Just back from Microsoft Redmond and a very educational trip! On this occassion it was a bit of an ordeal getting there and back. Instead of the normal flight from London straight to Seattle I had to be redirected to O'Hare and Chicago which added 4 extra hours to my flight. Coming back from London to Dublin was also problematic with a 3 hour delay. However, packed with some Altoids curiously strong cinnamon mints, my new Bose acoustic noise cancelling headphones (which Santa gave me), a copy of the excellent "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes", by Daniel Everett, ( review and purchase) and last but not least some sleeping pills it all turned out swimmingly in the end.
We all know there is a lot of exciting things happening in the world of recruitment with social media and social computing. On this visit I got to learn about Microsoft's 3 year strategy in this space and how from an enterprise approach how to start planning for the deployment of a very innovative global social recruitment strategy that integrats with some complex internal databases, our career site, and a number of centres of excellences such as work force planning, staffing marketing and central sourcing, not to mention about 70 different recruitment teams around the world! I'll be on point for deploying our solutions in LATAM, MEA and India and am looking forward to getting out to those regions, partnering with our business leaders and recruitment teams and helping to evangelise and educate our partners. It's going to be a very busy 2010.
I've just had a chance to check my Irish Recruiters mail and want to say a big thanks to those who signed up to the subscription program (for those who didn't - who knows maybe you'll take part next year). The one recruiter who got their subscription in at 11pm today; I hope I didn't ruin your evening and you had to run home from the pub :) Thanks again. Your commitment and support will help me a lot as I plan for the year ahead. Now that your part of the program you'll be getting your IR+ newsletters. I intend putting a lot of energy into this so there'll be some great content. It will be focused very much on the true "recruitment geeks" out there!
