Three keys for a successful HR vendor user conference

I'm just back from the inaugural HireVue Digital Disruption user conference in absolutely gorgeous Park City, Utah, a place where the only thing you can possibly complain about is how after about 15 paces you're short of breath (due to the altitude), and dying of thirst (due to the dry as dust air). It was a really great event, and kudos to the entire team at HireVue for executing at a high level on their first try.

During the closing reception at the event I got to talking with some attendees and in those conversations I shared how I have been to about 5 or 6 HR tech vendor user conferences so far this year, and I expect I will attend another half dozen or so before the end of 2014. And if it seems to you that sounds like a lot of vendor conferences you're right - it is a lot of vendor user conferences. So after having hit so many of these events over the last couple of years, I like to think I know something about what makes for a successful and valuable event, and since no one asked, here are three things I think are the most important keys or elements that can help make vendor user conferences more successful.

1. Executive keynotes - the best vendor executive keynotes are not the ones that show off the 5 new and amazing product features, they are the ones where the CEO/Founder/President shows his or her more human side, and actually connects with the audience, (especially the customers). I think we consistently underestimate how important the personal and human elements are in many of these vendor/customer relationships. Customers want to believe in you and what you are doing. They want to see how passionate you are for helping them solve their problems. They want to see you talk about your own team, hear something about your company culture and leadership philosophy. Mostly, they just want to see the CEO as a real person. So the best vendor executive keynotes manage to allow this human side to show through.

2. Content mix - the natural tendency at vendor user conferences is to program an agenda almost completely comprised of two types of presentations: Vendor reps talking about the products, and existing customers talking about how they use the products, often at a very detailed level. While both types of sessions can be valuable for attendees, I think the best vendor user conferences mix in at least some content that is not 100% product focused. Bringing in some more outside voices or even having existing customers discuss more of their HR and business challenges more broadly, can benefit the overall value for attendees. Often I talk with attendees who feel like many of the sessions simply repeated information about the products or how to use the products that they already knew. There should be at least a fair amount of content that can challenge, excite, and interest the most expert customer users, or else they don't really have a need to attend the user conference at all.

3. Attendee mix - while it is great that the vendor wants to enable as many of their own people to attend/participate/interact at the user conference, if the ratio between the vendor's own staff and the actual customers and prospects in attendance gets too skewed toward the vendor side, the opportunities for great customer-customer interactions get diminished. What the vendors really want and need is for their own customers to be their best advocates, to share their experiences and opinions about the vendor and the technology. It gets hard for them to do that freely if there are vendor reps swarming everywhere, (they are easy to spot too, since they all will have on the same color coordinated logo shirts). The best vendor user conferences manage to be more about the users and less about the vendors, if that makes sense.

Ok those are my three tips for creating and delivering a great HR vendor user conference. You're welcome, even though you didn't ask.

What else can HR vendors do to make their user conferences better?

Thanks again HireVue!

The trickier part of Moneyball: Understanding the price of performance

I'm out at the HireVue Digital Disruption event in Park City, Utah (I know what you're thinking, your humble correspondent sure has it tough), and at the opening general session the audience was treated to a talk by Billy Beane, GM of the first-place Oakland Athletics, and more famously, the subject of the book and movie Moneyball.Park City, UT

By now just about everyone in the HR/Talent space is familiar with the Moneyball story, as Beane and his former assistant at the Athletics, Paul Depodesta have both been pretty regular fixtures on the HR conference speaking circuit these last few years. The story, even if getting a little familiar, still resonates, and having the hook of a movie based on the Moneyball book and starring Brad Pitt has helped to extend the life of the story somewhat.

But it seems to me that while everyone in HR now knows the Moneyball story, that mostly we kind of only accept it at the first level, i.e., that HR needs to apply more data and analytical tools towards the management of talent in the organization. How Beane and Depodesta took a data-driven approach to managing talent at the Oakland A's was the fundamental message of Moneyball, but it was not the only message.

The more important, and much harder aspect of Moneyball is the concept of the value and price of performance. In his talk yesterday at the HireVue event Beane showed a chart that explained this concept playing out in decisions about major league baseball pitchers. A few years ago Beane traded one of the top pitchers in the league but who had a $6M or so salary and replaced him with a pitcher that had just about equal success on the field, but who had a salary of 1/10th of the guy he replaced. So while the emphasis and focus of the Moneyball approach to talent has been (mostly) about identifying the right data (and tools to analyze that data), that leads to high performance, once you have done that analysis then Moneyball demands you apply that to the costs or price you can or should pay for that performance.

