I had the opportunity to do one of the keynotes at SilkRoad’s first user conference earlier this week. It is a cool experience to go to the first user conference for a vendor. The crowd was pretty good (I do not have an official count, but I would estimate around 200 customer attendees – if someone from SilkRoad wants to comment with the official numbers I will do an update to the post). SilkRoad focused a lot on the culture they are building and the importance of offering a full suite of HCM solutions. I did respect that they had Citrix doing a customer keynote because they are not a full suite customer and gave Rich Berger the freedom to discuss their solution landscape. Like many customers, they have a portfolio of HCM solutions that they are managing. Citrix uses SilkRoad RedCarpet for onboarding and their move from a paper-based, manual process to a 98% paperless process was impressive. In addition, the creation of location-specific new hire portals using RedCarpet (and demonstrated during the presentation) was very interesting as it is often a challenge we see for global organizations wanting to implement onboarding. One of the big takeaways was the focus on time to productivity by Citrix in its onboarding efforts. We see increasing focus on this measure as opposed to time to hire.
I also had the opportunity to attend a Social Recruiting workshop in the afternoon put on by Thomas Boyle from SilkRoad and Rob Humphrey from LinkedIn. It was a good introduction for attendees to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Most of the attendees had some level of experience with social networks and were very interested in best practices in leverage those tools to improve recruiting effectiveness. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the entire workshop so I was not able to see how things turned out, but clearly, based on the attendance, there was a lot of interest in this topic.
As with most user conferences, a lot of the value was in the networking and you could see customers starting to connect with each other at meals and breaks and sharing experiences. That is really what these events are all about.
I was not able to attend the whole conference so if you did attend and have more to add on your experience, please feel free to comment on this post and add to this report.
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