It’s finally over, and I’m back in the office coming down from the cloud of SHRM13. SHRM really blew it out this year, with over 15,600 people in attendance.  As I look fondly back through the 26,000+ tweets that flowed like wine during the conference, I thought it might be fun to do a not-so-serious recap of my experience.

#1.  Next, year, let’s have SHRM on Mother’s day.  Equal Opportunity.  Jeremy Roberts, the new editor of SoureCon,said it best on his blog:

#SHRM13 will be awesome… but expect me on Monday :)

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It’s that time a year. Time to dust off my most comfortable pair of shoes (that I reserve only for SHRM) and get ready to head to Chicago for this year’s Annual SHRM Conference and Exposition.

So besides attending all of the resourceful sessions and seeing some interesting speakers (Hillary Clinton), I'm excited to explore Chicago.

This isn’t my first time to The Windy City, but I’ve had so much fun in the past, that even though I’ve done a lot of the “touristy” things I’m willing to do them again, so here is my list of the Top Ten Things to Do in Chicago while at SHRM (for first time visitors and veterans travelers).

CRM, ATS, JADs…the dizzying array of acronyms in the HR products and services ecosystem is overwhelming, and with the addition of new and unique players who are cropping up every day, the delineation between who vendors are and what they do has become blurry and confusing.

The product and technology roadmap from prospect to employee can be generally broken down into 7 major and distinct areas:

• Attract
• Source
• Recruit
• Assess
• Hire
• Retain
• Reward