Dear Community,

We are very excited about the confirmed presenters for the Recruiting & Retaining High Skilled Talent event on February 18th at the Radisson La Crosse Hotel. This event was developed to address member concerns about finding skilled workers that they need to sustain their businesses. Hiring a Skilled Workforce was a major concern of more than 87% of the businesses we surveyed in our 2014 Business Retention and Engagement Survey. We are pleased to bring together this incredible level of expertise for you to learn best practices that can be applied at your organization. 

Several members have asked me, “Who should we send to this seminar?” We recommend that you send a team of Executives, HR Directors, and Hiring Managers.  Consider sending your internal champions who embrace innovation and are dedicated to hiring top talent. 

The Mayo Clinic Health System will be our event sponsor and Joe Kruse, CEO of Mayo Clinic Health system La Crosse will provide the keynote presentation, “Recruiting the best and brightest talent in the world.” Kelly Broili, Social Media Manager at Starbucks will provide an opening presentation based on her work building engagement and loyalty with millennials at Starbucks and in her previous work at Microsoft.

General session presenters include Craig Porter, CEO of PlastiCert, who will share his work on creating a great workplace culture; Scott Siebert, HR Director and Karen Kouba, HR Generalist at TRANE, will give a joint presentation with Tim Tritch, Interim Director of Career Services at UW-La Crosse and Patti Balacek, Director of Business Development at Western Technical College, on creating talent pipelines from higher education into the TRANE Company; Susan Whitewater, VP for Business Development at PeopleFirst HR Solutions and Gina Schultz, Human Resource Assistant/Consultant at PeopleFirst HR Solutions, will give a presentation on motivating millennials; Sarah Harris, VP of Workforce Solutions at the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation will share an innovative approach to workforce recruiting that reaches over 100,000 potential workers every month. 

The event will be held on February 18th from 7:30 to 11:30am at the Radisson La Crosse Hotel and includes breakfast. To attend, go to www.7riversalliance.com and click on the event flyer or print the registration form and email it to info@7riversalliance.com. Tickets are $70 before the event or $80 at the event. For additional information, call our office at 608-787-8777. Special thanks to those of you who have already registered.

We have other exciting events planned for you as well. Read on and mark your calendars.

Happy New Year!

Lisa Herr
Executive Director