And it seems to me that side of the process, the 'How much are we paying for performance?' question is where the true value is to be found in the entire Moneyball story. In baseball and maybe in your business too, it probably is getting easier to determine what metrics to apply in order to identify and predict performance. But it is much tougher to understand the tradeoffs between costs and performance. Beane and the Athletics continue to succeed not because they still have some secret understanding of what metrics to apply, they stay on top because they consistently find ways to acquire the performance they need at a much lower cost than their competitors.

The focus on the costs and value from performance is why the book was called Moneyball and not Metricsball.

Identifying the metrics is only the first step - knowing how much they are worth, what you can pay, and when to 'sell' an overpriced asset and 'buy' an undervalued one is the real and much trickier lesson from Moneyball. 

Big Ideas from the Health & Benefits Leadership Conference

I'm just back from the 2nd Annual Human Resource Executive Magazine's Health & Benefits Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, which was a fantastic three days of content and sharing of ideas on the most pressing and important topics in the areas of employer benefits, healthcare, and maybe the most important one - how healthier employees create better business results.

To me, while the deep coverage and the analytical review of the various strategic decisions and then tactical execution challenges that most USA organizations are facing from the new Affordable Care Act rules and requirements, mostly due to (for an outsider like me), the almost impenetrable nature of what these new requirements actually are, were critically important to many attendees, it was the 'bigger' ideas that were presented at the event that will remain on my mind going forward.

I was fortunate enough to help host and moderate the Conference's 'Ideas and Innovators' session, a fast-paced forum for leading thinkers in the benefits, healthcare, wellness, and modern workplace space to present (in rapid 5-minute 'Ignite' style talks), their own disruptive and new ideas that will be impacting how organizations address the crucial challenges in benefits and employee healthcare going forward.

While all six talks presented in the 'Ideas' session were fantastic, (really you should have been there), I wanted to call attention to three of the most interesting or challenging 'Big Ideas' presented in the session, and share some links to additional resources for folks who might want to learn more and explore these ideas in greater depth.

Dr. Zubin Damania - Dr. Damania presented a fantastic talk about his company Turntable Health, who are creating a health and wellness ecosystem focused on primary and well care. The big idea is really kind of simple - by doubling down on the investment and time spent on prevention and keeping healthy before you get sick, people and organizations will see dramatic improvements in things like hospitalizations, ER visits, and more. While the idea is simple, the execution is very novel, with Turntable being at the forefront of trying to change how we think about and deliver care in a broader sense. 

Lindsey Pollak - Bestselling author of Getting From College to Career, and the forthcoming Becoming the Boss, Lindsey presented a compelling and actionable series of ideas on just how organizations can better engage the next generation of their workforces in health and wellness programs and activities. Drawing on research collaboration with The Hartford titled 'Gen Y Speaks', Lindsey proposed that organizations should more fully embrace the characteristics of younger workers (desire for personalization, preference for modern technology, and relatively longer 'time to financial maturity', etc.), as they design and implement benefits packages, wellness programs, and overall workplace design. As it turns out, not just Gen Y values many of these things as well!

Brian Poger - Brian is the CEO of Benefitter, a company that focuses on helping organizations understand and and leverage the trillion (yes, that is trillion with a 'T') dollar pool of healthcare subsidies that are available. Brian's 'Big Idea' was truly challenging and provocative - that for many organizations and employees, that dropping employer-sponsored healthcare coverage altogether might be a win-win for both parties. Brian can help you do the math, but it just might turn out that for many employees at or lower than the median US income level, that dropping the coverage that you as an employer provide might be the next tool you can use to actually increase total compensation and improve access. Get in touch with Brian to learn more.

I'd encourage you to check out the interesting work being done by Dr. Zubin, Lindsay, and Brian, as well as the other superb presenters at the Ideas and Innovators session.

It was a really interesting and fun session with these and the other great presenters at the conference and if your job as an HR pro or leader touches how your organization delivers benefits or deploys programs meant to improve workforce health and well-being then you really should make plans to attend next year's Conference to be held in April 2015.

