I'm very excited to be writing about StepStone's approach to involving customers in the enhancement of its product portfolio.

StepStone Ideas launched today to the i-GRasp customer community to post and discuss suggestions for features to be added to the product roadmap.  Representatives of each customer organisation play an active role in defining the priorities for future releases of the product by voting on the ideas of others - the higher the votes for an idea, the higher it sits in the priorities of the community and so it gets tackled sooner by our product managers.

This is a momentous step towards ensuring that the customer is at the centre of everything that StepStone does and comes off the back of the 2008 Net Promoter Score survey - another tool that customers have to influence how StepStone do things.

I look forward to welcoming the ET Web and EasyCruit customer communities to StepStone Ideas in the first half of 2009 and to sharing the results of StepStone Ideas with you.  

Like many people at this time of year, I've been looking back over the last 12 months and thinking about the highs and lows and how they have impacted me or those around me.

One of the high points for me job-wise came early in the year, when I attended the Online Recruitment - The Year Ahead conference organised by Enhance Media.  It was a good day with many excellent speakers with interesting presentations, my personal favourite was Tim Elkington's on the HOW E RU survey.

The HOW E RU survey is a great piece of work that gives respondents a quick view of how sophisticated they are as web users and gives Enhance Media a powerful set of data that can be used to show the sophisitication of web users by demographic factors. 

I found this particularly useful from the perspective of candidates using recruitment websites powered by StepStone and recruiters using our products to manage those candidates.   The key messages? 

1. The internet has a long tail - there is a huge difference between the capability of beginner and expert users 
2. We need to remember where our target audience sits on that continuum of capability.

Good points to keep in mind when thinking about how to reach-out to candidates, or to get recruiting managers and other users to make the best of the tools available.

I'm hoping to hear more about this survey and looking forward to listening to one of our customers, Tim Forster at PWC,  present at next years conference on the 29th of January.       

I posted recently on the importance of Talent Management techniques in a downward economy.  It was interesting then to see a post by Andy Atkins of Interaction Associates that suggests that CEO's are focussing their energies on other issues in order to get through the economic turbulence.