It’s been a long day. The show hours were from 10am to 5:30pm and most of the day was quite busy. And then of course there were the multitude of after-hours parties that we received invites to.
Let’s back up to Tuesday though. We arrived at McCormick Place in Chicago on Tuesday afternoon and promptly registered. On our way to the registration desk, Tiffany and I had the distinct pleasure of seeing the co-chair himself, Bill Kutik. We talked with Bill for a few minutes and could tell he was looking forward to a great show. After registering, we proceeded to the exhibit hall to do everybody’s favorite part of the show – the booth set up! After it was all done, we met up with one of the vendors for a couple of drinks at the Hyatt Regency bar.
Fast forward to the next day, Wednesday, and the exhibit hall began with a bang at 10am. Of course there were lots of great HR technology tracks all day long but being in the exhibit hall all day, we weren’t able to visit any of the sessions so I can’t comment.
The exhibit hall traffic was steady at times and slow at other times. It also seemed there were more vendors and analysts than prospects themselves. Based on what I have seen at other recent shows, the economy fears seem to be affecting attendance at shows and conferences. It shouldn’t but the media is doing a great job at instilling fear in people and making the economy out to be worse than it actually is. People, get out and spend money and invest!!!
Ok, sorry for the digression and back to the exhibit hall. Even vendors who didn’t have booths were walking around to visit with other vendors. As a company that prides itself in being the leading Talent Management and HR Systems consulting firm, we enjoyed meeting with many vendors and look forward to visiting with more on the second day. We also enjoyed talking with current clients and prospects and look forward to turning those prospects into clients.
One of the negative side effects of being so busy at the booth as that I didn’t get a chance to walk around and visit with some of the other booths and vendors that we work with in the HR Technology space. Hopefully on day two and if any of you are reading this, stop by and see us in booth 427.
Of course the exhibit hall had the required desert breaks to get people to visit the exhibit hall but one of the more interesting things was the “cirque de soleil” type thing going on over the Taleo booth. It was certainly fun to watch from our vantage point.
After the long day at the booth we (Rick, Tiffany and I) headed over to the Hyatt Regency to visit Cornerstone OnDemand’s cocktail party as well as that of nowHIRE. After that we headed off-site to visit one of our competitor’s events that we got invited to by a mutual client and then off to Fulton’s by the River to visit Salary.com’s event. Another vendor was having an event there as well but we didn’t get an invite and were tired anyway so we headed back to the Hilton Chicago.
All in all, a successful day one at the HR Technology Conference.
Solving a piece of the puzzle…
Matt Lafata, HRchitect
mattlafata
Tiffany Appleby