New Webinar Service Warmly Greeted at #SHRM09

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2009 annual conference opened yesterday afternoon with a keynote by legendary CEO, Jack Welch. Most of the 10,000+ paid attendees then made their way from the main presentation room at the mile long New Orleans Convention Center over to the massive exhibit hall to begin their discussions with the hundreds of exhibitors as well as snack on catfish fingers, gumbo, mushroom caps, beer, wine, soda, and more.
The exhibit hall was open from 4 until 7pm yesterday and traffic to the CollegeRecruiter.com booth was pretty good from 4 until about 6:15pm and then dropped off a cliff. By 6:45pm it was much harder to spot attendees than exhibitors but that’s pretty normal for these types of events as the reality is that most of the attendees come into the exhibit hall for the free food and drink and then leave to enjoy their evenings at local restaurants and bars. And given that this year’s conference is in New Orleans, there’s no shortage of either.

We were pleased with the upbeat crowd and and positive feedback about our existing job posting, targeted email, and cell phone text messaging tools and also very happy with the interest paid to our newest offering: paid career and recruiting webinars. We just started offering webinars to candidates to help them with their career development, to college career service offices to help them help their students and alumni, and to employers to help them better recruit and manage their Gen Y workforce.