Published Date: 12/14/2006

NYC Private Networking Reception leads to new hire

When the tried and true ways just don’t work, sometimes you need to get creative. That’s what ING has done with its Private Networking Reception (PNR) idea to recruit diverse talent. And great news! We have already secured our first hire as a result of the PNR event held in New York City last month.

The PNR is an alternative recruiting forum that ING started implementing this year. Partnering with one of our preferred executive search firms, the goal of these non-traditional events is to bring together 15–20 talented and qualified diverse insurance industry professionals in one location for power networking with ING leaders and hiring advisors. The concept has taken off at several U.S. sites and is also being leveraged by the ING Employee Networks.

“PNRs offer a proactive and opportunistic method for sourcing diverse talent and supplementing traditional searches,” said Jacqui Robertson, head of Workforce Diversity. “It also allows us to get to know passive talent, e.g., not actively looking in the marketplace, which we would not typically be privy to without proactive outreach.”

We have already hosted one very successful PNR in Atlanta earlier this year. In fact, one of the Atlanta invitees has already joined ING, and several others are in the pipeline and actively engaged.

We have also experimented with a variation on the PNR theme by conducting an in-house event in our Des Moines office. Managed completely by internal resources from Talent Management & Acquisition and hiring mangers, this initiative was also quite successful with one hire resulting so far and two more candidates in the active interviewing stage.

If we can continue to achieve an ROI that offsets our costs and if our business leaders find them beneficial, we will look at hosting more PNR’s next year.