

InfluenceHR is going to show that marketing isn’t just about what a company communicates or advertises, but how that business is developed. It’s also going to show that the people are just as critical to the success of a marketing strategy as the message that is at its core.

Join us for InfluenceHR on May 13. Click here to register if you haven’t already added this one-day event to your calendar.

When we say that InfluenceHR is going to spend one day unveiling the secrets of HCM marketing, we know you’re expecting actionable advice that can reshape your strategy. The Starr Conspiracy is making those secrets yours for the taking.

With more than 10 years of expertise in the HCM industry, The Starr Conspiracy is underwriting InfluenceHR in an effort to change the way you think about marketing. No redacted reports. No games. Just truth.

Bret Starr, founder, president, and partner of The Starr Conspiracy, has a keynote session lined up that tells you exactly the kinds of secrets you want to hear — “Inside the Honeycomb: An Expansive Model for B2B Marketing.”

After more than a decade of research and field-testing, Starr is ready to publicly unveil the Honeycomb model. It’s a new, expansive philosophy of marketing that eschews the obsolete dogmas of post-bubble B2B marketing strategies.

In his presentation, Starr will introduce the concept of “Drive” as the single unifying element of all business and marketing strategies. He will demonstrate how Drive must be the starting point for all message, brand, and promotion strategies. Finally, Starr will make the case that all prospect, customer, and employee communication initiatives draw their power from a company’s Drive.

The days of the monolithic brand strategy are over, as are the days of demand-generation-dominated promotion strategies.

With The Starr Conspiracy, attendees get more than a sponsor — they get insight and genuine passion around changing the nature of B2B marketing. Those are secrets that an underwriter can share. Those are secrets that can help you change the destiny of marketing.

If you haven’t registered for InfluenceHR yet, it’s time to commit. See you there!

This week we announced the 2013 #hrwins.  #hrwins is the first ever complete look at truly innovative HR Technology products across all categories.  Last year one of the vendors I evaluated called it a “Celebration of Innovation”.  I think that’s fitting.  Everything we do here is rooted in the belief that when HR Technology vendors innovate and market and sell their products properly, HR wins.  It’s good to recognize and celebrate that kind of winning!

#hrwins analyzes HR technology via comprehensive briefings, where hundreds of vendors are evaluated on their solution’s innovation, the value their technology delivers to the Human Resources profession, and the overall viability of the products. Vendors in virtually all segments of HR Technology will be evaluated.  It’s an exhaustive, and exhausting, process.  Innovation is not limited to the bits and bytes of a solution, or a solution’s trendiness.  We look for new, innovative, ways of addressing real HR challenges through the implementation of technology.

This year’s #hrwins really started in October of 2012 after the 2012 #hrwins Companies To Watch were published.  Vendor briefings are a constant.

We’ve changed the format slightly, so that we can cover more ground.  This year we will look at even more Technology segments and, in that way, provide more value for those in HR that are evaluating technology.

This year’s #hrwins will conclude in October 2013 with 10 HR Technology Vendors receiving the distinction of “2013 HR Companies To Watch”. Additional vendors will be highlighted across the major HR Technology segments later in the year via the popular #hrwins Trend Reports, and an e-book that will be released at the overall conclusion of #hrwins.

When HR Technology vendors innovate they create an opportunity for HR, and the business of getting work done, to proceed to a much more desirable level.  When HR Technology vendors innovate, HR wins, hence #hrwins was born.”

This year we are announcing 10 companies to watch and providing a broader view to vendors innovating across all categories.   The goal is to highlight the vendors that are delivering new and innovative value to HR, so that HR practitioners can create a short-list of innovators by category when they have buying decisions to make.”

Each of the 10 vendors receiving this distinction will have a report outlining the innovation they are delivering to help HR win. LAROCQUE is also publishing the popular #hrwins Trend Reports, which are not vendor specific, outlining the technology and solution trends found through the #hrwins program. #hr wins Trend Reports are scheduled to start in late May 2013. All of the #hrwins reports are published free of charge at http://www.larocqueinc.com

HR Technology vendors wishing to include their products in the 2013 #hrwins are encouraged to contact LAROCQUE by filling out a Vendor Briefing request form found at http://www.larocqueinc.com/vendor-briefings 

There are no fees for vendors to participate in the program.  LAROCQUE does not disclose a list of vendors that were evaluated, and do not make the 10 Most Innovative, or get mentioned in Trend Reports.  We are happy to provide participating vendors with feedback on their participation in the process.

I’m excited to tell you about a new partnership between InfluenceHR and ERE! Our events were always scheduled next to each other – always in the same facility. But, attending both shows is more than just a matter of convenience, if you’re marketing technology to the HR buyer these shows go together like… well, like chocolate and peanut butter.

InfluenceHR and ERE have teamed up to make sure you don’t miss out on the innovations people are using to go to market and recruit the best talent.

