Some quick thoughts on the really quite good - Enhance Media's Online Recruitment - 2009 - The Year Ahead Conference.

Great turnout. With bad news aplenty in the industry, it's nice to be reminded that online recruitment advertising remains a massive opportunity (we still think at least £200+mm in the UK) with many smart people involved. Companies are still recruiting, but to a lesser degree, and there is greater pressure on them to be accountable and to improve ROI with their recruitment spend. When top line revenue growth is threatened, the companies that succeed will find ways to increase operating margins. Per the talks:

Luisa Mauro - YouTube: Agree with her that YouTube is big. Agree that video shows promise and would be interested in seeing more examples of recruiters and HR managers making use of video. Using video for Ads (personal or corporate) is fun and is a natural progression, but I'm sure there are more interesting ways to make use of video in the recruitment sector and we'd be interested in working with companies that are developing new tech/approaches to video.

Simon Appleton & Tony Jewell - Workcircle: Enjoyed their talk. I like the case study model of presenting and they effectively laid out their approach to traffic acquisition is a useful manner. Although at a certain level, all online businesses are arbitrage plays, Workcircle offers a great value proposition and is more explicitly a lead acquisition arbitrage play. Asymmetrical information is a great advantage in these situations, but platforms like Adwords provide a degree of transparency that will force Workcircle to work harder and harder to maintain their advantage but I'm sure they'll find a way.

Jeremy Mason - Revenue Science: I've always been a fan of behavioral tracking but with more and more performance based media available, I've made less use of it than I have in the past. With CPM buys it's critical, but for advertisers on CPC/CPA campaigns, not so much. For publishers trying to push up their effective CPMs, we'll see more and more of it. Would like to have had his talk more focused on behavioral targeting centered in the recruitment space. I'm sure from opposition research, to talent poaching, to better understanding the passive job seeker, that there is some great data and case studies they could present.

Giles Guest - Enhance Media: Admire his bravery in talking about the future in such a turbulent time. Also, thought it brave to offer definitive definitions for Web 1-3.0 when even the developers of the technologies that enable these shifts don't have clear definitions for them. Not sure the analog (Rolling Stones 1-3.0) really helped. How Rolling Stones 3.0 meshes with the semantic web isn't abundantly clear especially in the framework of the four dimensions that he put forward. Thought his talk was best when focused on how he has effectively used new technologies in the recruitment space. Not sure on the theory of changing the recruitment process from reactive to proactive. Think there just might be too much "noise" and "fuzziness" in the data to develop technologies that would enable this. He's clearly a bright guy and we would be interested in hearing this hypothesis laid out in more detail. The Long Tail is also a tricky framework to present a value chain analysis. We also welcome more discussion on how aggregators impact the value chain in recruitment.

Josh Smith - Facebook: I like the Facebook ad platform. Would like to see more of the media buyer tools that AdWords has, but for demo/behavioral targeting on a CPC basis it's tough to beat. Good presenter.

Tim Forster - PWC: Real world examples are useful and this was a nice case study of how PWC got into the blog business. Good extemporaneous speaker which was useful since he's probably not the closest individual in the organization to the management of their blog efforts. Difficult to assess the success of their efforts or even just how to benchmark the ROI. Would be interested in learning about their metrics for success even if it's just a brand building exercise. Amused when he suggested that poaching of their personnel was, not so unwelcome, in this environment.

Janet Berry - Bracknell Forest Council: Like her no nonsense, brass tacks approach to their recruitment efforts. Also, that she was open about challenges to their efforts whether they were IT, institutional, or even generational (amusing to learn that their Facebook campaigns have to be managed remotely since workplace facebooking is not allowed and about how tetchy those Gen X folks can be). Good to see that they're still recruiting and that even though they've reduced their recruitment budget by 40% that they are looking not, at just reducing their efforts, but at being smarter in how they allocate their spend.

Dr. Steven Finch - Daxtra: Although, this was the talk I was most interested in (I'm kind of a data nut), the notion that it's difficult to glean knowledge from data is fairly well known. Would like to have seen more of a tie in to the recruitment space and think that the talk could have been better tailored to the audience.

All in all, though a great day. Thanks, Enhance Media.

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