Tag Archives: Speaking

Whoa! Where I’ll Be This Week

With this blog I normally try to stick to HR content that you can put to good use, but today I’m going to lean back and give a quick update on the things that are going on.

Talking social for HR

Tuesday I am speaking to a local SHRM chapter (Winfield) about social media for HR professionals. Love talking about this topic and I think it’s unique since I don’t 1) try to sell social media as the best thing since sliced bread or 2) act like the legal universe implodes if you use Facebook for recruiting.

It will be a small, informal group, so I hope to have a good bit of Q&A to keep things lively. (Side note-I love speaking to HR professionals! If you have a group you’d like me to connect with, just shoot me an email and we can discuss the details).

NextChat-Employee Rating Systems

Wednesday I will be doing a Twitter chat with the fine folks at SHRM. The #nextchat will focus on rating employees and will be a lot of fun. If you are on Twitter, I’d love to have you join in the conversation! I will be talking all about how organizations can use rating systems for succession planning and talent management, but I’ll also look at how those tools can be ineffective or even damaging to a company if used poorly.

The last NextChat on how to get a job in HR was a lot of fun! We talked about transitioning to an HR career, both from an entry level standpoint and a lateral move from another profession.

More social, more HR

Thursday I will be speaking to the Huntsville NASHRM Mentor University (NMU) group about social media. I’ll be tweaking this one a little from the Tuesday session to talk a little more about using it for professional development, since I’ll be speaking to the younger/less experienced HR crowd.

I’m honored to go back and speak to this group, because I was in the inaugural NMU class and was able to land a phenomenal job due to the networking within the group. It’s a great initiative and I’m looking forward to seeing the group they have put together.

Other items

On the work front, we’re recruiting for over a dozen positions right now, and while I enjoy the recruiting, it’s taking over my life. I had a nightmare the other night that I couldn’t get the right candidate for a highly specialized job. Whew. We’re going to be starting mid-year reviews in about a month, we are changing insurance vendors, and I’m looking at increasing staff at the local office by about 50% within 4 weeks. Yeah, it’s fun to be a one-man HR shop sometimes! :-p

Also, I just confirmed that I will be covering the Alabama SHRM State Conference as a blogger. More details on that in the next few weeks.

What’s up with you guys? I like staying in touch with everyone and learning what is keeping you busy. 

Catch me today on DriveThruHR!

I’ll be talking on DriveThruHR today, and I’d love for you to call in or listen online. The show is at noon central time and runs for a (fairly quick!) thirty minutes. If you miss the show, you can listen to the archive afterward.

I have had a busy week, and I honestly am not sure yet what I’ll be talking about when I get the famous “What is keeping you up at night?” question. Here are a handful of things I’ve been working on in the past few weeks:

  1. Worked to determine how to compensate a team for delivering an amazingly complex project on time and on budget
  2. Looking at potential performance issues and how to deal with them through the eyes of one of our new managers
  3. Working with our events team on living out our “create an enjoyable work environment” value through fun, exciting events throughout the year (paper airplane contest, tailgating, and more!)
  4. Completed the local wage/benefits surveys and had to hand deliver paper printouts of several spreadsheets; no electronic copies of the Excel file that you had to add data to could be submitted
  5. Prepared for the quarterly all hands briefing
  6. Set up our team trivia practice for an upcoming fundraiser (IMPACT Alabama)
  7. Dealt with email flame wars that seemed to go on indefinitely
  8. Developed flow charts to illustrate our processes with regard to recruiting, performance management, etc.

Those are just a few of the things that have kept me busy in the past week! Outside that maybe we can talk about events, HRevolution, and other fun stuff.

Not the usual social media pitch

Short post today because I’m preparing for a presentation I have to give at lunch to a local SHRM chapter. The title is as bland as they come–Social Media for HR–but it isn’t the usual “rah rah for social media” content you hear. Here’s my opening:

If I was a lawyer, this is where I’d start talking about how social media is the biggest liability your company has ever seen.

If I was a recruiter, this is where I’d start talking about social media being a silver bullet for hiring great candidates with free tools.

But I’m not either of those. I’m an “in the trenches” HR pro, and I have a real job to do. I manage to integrate social media into what I do to some degree, and this is how I do it.

I talk less about statistics (yeah, we all know that social media is the next big thing). I skip the part about how Company X has a great Facebook page you should copy. I like to focus on professional development, networking, and how to use the social tools to be more effective and efficient on a daily basis. It’s something you can walk out of the room and put into action much easier than a twenty point plan for using Twitter.

Just my two cents, but it’s working, so that’s what matters. :-)

What I’m doing and not doing today

In the past few weeks I’ve written in spurts. Sometimes I’ll get a lot of posts out and sometimes it’s more of a trickle. Sometimes I get guest posts out to help other people keep up their frequency even though mine sometimes is lower than I’d like. Well, I had intended to write a post today. But then I remembered that I have something more important going on.

Next Tuesday (September 14th), I am going to be speaking at my local SHRM chapter’s luncheon. Yeah, I’m kind of surprised, too. :-)

It all started when a few of the chapter officers followed some links from the SHRM chapter blog that I write. Those links led to some different posts here, and they reached out to me to see if I would be interested in talking to the chapter.

I am so not interested in talking about me for an hour, so I’m trying to make it about the audience and how what I have learned can benefit them. So far I’ve narrowed it down to two big things: passion and professional development.

Everything I do outside of work springs from my passion for this field. And that enthusiasm has led to some amazing professional development opportunities, including attending the SHRM10 conference, cofounding HRevolution, participating in my local SHRM chapters’s mentoring group, and chairing the HRYP committee for SHRM. Just for kicks, I also want to share things I’ve screwed up on, because that’s how I (and everyone else) learns the hard lessons.

So, I’m not writing a blog post today. Not at all. I’m writing the outline for my presentation. Nothing to see here. Move along. :-)