Follow Cytiva on Facebook or Twitter

Want to get the latest information from Cytiva? The best way to do that is to follow us on either Facebook or Twitter.

Since starting our blog way back in 2006, the options for how we communicate have evolved dramatically.

The immediacy of Twitter and the community provided by Facebook are now two important parts of how we interact with clients, HR professionals, employees, colleagues and the HR software industry in general.

We love our blog and we will continue to use it to convey information and present topics that requires more depth. But the speed of Twitter and Facebook allows us to communicate more “update” type information effectively and conveniently.

So we invite you to subscribe to our blog feed, but also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get easy and fast updates.

Why you ask? That’s easy. Cytiva presents free informational webinars on recruiting issues each month. And we regularly make available HR industry reports, white papers and case studies. We do this because we have a tremendous amount of domain expertise within our company and client base, and we want to share that with the world. No hype, no spin, just good information that you can use to improve your talent management efforts. Of course, if you ever need help with recruiting, onboarding or performance management, you’ll know who to call.

Here’s a sample of the resources we’ve made available free in just the last couple of months alone:

• A webinar exploring Web 2.0 technologies for recruiting
• A webinar about building your employment brand
• A white paper giving tips on how to tell if your applicant tracking data is safe
• A webinar showing how to uncover hidden cost savings in your recruiting process
• A white paper providing six steps to successfully implementing performance management technology
• A case study detailing E2Open’s success with SonicPerform
• A case study detailing how LoJack cuts costs with SonicRecruit

So whether you follow us on our website, subscribe to our blog, our or get active updates through Twitter or Facebook, it doesn’t matter. But please do follow us somehow, or you’ll miss out on some great resources to help you better do your job. And tell your colleagues to follow us as well.


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Riding the Bus: SHRM Conference 2009

By Ian Alexander

Cytiva is happy to have attended the 61st annual SHRM Conference and Expo last week. We posted updates to our Twitter and Facebook followers throughout the conference and now, after a few days of reflection, it’s time to blog.

The conference itself was well managed as usual. SHRM puts on a great event and makes the entire affair seem easy. From roaming information clerks to convenient and on time busses, SHRM does it right. On the downside, attendance was half of what it was last year, and there were significantly fewer HR vendors in the expo.

That’s fine with us. As a vendor, we appreciate a distilled attendee base and fewer booths to compete with. Ironically, there was a direct competitor to us right across the aisle. This is something that has never happened to me in almost 15 years of exhibiting at SHRM. I don’t know if it was our booth, our staff or our products, but it was good to see that we outdrew our competition in booth traffic by an unscientific three to one.

SHRM has always been a conference that tends to draw smaller companies and (relatively) lower level practitioners. I believe that the lower attendance was good in that it, a) provided a universe of practitioners from companies that are spending money (many travel budgets are frozen these days) and, b) weeded out some of the practitioners who are too early in their careers to have much influence or participation in the purchasing process.

Cytiva made contact with a record number of people at the conference, including several happy customers. And, as always, SHRM is the ultimate voice of reality in the realm of HR technology. As HR technologists, we can tend to get wrapped up in the value and glory of our cool solutions and lose touch with reality. We are, almost by definition, ahead of the curve and SHRM is a great way of slapping us back down to earth and letting us know just how far behind us the curve actually is.

So you think Twitter, Ning, Facebook, SaaS (I’m sorry “Cloud Computing”), bloggers, et al, are changing the face of business/HR?

Ride the SHRM bus.

The SHRM bus to and from the hotel is my personal reality check. Every year I ride the SHRM bus and start talking to people about what matters to them. Invariably, it’s not leveraging the cloud to create a living network of connections that they can use to harness internal knowledge, align employees and source the highest levels of talent.

Of course not. This stuff is only immediately compelling to those of us that bathe in it daily and see the potential for its benefit. Today’s HR has a wide range of issues to deal with, not the least of which is its own place at the strategy table. Cytiva announced several new web 2.0 features for our products and while these things are cool and appreciated by the membership, they will take time to take hold and prove their value.

Some people complain that the conference is too broad, including comp, benefits, legal, incentives, recruiting, and the like. But I say SHRM is a great place to take the real pulse of HR and gauge what you’re up against as a technology product company. Things move slowly on the SHRM bus. And it’s usually full up with a lot of stuff that your technology doesn’t deal with. That’s what HR is: too much stuff that has to be done, not enough stuff that actually innovates and/or transforms.

That said, the conference was upbeat and hopeful in the midst of a lot of turmoil and economic uncertainty. In that sense, it was a great conference to attend and I thank all the people who stopped by our booth.