ADP Meeting of the Minds 2016 is bustling with activity and buzzing with conversation this week! HR leaders from large enterprises are gathering to see how they can improve the user experience for their employees, while refining the processes they use to acquire, develop and retain talent.

As I said in my last post, the theme of this year’s event being conducted in the Washington, D.C., area is “Build Your Capital.” Attendees are using the conference to network with and learn from each other.  They’re also taking advantage of the nearly 200 educational sessions being conducted.  Among some popular topics of interest are benefits solutions, the innovative use of application programming interfaces (APIs), data analytics, and veteran hiring, just to mention a few.

This year the buzz has intensified around further innovations on the user experience.  Attendees’ focus also is being drawn to enhanced recruitment management best practices that more deeply integrate with social media, profiling, hiring analytics and onboarding tools.

The conference also is building on last year’s success, when we made a commitment to our clients to enrich our benefits user experience, data analytics, and diagnostics and optimization solutions.  During our opening general session, three ADP clients talked about how those solutions are helping their businesses.

ADP President and Chief Executive Officer Carlos Rodriguez welcomes more than 1,400 attendees to ADP Meeting of the Minds.

Our daylong Benefits Summit explored a number of topics, including:

  • how viewing employees as customers and focusing on the “moments that matter” in their lives can provide greater value to them and the employer;
  • driving better business outcomes with an integrated benefits strategy;
  • current and impending federal regulatory issues and wellness programs;
  • developing a benefits strategy in an evolving human capital management landscape.

Fifty-five clients representing 44 employers and 250,000 employees attended and contributed to the dialogue of this Monday session.
Gerry Leonard, president of ADP Benefits Services, talks to Benefits Summit conferees about providing services to employees at those “moments that matter” in their lives.

We’re also sharing examples of the benefits of ADP APIs, which let companies enhance data-sharing capabilities across their enterprise applications with a single set of workforce data.  Collaborating with system developers is commonplace for us.  Through the ADP Marketplace, clients, partner companies and applications developers can gain access to our APIs through a secure cloud platform.

Data analytics still is a hot topic with attendees, as you might expect. Businesses are interested in learning how capabilities like predictive modeling, data exchange and benchmarking can help them be a more strategic contributor to business decisions.  Predictive modeling can help reveal the risk of an employee leaving the company.  Data exchange gives businesses the ability to use API’s through the ADP Marketplace to add their non-HCM data, like sales revenue and customer service scores, and marry them with data from sources, such as time management.

We also added a new track this year on Veteran Hiring, which focuses on helping hiring managers recognize and translate the skills servicemen and women bring to the civilian workplace.  Our clients tell us that hiring Veterans presents them with some unique challenges.  Earlier in the week, we discussed ways to:

  • appeal to the Veteran population and attract them to a company;
  • effectively use social media to locate and attract Veterans;
  • build a solid Veteran recruitment and retention strategy, and
  • challenge and develop Veteran hires once they’re on board.

To gear up for that session we hosted an ADP Foundation-sponsored volunteer service project supporting Operation Gratitude, a non-profit organization providing care packages to servicemen and women deployed around the world.  More than 500 volunteers assembled 3,000 hygiene kits and 500 “Battalion Buddies” teddy bears that will be combined with other items and shipped to the deployed troops.  Attendees also signed thank-you notes for the troops that will be included in the Operation Gratitude care packages.

Hygiene kits and thank-you notes were just two of the items included in ADP’s Operation Gratitude packages.  

You can check out more information about the ADP Meeting of the Minds 2016 conference and video highlights from previous conferences on ADP’s website.

And don’t forget to circle back next week when I’ll be sharing more highlights from the conference.