We have a date for the first day of registration for the 2016 Top Echelon Network National Convention.

(Well, we don’t have a DATE, you and I . . . I’m a married man, after all. I mean we have selected a day for the start of registration.)

That day is Monday, December 7!

Starting on that day, you will be able to register for the convention with a credit card in the Members’ Area. You will also be able to view the preliminary agenda for the convention, which will provide a “sneak peek” of what you can expect from this networking and training event.

As we’ve mentioned before, the location of the National Convention is Las Vegas, and as I pointed out last week, there are placements waiting for you in Las Vegas. However, that’s just the start of the good news.

Below are additional details regarding the convention:

• The dates of the convention are Tuesday, April 19, and Wednesday, April 20.
• The main speaker will be Greg Doersching of Bullseye Recruiting.
• The site will be the Monte Carlo Resort & Casino.
• Our room rate for the Monte Carlo will be $58 per night!

With the release of registration on December 7, this will allow Network recruiting firms to register for the convention before the end of 2015, and thus they can apply the cost of the event to this year’s business expenses.

Membership in Top Echelon Network is currently at its highest mark in the past several years. Activity is up. Placements are up. Optimism is high.

Now is the perfect time to make plans to join us in Las Vegas. Invest in your Network membership and invest in your trading partners. The New Year will be here soon. Make it the best that it can possibly be!

Top Echelon Network member Deb North of Deb North Consulting, LLC lives in Kansas City. She loves Kansas City. And she loves the Kansas City Royals.

As most of you probably know, the Kansas City Royals won this year’s World Series by putting together a team that focused on fundamentals, especially when it came to never striking out. The Royals struck out with fewer frequency than any other team in the postseason, and that’s one of the big reasons that they won the championship.

The same can be said of Deb. She joined Top Echelon Network on March 28, 2012 (near the beginning of the Major League Baseball regular season, coincidentally). Below are her year-by-year placement totals since then:

2012—1 placement
2013—9 placements
2014—8 placements
2015—7 placements (so far)

Deb has made a total of 25 split placements as a Top Echelon Network members. Even more impressive, she’s made those 25 split placements with 17 different trading partners.

Like the Kansas City Royals, Deb has stellar networking fundamentals. Like the Royals, she hardly ever strikes out.

The Kansas City Royals are World Series winners, and Deb North is a winning Network recruiter in TE. That’s why we’re naming her Recruiter of the Week!

Congratulations, Deb, from everybody at Top Echelon. But if you don’t mind, we’d really like for the Cleveland Indians to win the Series next year. (Like Royals fans, we’ve been waiting a long time, too.)

— — —

Deb North

Trey Cameron

“I FINALLY have a seat at the ‘Trey Cameron Party Table.’ This candidate came in through [the website process]. He wasn’t a fit for that role, but I jumped all over him since he was a JAVA Developer with a stable work history. I made several marketing calls, secured him an interview, they brought him back for a second, and now we have a placement. Definitely a reminder to myself that I need to skill market more often.”

Submitted by Deb North of Deb North Consulting, LLC regarding her Network split placement with Trey Cameron of the Cameron Craig Group

Position Title—SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

Fee Percentage—2o%

(Editor’s note: This is the first Network split placement that North and Cameron have made together in Top Echelon.)

— — —

Sean Napoles, CPC

“Sean was on a mission to fill one of these jobs, and we finally got one. It was a bumpy road, and I had to have a very candid conversation with the client. Thank you for working hard on this, Sean, and for being a great trading partner.”

Submitted by Deb North of Deb North Consulting, LLC regarding her Network split placement with Sean Napoles, CPC of Career Brokers, Inc.

Position Title—HRIS ANALYST

Fee Percentage—25%

(Editor’s note: This is the second Network split placement that North and Napoles have made together in Top Echelon.)

Next week is Thanksgiving. You may or may not be in the office next week, and if you are, it might only be for a day or two.

We at Top Echelon like to have a little bit of fun when the circumstances call for it. We believe they’re calling right now. That’s because, with the upcoming and the last installment of the James Bond movie series (Spectre) in theaters, this would be a good time for the following poll question in the Members’ Area:

Which actor has portrayed James Bond the best?

Results:

The choice of answers that we provided is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that selected each one:

• Sean Connery — 68.4%
• Roger Moore — 15.4%
• Timothy Dalton — 0.0%
• Pierce Brosnan — 9.4%
• Daniel Craig — 6.8%

Analysis:

Well, there aren’t too many surprises with this poll, either. I would have put cold, hard, cash money on the fact that Sean Connery would be the most popular choice, and he was. Connery ran away with over 68% of the vote.

However, that’s when things get interesting. The second-most popular Bond? Roger Moore at 15.4%! Who would have guessed? Then Pierce Brosnan came in third with 9.4% of the vote, and Daniel Craig was fourth at 6.8%.Sean

As for Timothy Dalton? Sad, sad Timothy Dalton? Well, he garned not a single vote in our recruiter poll of Top Echelon Network. So in the “World of Bond,” not everybody is a winner . . .

Conclusion:

There are two main conclusions that can be drawn from the results of this poll of recruiters:

1. First, nobody is going to dethrone Sean Connery as the best James Bond of all time . . . at least, the best in terms of what the majority of people on the plant Earth believe.
2. Second, the James Bond franchise is now officially sagging with Craig in the lead role. To illustrate how far he’s fallen, there was talk of HIM being the best Bond ever when he graced the silver screen in Casino Royale. Not only is nobody saying that anymore, he was fourth (fourth!) out of the five choices in our poll—and the guy who finished fifth received zero votes.

It’s not easy being Bond. Good luck to the next guy who decides he wants his martinis shaken and not stirred.

(Bonus trivia: Burt Reynolds was offered the role of Agent 007 in 1970. He turned it down. But he would received just as many votes as Dalton if I had included his name in this poll.)

We’ve been posting quite a few photos on our Facebook Fan Page lately. You might have noticed that we started a new album titled “‘Blast From the Past’ Recruiter Networking.” This album contains photos of Top Echelon Network recruiters networking with each other during the past several years.

Included in these are photos of Network recruiters interacting at regional core group meetings. Speaking of which, the Ohio Regional Core Group held its annual meeting in Columbus last week.

I was in attendance at the meeting, and I have to say that it was a great event! There were over 40 recruiters there, and everybody was excited to share hot job orders and candidates and talk with one another.

There is NO doubt that split placements will result from this event, which we’ll be chronicling in future issues of The Pinnacle Newsletter Blog. However, there are three additional points I’d like to make:

1. We have posted photos from the Ohio Regional Core Group meeting on our Facebook Fan Page, which you can access by clicking on the link below.
2. If you were in attendance at the meeting and you have photos that you’d like to share, please send them to marketing@topechelon.com.
3. There is going to be a Top Echelon Florida recruiters meeting at the beginning of next year!

That’s right: the Florida Regional Core Group is meeting on Friday, January 8, in Orlando. At this point, those are the only details associated with the meeting. We’ll release additional details as they become available, most likely in the news section of the Members’s Area.

“Ohio Regional Core Group Meeting” Album!

If you’d like to attend the Florida Regional Core Group meeting, please contact me at 330.455.1433, x156 or via email at drea@topechelon.com.

Ohio and Florida recruiters are NOT the only ones who are able to meet face-to-face in Top Echelon! At one time in the Network, we had between six and eight regional core groups in operation. If you’re interested in starting a group in your area, then by all means, let me know and we will explore the possibilities.

But in the meantime, what could be better than Orlando in January?