If you do not know, Elevate 2015 is the world’s largest virtual summit organized by HireVue and BambooHR last week to discuss all things HR and business. With 60 webinars conducted by industry-leading experts and visionaries, the summit offers a wide array of insights and revelations in many areas, including recruiting, sourcing talent, strategy, leadership, talent management, culture, and HR research, tips, and tricks. You can see the full agenda here.

For any busy professionals, it is impossible to check out all the great knowledge being shared. The good news? All sessions will be on-demand for the next month, so if you have time to kill, check out the sessions yourself here. However, for the busy bees which I think most of HR professionals are, below is a quick roundup that I curated to help you catch up on the key trends and insights discussed in Elevate 2015. Since there are 6 key tracks with 60 sessions, I am going to highlight only the most interesting sessions to me. This first post covers Recruiting & Leadership tracks. Look out for our next blog posts to read the summary of the rest of the tracks. 

Track 1 - Recruiting 

It's Never Too Late To Try: How and Why Social Media Still Matters to HR 

Laurie Ruettimann (@lruettimann)

This is one of my most favorite sessions of the entire summit, not only because of Ruettimann’s personable and enthusiastic approach, but also because of the great case studies and best practices that she shared. 

Ruettimann’s main message to HR professionals: when it comes to social media, move from a fear-based approach to an open mind and open heart.

To truly succeed with social media presence, HR, sales, and marketing need to work together, to learn from one another – put together a smart social plan to attract and retain the right candidates.

Ruettimann suggests the easiest way to start is to look at what other companies have done online successfully and copy it. With that, she proceeds with 6 great case studies to learn from. Here are some highlights:

• NPR: despite operating on a shoestring budget, NPR has been successfully attracted and hired young workers by leveraging their social media strategy. The non-profit organization trusts its intern to tell unapologetic stories about life at NPR through all of its main social media channels: Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter.  
  
• HireVue: The Company starts onboarding process before day 1 by allowing new hires to introduce themselves and get to know team members through video-enriched profiles. On the 1st day of the new hire, they roll out a red carpet, take professional photograph, and ask their employees to go onto LinkedIn to update their LinkedIn profile with the new picture. They truly encourage employees to celebrate their new jobs on social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., as a way to celebrate the brand, without fear of losing their new hires to poaching.  
  
• The Motley Fool created an interactive employee handbook and puts it online so anyone can check out “The Fool Rules” even before applying for any position in the company. This practice shows a great level of transparency and allows prospective candidates to truly understand the company’s purposes, core values, roadmap, etc.  

Ruettimann also cites Warby Parker, PwC, and Kinetix as great examples of companies who smartly use social media to communicate their atmospheres and culture. If you can spare 30 minutes, definitely check out Laurie Ruettimann’s engaging webinar yourself. 

Hiring for Attitude

Mark Murphy (@LeadershipIQ)

Mark Murphy’s presentation introduces a radical rethink of the hiring process. While most executives hire the most technically competent people, Murphy reveals that 46% of newly-hired employees will fail within 18 months for reasons of attitude, not for lack of skill. 

Murphy suggests the three basic steps to start hiring for attitude include:

• Discover your unique attitudes:  
  To identify your organizational attitudes, perform a 3-3-3 exercise where you compare the best 3 performers against the worst 3 performers in the past 3 months to define the attitude differences among the two groups, and pinpoint what attitudes your organization wants to hire for.  
  
  
• Build attitudinal interview questions: 
  Look at differential situations that separate high performers from low performers, i.e., a software system change, a request from a customer to do something outside the employee’s expertise, etc., to turn those situations into interview questions.  
  
  Leave the questions hanging. Do not give away the answer in the question. Give open-ended questions so that interviewees have the freedom to reveal their true attitude without being influenced on what might be the right answer. For example, instead of asking “Could you tell me a time when you have to adapt to a difficult situation? What did you do?”, ask “Could you tell a time when you face a difficult situation?” 
  
• Prepare an answer guideline for interviewers 
  An answer guideline puts everyone on the same page. For every interview question you ask, put together sample answers that show warning signs, and samples that signal positivity. Give the guideline as a cheat sheet to all interviewers. 

Overall, this is a great session not to be missed. There are much more useful advices and actionable tips throughout the webinar. Listen to Marc Murphy, read his book – “Hiring for Attitude”, if you really want to hire the best candidates for your organization.  

The Talent Secret: The Link between Hiring and Revenue

Sarah Brennan (@imsosarah) 

Sarah Brennan is founder of Accelir, a boutique firm focused on the intersection between talent and growth. Sarah Brennan’s presentation reveals an eye-opening correlation between employee engagement and business performance. 

According to Brennan, poor employee engagement results in a 4x higher turnover rate, costing $11 million each year in talent replacement, and $550 million loss in revenue. On the contrary, a culture of engagement can result in 2.5X revenue increase. After all, consumers like to buy from happy people.

Brennan suggests employers should build their engagement strategy from Day – 100:

Most business problems can be eliminated by hiring the right people, so companies should start talking about engagement from the recruiting and onboarding process. During recruiting, tell candidates about the company’s strategy and bigger picture. On the first 30 days of the new hire, check in frequently and provide feedback on performance at least once a week.

