Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient 2018 — Marquis Who’s Who Publications

Staffing/Recruiting Professional of the Year 2017; Woman of Excellence 2017 — Strathmore's Who's Who

Official Honoree Webby Award 2006

Jeanne Heydecker

I created an entirely new candidate experience which reduced the number of unaccepted offers to less than 2%. I created a new trainee welcome kit, standardized interview questions, interview scoring rubric, candidate experience survey, and improved hiring process. Decreased attrition from 72% to 24% in one year. I also developed a complete update of trainee courseware: scoring rubrics, assessments, worksheets, and presentations while decreasing the duration of programming by 50% to get trainees onto the work floor in 4 weeks. An ideal mentor, I pushed continuous innovation within the company by personally delivering leadership development training and acting as chief mentor for all internal startups testing several business models for expanding services and markets.

TALENT ACQUISITION AND TRAINING

As a non-programmer, I am highly skilled to write requirements documents focused on the user’s experience to ensure quality, engage employees and increase lifetime value. I have also identified internal processes and procedures that could be easily and affordably automated to enable employees to focus on higher level tasks. Having managed small and large development teams (120+), I have successfully automated a number of companies whose projects had stalled or failed completely in Linux, Microsoft and Apple networking environments.

CORPORATE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

I have been involved with trade shows all over the world since 1993, personally supervising the build and strike of custom booths ranging from 9 sqm to well over 900 sqm on five continents. I personally design all show floor plans in conjunction with subcontractors who build out my vision. I have been an exhibitor, conference planner, speaker, negotiator and problem solver, along with staffing scheduler, travel and logistics manager, securer of booth vendors, caterers, translators and other services. During my tenure at Shyam, I managed to decrease the average cost per square meter from $1,863 to $431 by second year.

EVENTS MANAGEMENT

I am well versed in design, usability, analytics, SEO, database structure, QA, and some programming (HTML and CSS). As a department of one, I designed, edited, and produced a series of 50+ web sites for a large public school district that won me a Webby Award due to their effectiveness in improving communication between staff, students and the community at large. I co-founded my own web consulting firm in Chicago and have built over 250 web sites since 1996. Before that, I worked for Lycos when it was #2 after Yahoo!, where we invented the pop-up window.

WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

LaunchPad is an organic organizational structure developed in India by my team at iPlace India, a recruitment process outsourcing company located in Pune, India. LaunchPad is a platform for all service and delivery personnel to succeed. It allows for rapid growth and success regardless of tenure. It gives every employee an opportunity to transform themselves into leaders with performance and merit as the only determinants. It ensures that the success of the company is shared with those who contributed to the success.
 
LaunchPad was developed to achieve a scalable and sustainable organizational structure without being bureaucratic. It pushes responsibility deep down into the organization and builds training and development into the daily work. LaunchPad develops leaders, recognizes those who do what is right for the company before themselves, and generates value for the organization through their knowledge, hard work and dedication. I can provide more detail on how this program works and how it helped me grow the company from 120 people to nearly 500 in four years.

REMOVING MANAGEMENT LAYERS AND EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES

I have successfully launched new companies, products, services, and sales channels, opened new markets, and added applications for existing products. I executed the launch of the first unified messaging software for small business that was sold to Nokia for US $56M in 1998 and won Best of Show at the Spring '99 CTI Expo. I executed the industry-changing launch of the world’s smallest closed loop motion control system that enabled hard drives to be formatted to 100,000 tracks per inch, which eventually sold to the GSI Group for US $54M. My latest major launch was introducing the world to the first entirely solar-powered mobile telecom and broadband internet network for India’s Shyam Telecom Group that now has systems deployed on five continents and has won several international awards.

LAUNCH STRATEGY

Most of the sales literature, web sites, technical manuals and sales catalogs have all required a proficient English writer that can put forward complex ideas and sell product. Most companies don’t have that person in-house. Personally, I write mostly about business, leadership, management and entrepreneurship.

WRITING

I have hired, trained and built many online marketing teams both is U.S. and India focused on internet marketing, traffic development and online sales conversion, taking dotcoms to 16 million page views per day, even while reducing staffing by half. 123Greetings.com became comScore's 8th fastest gaining property by December 2007 and we had reached 4th by February 2008.

INTERNET MARKETING

I launched an innovation program called "iMakeaDifference", where every idea, large or small, went through a formalized evaluation program. Approved projects gave the idea submitter a "seat at the table" through the evaluation, funding and execution planning. They were also recognized during monthly company meetings.

INNOVATION PROGRAMS

At 123greetings.com, email marketing was rebuilt, with a new list of characters going about their daily lives with story arcs building over a series of emails that increased open rates from 2% to 28% in six months. My team tested subject lines, colors, placement and delivery dates and times to maximize open and click-through rates, focusing on driving traffic to the web site.  Launched a companion blog that increased click-throughs from 6,000 per week to over 80,000 on a list of over 2 million U.S. emails

EMAIL MARKETING

I have been creating branding for companies large and small for over 25 years. I am an expert in the use of Adobe design software and can develop branding guidelines, stationery, sales collateral, web sites - everything you need to brand your organization. I can design anything from buildings to business cards.

DESIGN

Executed a 16-hour weekly Leadership Development program to train and mentor potential leaders within the company, with a special emphasis in Indian-American cross cultural awareness. This program focused on leadership, managing employees, communicating with clients, data collection, performance management, proactive business solutions, and execution best practices.
 
iLead Leadership Development Program 
-- What is Leadership? 
-- Handling Difficult Conversations  
-- Mastering Resource Allocation  
-- Mastering Mentoring  
-- Effective Weekly Client Calls 
-- Writing Professional Emails and Meeting Minutes 
-- On-boarding New Clients  
-- Fixing Poor Performing Accounts

I pushed continuous innovation within the company by personally delivering this 16 hour courseware, after which teams needed to come up with a business idea - either expanding our services, expanding our markets, or streamlining our business operations. They were required to create a pitch, SWOT analysis, execution plan and budget.

iLead Advanced Leadership Development Program
-- New Business Idea Generation Techniques
-- Conducting Feasibility Studies
-- Techniques for Developing a SWOT Analysis
-- Creating a Financial Forecast
-- Launching a New Firm/Service 
-- Performing Profit and Loss Statements
-- Hiring and Structuring Employee Organizational Charts

We then essentially performed a "Shark Tank" where all C-Level employees evaluated their presentations and determined whether or not to fund them.

If they were funded, these team members then became their own internal startup. I acted as chief mentor for all internal startups testing several business models for expanding services and markets. Some of those programs earn more per capita than our standard retainer business model. Some of them tanked and we closed them after a year, putting the team back into our standard business. They all knew that I had failed on our first internal startup due to bad software. They knew failure wouldn't kill them, they wouldn't lose their jobs, and I'd be there to help them be successful.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Portfolio Web Site

Accomplishments / Portfolio

BrainBench [transcript #3618734]: Certified Web Designer - Brainbench Certified Internet Professional, Certified Project Manager, and Certified Product Manager