Thanks to program chair Jennifer Benz and Human Resource Executive for putting on such a great event and for allowing me to play a small part. 

Step up to a glamour job

Spotted on the always fascinating Retronaut site this piece - 1965: "Step up from routine office work into a glamour job" that highlighted a vintage advertisement from that fine, fine institute of higher learning, LaSalle Extension University on the amazing potential career opportunities that awaited those willing and able to learn how to use a wondrous new technology - the Stenotype Machine.

With the Stenotype Machine, and the skills required to translate every spoken word in the English language into a series of 22 weird characters, the ad promises that career minded folks, (and let's be honest here, LaSalle University is aiming this add only towards women), would soon be able to "Sit beside top corporation exectutives at board meetings and big conferences" and "Even cover conventions and courtroom trials!"

The irony about this old ad, pushing the benefits of a new machine that would help someone learn the skill of being able to listen to a conversation or a presentation in real time, and translate the essence or the most important elements of what was being said into a new, concise, constrained, and kind of hard to figure out initially type of language, and do all of that instantly, is that it sounds almost exactly like what I, and lots of other people are doing, when they try and 'live tweet' conferences or events.

But unlike the Stenotype operator that had to capture all of what was being said, the live tweeters only try to grab the most compelling bits of information - those highly tweetable phrases and comments that are meant to reflect the overall content and point of view of the presentation or event, but ultimately fail at doing both, primarily because we simply can't type as fast as the 1965 Stenotype machine operator, and second, because our constraints (140 characters, mainly), only allow for the simplest sound bites to be shared.

But even with all that, there are some remarkable similarities to the pitch back in 1965 for Stenotype operators, "Sit next to big, important people and write down what they say!" and today's live tweeter, a kind of social media created spectator. Just like LaSalle Extension University (Did they have a football team? Go Extenders!), tried to convince women back then that sitting near powerful people was something worthy to aspire towards, I think for lots of folks that are sitting in audiences and trying to capture and crystallize what presenters are saying is the modern equivalent of a kind of reflected importance.

Look, I am not knocking the idea of tweeting from conferences or during some kind of popular media, news, or cultural events. I do it myself. It is kind of fun. Sometimes you actually have something insightful to add to the conversation. Sometimes.

But mostly or at least often it is just 'sitting next to important people and writing down what they say.'

The 1965 version of that doesn't look like all that much fun as we look back. I bet one day we will look back at the 2014 version and say much the same thing.

How to be Awesome in 2014 - #HRTechConf

WARNING: Promotional Content for this year's HR Tech Conference to follow...

One of the highlights of each year’s HR Technology^® Conference has been showcasing the most Awesome New Technologies for HR. And in 2014, we’re bringing a whole new element of excitement in response to attendee feedback: the popular Awesome New Technologies for HR session will be expanded into two distinct categories for:

• More established solution providers to show off their latest and greatest addition to their products
• True “start-ups,” those newer companies that are in their early stages, and trying to innovate and disrupt what the big boys are doing

We are currently looking for solution providers in both categories!

Why apply for consideration?

Selected participants get the opportunity to demonstrate their solution live to hundreds of potential buyers in a General Session at the Conference, be featured in conference promotional activities, and become a member of an exclusive club of HR technology companies that can truly call themselves “Awesome.”

How to apply for consideration?

Simply complete the form on the HR Tech Conference website in its entirety and submit it no later than May 31, 2014. Please note, the product/features you are submitting must be generally available to customers no later than October 2014.

How do I know if my company is a contender?

HR Tech will be contacting only those providers selected to continue in the application process. For those selected, HR Tech will request a formal demonstration (delivered via web conferencing). The demonstration should be a maximum of 10 minutes in length with the majority of that time consisting of actual product demonstration. Provider selections are expected to begin in May 2014 with the final participants for the Conference selected by August 2014.

How many providers will be chosen to participate in one of the sessions at 2014 HR Tech?

Approximately 5-6 providers will be invited to participate and demonstrate at each of the Awesome New Technologies for HR sessions. It is expected that the CEO or the most senior product executive from the participating company will present live on stage at the Conference.

Any more questions about how the Awesome New Technologies for HR session, let me know!

Now go forth and be awesome...