HR Happy Hour - Live from ERE Expo

The ERE Expo is a fantastic event in the corporate recruiting space, and I am really pleased to be a part of the program once again. Today and tomorrow I will be hosting the web livestream from the show in San Diego, California.  

The event itself is three days of workshops, keynotes, concurrent sessions, and great opportunities to network with industry leaders, as well as to meet with and learn more from many of the leading solution providers in the Recruiting technology and services space. This will be my third time doing the HR Happy Hour-style interviews live from the event, and it continues to be a fun and interesting program, and is a testament to ERE's commitment to make much of the conference content accessible to everyone, regardless if they are able to attend in person.

Starting today at approximately 8:00AM Pacific Time, you can tune in to the livestream directly from the link on the ERE.net home page.

Over the course of this Thursday and Friday, and ably accompanied by ERE's own Lance Haun, we will welcome a series of recruiting industry leaders, recruiting practitioners, and Expo speakers, (and more), to talk about recruiting, talent management, new technology, and beyond.  And of course this is all in addition to the live coverage of the event keynotes and featured sessions from the mainstage.

So if you are at all interested in the world of recruiting, the issues (and potential solutions), facing many of your industry peers today, and overall want to get the ERE Expo experience from the comfort of your office (or sofa), I hope you will tune in to some or all of the live cast over the next two days.

Many thanks to everyone at ERE for having the HR Happy Hour Show once again be a part of the event.

And if you are in San Diego this week make sure you come by the set and say hello!

#HRevolution 2012 - Open for Registration

A few years back a couple of enterprising HR professionals hatched a plan to stage a new kind of Human Resources event - one that was more open, and informal, and participatory, and social, and affordable than the typical and traditional conference or seminar. And from that initial small step, the HRevolution was launched. In 2009 the first HRevolution event was held in Louisville, KY and soon thereafter, the event and the community that supports it has become entrenched in the HR landscape.

I have been lucky enough to be a part of the HRevolution organizing committee since that first event in 2009, and I have seen HRevolution grow and evolve while still creating unique opportunities for HR professionals, recruiters, consultants, and vendors to come together to discuss and debate the future of HR.  

I am really pleased to share the announcement of the details of the 2012 event, so here goes:

HRevolution Chicago (aka #HRevolution #5)
October 7, 2012
McCormick Place
8:00 am- 4:30 pm
Click here to register

HRevolution will for the second year partner with The HR Technology Conference in a ground-breaking event in both content, format, and delivery of ideas that are key to the practice of human resources.

We believe and continue to work hard to ensure that HRevolution is not your typical conference.  Our main purpose is to grow your professional and personal network, and expand your ideas around the practice of Human Resources. You will network with 200 of the brightest and most innovative leaders in the industry. 

Other highlights of the HRevolution event include:

• Fully participatory sessions
• Opportunity for participants to bring work issues to debate, discuss, and find solutions
• Workable and practical ideas you can take home to your organization
• Increased reach-  since HRevolution is fully integrated with social platforms, you will be reaching hundreds of thousands of professionals

All past Hrevolution events have sold out, so be sure to register today!  Early bird pricing for the first 25 registrants will be $150.  General registration is $200.  Where else can you have access to top industry professionals for that low price?  Nowhere!  And thanks to our generous sponsors who help defer your costs, you can get both value and quality at HRevolution 2012!

But wait! There's more!

Special HR Technology Conference Discount

HRevolution is excited to be co-locating again with the world-famous HR Technology Conference & Expo – this time Oct. 8 – 10, 2012 in the self-contained West Wing of McCormick Place, Chicago.

HR Technology is one of the must-attend HR events of the year, and continues to grow in relevance and importance. Learn how technology can help you with every aspect of HR including managing your workforce, recruiting and attracting quality employees, identifying and developing your top performers, and much more.

Best of all, after you register for HRevolution you get a whopping $600.00 discount off the HR Technology® on-site rate. Look for the savings promo code at the bottom of your HRevolution confirmation email.

So I hope you will take a look at all HRevolution has to offer. If you have attended one of the previous events, then I don't have to convince you of the event's value. And if you are new to HRevolution drop me a line and a can tell you more. Better yet head over to Twitter and ask 'What is this #HRevolution I keep hearing about?' I am pretty confident you will get a dozen testimonials from past attendees within a few hours.

Possible Reasons I Will Be Speaking at SHRM 2012

Last year about this time I published a kind of whiny, (hopefully) slightly amusing recount of the possible reasons I was not selected to present at the 2011 SHRM National Conference. Long story short, I had submitted a session proposal that involved the staging of a live HR Happy Hour Show from the SHRM event, incorporating a live guest panel, in-person audience questions, and questions and comments from the show listeners and the Twitter backchannel.