Three days, two great events, one low price.

First, check out InfluenceHR. This is a marketing symposium developed by marketers, for marketers. For one day, you’ll get access to top-shelf analysts, hear exactly what your peers (and competitors) are doing, and learn new ways to transform your marketing strategy.

And then you’ll head to the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. They’re turning the conference model on its head with 16 presentations of recruiting innovations that are too new to be proven, developed by startups, established recruiting suppliers, and in-house recruiting departments. They’ll speed through 20-minute pitches, and you’ll decide who’s got the game-changing solution.

Join us May 13 to 15 in San Francisco for both InfluenceHR and the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. And here are the details on the deal:

• Until April 15: Register for both conferences for $1,495 (that a 25 percent savings)
• After April 15: We still love you, so at $1,795, you’re still getting a 25 percent discount

And both events are at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District, so you don’t even have to pack your bags until May 15.

To register for both events, visit the InfluenceHR registration page. You’ll automatically be registered for both conferences.

Remember: three days, two great events, one low price.

Companies have never had more opportunities to target the right audience than today. Marketing doesn’t have to be a shotgun approach, hoping your message hits someone who will listen. Instead, you can target with laser focus to market to the right people.

That’s what ReTargeter helps people do. I’m happy to say that ReTargeter, a full-service advertising solution company, is going to be part of the team of experts unveiling marketing secrets at InfluenceHR on May 13 in San Francisco.

In order for companies to see the value of targeting their approach, they need to understand the digital landscape and see results from real companies already doing this. ReTargeter founder and CEO Arjun Dev Arora will share his secrets in the session “What’s Possible: Finally Finding the Elusive HR Buyer in a Digital World.” Dev Arora will speak to his digital advertising company’s experience with the HR market while also discussing the history of display advertising and digital media as a whole.

In this session, attendees will learn not only about the history of digital marketing but also about its future. This includes how offline activity can be connected to online campaigns, how to leverage the power of targeted advertising to reach only the right people, and how companies are shifting their digital strategy toward new media.

I’m really glad that we can bring ReTargeter to the sponsor team for InfluenceHR. They’re experts themselves, not just another company going through the motions.

If you haven’t registered for InfluenceHR yet, get your head in the game. There isn’t another marketing conference like this, and you need to see how one day is going to change how your company goes to market.

Salesforce is now leading the way to where Social can be tied to real business results. Their CEO, Marc Benioff, has been announcing their new message: “Become a Customer Company”. Leveraging social and other platforms to become a company that listens to the customer, and develops deeper relationships – based on data and direct interaction – and then driving better revenue and retention results.

The HCM tech community should take note. Get ahead of the curve on these concepts. They directly relate to the way you approach your customers. They also directly relate to the way social is, and will, drive value within the Talent Management space.

From my seat, I don’t see these as new concepts, as much as applying social, mobile, crm, and marketing automation as they have all evolved to deliver a more direct tie to business results.

Salesforce remains a dark horse in the Human Capital space, in my opinion, with their existing core capabilities and apps, their roll out of work.com, and their growing list of HCM-related apps in their App Exchange.

Benioff Announces Chatter To Be Primary Interface to Salesforce.com in Boston on 3/22/13

My previous posts on Salesforce and their opportunity in Work Management.

Information Weeks editor’s take on the new message.

Enterprise Irregulars take on the new messaging.

Before the panel started I was given an impromptu briefing by SmartRecruiters Founder and CEO, Jerome Ternyck. Like most briefings, I was brought up to speed on their growth and progress as a company since last we met. I also received the standard glimpse to some new Third Party Agency Management capabilities being announced today.

SmartRecruiters’ progress, and these new capabilities, are anything but standard.

I’ve been following SmartRecruiters since 2010. They launched as a free ATS, and did a great job releasing an initially functional product and marketing it well. Leaping into the market with thousands of users and a great deal of buzz, they caught my attention. With Jerome’s background and understanding of Talent Management and HR Technology, it was clear that the product would continue to improve. What was less clear, at the time, was whether there was a sustainable and scalable business that would deliver on more than just the promise of being free. Based on what I see now, the answer is clearly a resounding “Yes”.

SmartRecruiters remains free to their customers. Since launching in 2010 they have amassed more than 35,000 of them. Here’s an interesting data point – SmartRecruiters is doing a LOT of migrations of their customers’ data from other ATSes. Customers that were paying for systems before are now moving to the SmartRecruiters free platform. We’re not just talking about the SMB, either. Firms with more than 10,000 employees have left Enterprise-level implementations of their ATSes and Talent Management Systems and moved to this free platform, leaving behind the customizations and depth that comes along with an Enterprise solution.

Why?