To summarize, the five quick tips to engagement success are:

• Start at Employment Branding 
• Built through recruitment 
• Supported through onboarding 
• Developed through talent management 
• Lost through silence   
  

The Science of Hiring & Communication

Mike Cheney (@cheneymd) 

Cheney’s presentation boils down to how organizations can avoid the heavy price of picking the wrong hires by utilizing a methodology that match up a person’s characteristics with the nature & culture of the job.   

Cheney explains personalities at work can be divided into four patterns:

• Dominant (12% population): this personality is fundamentally task oriented and resiliently drives for results. 
  
• Expressive (19% population): this group love to talk, lead, and are very comfortable in expressive nature. 
  
• Analytical (32% population): these people like orders and care a great deal about getting a task done correctly the first time. 
  
• Amiable (37% population): individuals using this pattern are considerate communicators who are very group oriented 

To hire right, you need to match the right pattern to the right job. Also, managers need to be trained to manage and communicate effectively with each of these personalities.

• Dominant – be clear and direct in communication, have answers for them fast. What the bottom line is. 
  
• Expressive – these people are interested in building relationships. Perfect for a sale position. Let them know what the big picture is. 
  
• Analytical – these people do not divulge what they think easily, but they communicate before asking questions to hear responses and measure that responses. Be prepared to answer their questions in details. 
  
• Amiable: Take note that this group likes to ask for permission before taking action, and build everything on trust. If you are a manager, never promise anything that cannot happen.  
  

If you are interested in finding out what personality pattern you have, and how they can work for you or against you in your current position, take this assessment test: http://bit.ly/persogenics

Code: 0ouS53RH  

Track 2 – Leadership  

You Can’t Manage Millennials

Mike Maughan (@MikeMaughan)

Mike Maughan's seminar boils down the Professional Millennial conundrum into a straightforward query, and the results are fascinating.  

Maughan eases us into an absolute fact: by 2025, 75% of the workforce is going to be made up of Millennials. Maughan positions this truth as an opportunity of engagement rather than a dour forecast and gets to-the-point of this future (well, the future is now) workplace.

So when you get down to it, here's what really matters to this up-and-coming generation of innovation:

• Millennials might seem like a generation of entrepreneurs, but they're actually more entrepreneurial than self-made. This means that they strive toward self-directed environments, but they crave the stability and structure of a traditional workplace. Take note recruiters. 
  
  
• Millennials envision mentors and team leads over hierarchical bosses. This generation values in-the-trenches leadership over domineering bosses of the classical stock (and really, who wouldn't), but again, they thrive under inspiring collaborative structure. 
  
• And perhaps most importantly, Millennials want room to advance in a company with challenging and rewarding projects. Contrary to their flighty reputations, Millennials want to connect with inspiring companies and teams and take root for the long haul. 

One Click to Download This  
Ultimate Checklist for Successful Millennial Recruiting

Management 3.0: Manage The System, Not The People

Jurgen Appelo (@jurgenappelo)  

Jurgen Appelo's engaging seminar offers a fascinating alternative structure to traditional team management. Appelo suggests that we facilitate a basic management system, rather than “manage” the people who support it.    

Appelo stays on target with concepts like:

• Allowing your team to construct their own job titles and professional identities. This kind of self-directed positioning can inspire tremendous team confidence and collaboration. 
  
• De-emphasizing inflated job titles. After all, it's all too easy to lose sight of what really matters in the workplace when your job title is something of a tongue twister. Appelo suggests that we gracefully transition into a model of personalized value and out of outdated titular politics. 
  
• Maximizing remote team efforts with innovation and creative collaboration. Appelo isn't one for the office culture of the 20th Century, and he recognizes that some of the most effective teams aren't in close proximity to each other. He suggests bold team exercises like creative mind maps...quite brainy. 

If you haven't already, definitely check out Jurgen Appelo's wonderful seminar.

Don't Survey Your Employees.. Engage Them

Josh Little (@joshlittle) 

Josh Little suggests that we forgo the modern survey format for a higher level of engagement. Little laments the over-saturation of dull-tailed company surveys and finds in excitement in the alternative of quizzes. He's created a nearly electric work atmosphere with a subversive strategy.  

Here's how and why:

• Statistically, people are more engaged (and more motivated) by valuable content than surveys. In other words, nearly everyone is more interested in what kind of Disney princess they are than rating a company's service on an arbitrary link. 
  
• Employee feedback works...and it tells you exactly what you want to know. This kind of information is invaluable, enough said. 
  
• Content is still king, and the data extraction is gold to mine. You can quite literally figure out whether your audience and workforce prefer Breaking Bad to Star Wars...and that's only the beginning.

To find out how you can use quiz data analytics to your (and your colleagues) advantage, check out Josh Little's engaging seminar – it's a 21 minutes more than well spent.

That is the summary for today. Hope you all have a good read. Subscribe to our blog to get notified when we will publish our 2nd part of Elevate 2015 roundup. 

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Note: This article was originally posted on Rakuna's blog. For the best visual quality,view the original post here.