It would have been epic. And a real pain in the neck to stage properly, to get the audio and internet connections sorted, and execute the live show effectively. Plus, there would have been the added challenge of explaining what the heck the HR Happy Hour Show is to the average SHRM conference attendee, probably ensuring low interest in the session. So looking back on it now, SHRM probably made the right call in passing on the session proposal.

Fast forward about one year, and in the interests of fairness and openness, I am pleased to report that next year, at the 2012 SHRM Annual Conference in June, I actually will be speaking, or more accurately participating on a panel discussion on Social Recruiting along with Robert Hohman, Glassdoor.com Co-founder and CEO; John Sumser, Industry thought leader from HRxAnalysts; and Chris Hoyt, the Recruiter Guy from PepsiCo.

Our session is called 'Is Social Recruiting Really Working?', and during the session we will take a closer look at the changes and influences on recruiting brought on by the rise in importance of social networks, how behaviors and approaches by job seekers and organizations are changing with respect to social, and some thoughts on the direction and future of social recruiting. It should be a fantastic session and I am really pleased that it was selected, and that I will get a chance to share the stage with such an esteemed group of experts.

So back to this post's title, and a closer look at the possible reasons that the session was selected?

Well, first and foremost it was mostly due to the excellent work and ideas from the team at Glassdoor.com who had the idea for the session, and kindly offerered me the chance to participate. No doubt their professionalism and demonstrated domain expertise was far superior compared to the sad attempt I made at presenting at SHRM in 2011. Second, I think with each passing year 'mainstream' Human Resources and SHRM move more and more to embracing and addressing the impact and importance of social networking and social media in the HR and recruiting functions. Our topic, Social Recruiting, fits well with this emerging area of interest to SHRM and its members.  And finally, the ability to assemble such a solid panel of varied backgrounds and expertise all but ensures a diversity of thought, wide range of perspectives, and hopefully lots of insight and actionable advice for attendees next June.

So big thanks to SHRM, Glassdoor, and to my fellow session co-participants. I am looking forward to the event and to seeing lots of old friends and meeting many new ones. 

Senior HR Executive Conference - Social Technology and Innovation

This afternoon at the Conference Board's Senior HR Executive Conference Trish McFarlane and I presented a talk titled 'How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization'. The slides from the session are can be found here, and are also embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through).

How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization

View more presentations from steveboese

Mainly, what Trish and I tried to share are some examples, both well-known and a few lesser-known, of how organizations have and can use social media, social networking, new tools for innovation and collaboration, and probably most importantly how looking at business challenges with an eye towards how social and collaboration can help meet these challenges.

These types of short presentations are really meant to be a kind of starting point to thinking about social in different organizational contexts, and for leaders and organizations that have already begun projects and programs, perhaps offering some awareness or insight to new opportunities they have yet to explore.

The feedback to the session was great, (thanks attendees for your time and attention), and many thanks to Trish and to the Conference Board for allowing us to present today.

I'd love your comments and feedback on the presentation as well!

Senior HR Executive Conference - How much failure can we really embrace?

Today and tomorrow I am attending the Conference Board Senior HR Executive Conference in New York City. I plan on sharing as many interesting ideas and concepts as I can from the sessions and conversations over the next few days.

One of the common themes that has emerged early on Day One is the pressing need for organizations to continue to innovate, often faster than ever before, more effectively than the competition, and in a manner than can be sustainable and repeatable. A tall order for sure, particularly when faced with flat or declining resources, an increasingly stressed and maxed-out workforce, and for large public companies, the need to be aware of and to meet extremely short-term financial objectives. In the opening keynote from Steve Fussel from Abbott as well as in a later panel discussion with HR executives from Nike, Cisco, and AMD the various leaders talked about the need to accept, embrace, and most importantly learn from failures as a key component of the innovation process or life cycle. It was generally stated that failure is and must be a part of game, a kind of table stakes for sitting down at the innovation table.

But what was not really discussed was just how much failure was acceptable and would actually be tolerated as a by-product of a commitment to an innovation program or culture. While 'failure' and learning from those failures as a concept sounds great, and is sort of easy to talk about as a core component of the company innovation approach, each failure eventually has to get ascribed to either an individual, team, region, something more discrete and tangible than the more amorphous 'culture'. When the discussion turned to just how much risk, and theoretically how much potential for failure should be tolerated, one comment was 'it's ok to risk your own job, just don't risk the entire company.'

Which gets us to the main challenge I think about risk, failure, opportunity, and innovation. We want, no check that, we need to get faster, more creative, more innovative, and frankly better than before. But at the same time, with margins razor-thin, an unforgiving economic climate, and many employees happy to avoid the kinds of risk that might jeopardize their jobs, balancing innovation, risk, and consequences of failure could be the greatest challenge for leaders tasked with finding the next billion dollar idea.

What do you think - is there a 'right' amount of failure? How much is too much?