In my opinion, there are two primary reasons:

1. SmartRecruiters free pricing model has allowed their customers to shift a significant spend on license fees into other services (Background Checks, Skills and Competency Assessments, Job Posting/Advertising, etc.). Today’s announcement of a marketplace to manage and control Third Party Agency Spend is just another example of SmartRecruiters execution on that strategy. But, its not just about diverting dollars to services that help you hire better – ITS ABOUT CONTROL. COST CONTROL and QUALITY CONTROL. It’s not about control of process just for process’ sake. SmartRecruiters is committed to a simple-to-use interface that is driven by user and candidate experience. CUSTOMER experience.

They have refused to implement the kind of process-driven workflow hierarchy that renders other systems cumbersome and unusable. This allows SmartRecruiters’ customers to achieve something most Talent Management system customers could never think of: Engaging the Line Managers to use the system – and they actually use it. With everyone using the system, and all of the hiring spend, including Agency fees, being managed via the system the visibility and real-time measurement of effectiveness of any source, any campaign, and any spend is at a level not normally achieved by those paying for their systems.

2. There is a movement afoot in the world of Enterprise Software that is taking interface design to its simplest level. Trading off the kind of process for process’ sake workflow referenced above for usability and portability. Its early, and its hard to tell whether its a trend or becoming our new reality, but one thing is certain – the world is moving to a more customer-driven, and in our world also candidate-driven, design model. I wrote about it here. SmartRecruiters is one of the first ATSes I’ve seen that incorporates this approach.

So, what about this new Agency Management Release?

SmartRecruiters customer can now:

• View terms for all recruiters, and negotiate and contract directly online
  with the benefit of the marketplace transparency.
• submit a job to the marketplace and let recruiters bid for that business
• manage all their 3rd party recruiters from one platform
• invite their preferred suppliers or discover new ones that have been vetted by their peers
• see the best performing recruiters ranked based on areas of expertise, key
  success metrics, such as CV to interview rate, average time to source, and hiring
  percentage, as well as, customer reviews.

These features are a huge win for SmartRecruiters’ customers. Third party recruiters are often viewed as “only as good as their last placement”. A significant amount of time and energy goes into discovering the current “best” recruiters, and then establishing working contract terms with them. SmartRecruiters has addressed these issues, and created a marketplace with transparency to performance and cost. The best recruiters will just get better in this environment, and SmartRecruiters customers in need of third-party agency help are closer to passive, harder to find, quality talent with just a few clicks.

If I were managing Talent Acquisition, or Recruiting for ANY size firm I would be taking a close look at the SmartRecruiters platform.

If I were a legacy Talent Management or ATS vendor, I’d be taking SmartRecruiters very seriously as a current and future competitor.

Disclosure: THIS IS NOT A SPONSORED POST

I’m so excited about the KeyNote presentation we’ve secured for InfluenceHR.

Mark Organ is the person credited with creating marketing automation.  He was the founding CEO of Eloqua and disrupted the B2B market, putting the technology and the concepts we all manage to today on the map.  He has agreed to talk to us about the next Disruptive Technology and approach in B2B marketing, and in turn our HCM space:  Advocacy Marketing.

B2B Advocacy Marketing has begun to deliver massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more for those that are doing it.  I really believe it’s where B2B marketing is going in this social/digital age.

HCM Vendors that listen to Mark, and adopt strategies in Advocacy Marketing won’t just sell more stuff.  They’ll also help HR and the HR buyer.  THIS is why I’m so excited about it.  Selling more stuff isn’t that hard – selling more stuff to the right people, and making a difference while you’re doing it – that’s pretty cool.

One of the driving principles behind creating InfluenceHR is this:  When Human Capital Management Vendors get it right, HR WINS.  The wins are obvious when a vendor gets their product or service right – value gets added or Return on Investment achieved.   But, selling a good product to the wrong people, or with the wrong expectations, is a waste of everyone’s time.

When HCM Vendors get their marketing and their go-to-market right – HR WINS even more.   Imagine as a marketer not just messaging to people who care about what you have to offer, but empowering them – enabling them with your brand… creating an Army of Advocates that are IN THE MARKET, ON THE GROUND, talking to their peers about what they like about you.  No one’s time is wasted in that scenario.

Imagine the credibility your brand would have in HR if it was introduced more by actual HR people than by sales people, mass emails, or display ads. Imagine the feedback channel to product development you would get from an engaged audience of customers, advocates, and prospective users that all truly care about what you’re doing.

Another driving principle behind InfluenceHR is over-delivering on our promise via our agenda.  We’ve promised you one day that will turn marketing to the HR buyer on its head.  Mark’s keynote alone does that, but we didn’t stop there.  I’m excited to tell you more about our other speakers and our agenda in upcoming posts.

If you haven’t registered for InfluenceHR yet, do it now… The Early-Bird discount expires on March 15.  You’ll make your CFO happy.