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!

Social Media and the Company: Which picture is worse?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show we will be re-visiting the topic of 'Social Media, The Company, and The Law', with special guest, Employment Law expert Eric Meyer.  It has been some time since we covered this ground on the show and tonight I am sure that Eric will do a great job getting us all back up to speed so to speak, with the ever-changing and fast-moving world that is the intersection and tension between social media, social networking, company objectives, employee rights, and the law.

It will be an interesting and fun show, and I do hope you can join us tonight at 8:00PM ET as we kick around the topic.

You can listen to the show tonight on the show page here, by calling in to the listener line - 646-378-1086, or via the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

This week, as luck would have it, another great set of 'possibly inappropriate examples of social media use by employees' popped up - from my favorite professional sports league no less, the NBA.

Submitted for your consideration are two Twitter status updates, both that originally contained a linked picture or 'Twitpic', and both from current NBA players, (though not from the same team).

Exhibit 'A' - New York Knicks forward J.R. Smith tweets a very NSFW picture of a female friend in a state of very little dress, with an accompanying joke commenting about an aspect of her physique, (note Smith has since deleted the original Tweet).

Exhibit 'B' -  New Orleans Hornets center Chris Kaman tweets a picture of himself holding up what appears to be a very lifeless cat along with some commentary along the lines of 'Look what we are going to do to the Bobcats tonight').

Both tweets were sent from the player's personal Twitter accounts, and not in conjunction with any official team or league activities. Just a couple of goofy NBA players messing around on Twitter in their free time. No doubts that Smith's and Kaman's updates and shared pictures could be described as (depending on your point of view), as inappropriate, crude, classless, vulgar, offensive, etc.  And depending on the NBA or the individual team's written policies and contracts perhaps these kinds of updates would put the players in some kind of 'official' trouble with the league brass.

But here is the interesting thing, and the tie back to tonight's HR Happy Hour Show on social and the company and the law - the league fined Smith $25,000 for his actions, and as of this writing, has not taken any action against Kaman.

And that's the tricky part with dealing with employee's personal use of social media as an organization. Sometimes you have to make the tough call deciding what is more offensive - a NSFW picture of a woman not really dressed, or a guy on the starting five swinging a dead cat.

Fun times...

Nothing But Net - Talking NBA on the HR Happy Hour Tonight

This week is really the wind down of 2011 as many of us get ready to celebrate holidays, take some time off from the grind, and generally decompress a little bit before the New Year is upon us and things get cranked up all the way to 11 again. One of the fixtures of the holiday season, certainly here in the USA, are sports - specifically the slate of Christmas Day NBA games that typically feature the Association's leading teams and stars in a nationally televised showcase.

This year, the schedule of Christmas games takes on heightened meaning, as the long protracted labor strife between the league's players and owners was only recently settled, and subsequently delayed the start of the 2011-2012 campaign long enough to make the holiday games the actual start of the new season. 

So since the world of work is winding down, and the world of basketball is just heating up, for the last HR Happy Hour Show of 2011, we are going to do a full-on, nothing at all to do with work, or talent management, or recruiting, NBA preview show. Just the NBA - the labor issues, the short training camps, the player moves, the predictions - everything you need to know to get ready for the new season.

Joining me on the show will be some or all of the crew from 'The 8 Man Rotation' - Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, Matt Stollak, and Lance Haun, to talk LeBron, Kobe, Dirk, Durant, and more.

You know you love the NBA and what better way to wind down from the workplace and gear up for the holidays and the start of the season by listening to your pals talk NBA on the HR Happy Hour Show tonight.

Here's how you can listen in tonight, starting at 8:00PM ET:

On the show page here. By calling the listener line at 646-378-1086, or on the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

Also, you can follow the backchannel conversation on Twitter - just follow the hashtag #HRHappyHour.

Go Knicks!

Consumerization, Technology, and HR

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, (a weekly live internet radio show and podcast that I have been hosting since 2009), the conversation is going to be about Consumerization - specifically how the demands on Human Resources and HR Technology professionals are changing, largely influenced by developments in the consumer and personal technology markets.

Thinking about consumer technology and trends naturally forces one to consider the larger world in which our organizations reside, and how things like globalization, changing demographics, and even political and social unrest all contribute to and impact the workplace. The employees that work for us also live in the real world as well, and as the lines between work and personal time continue to move, shift, and cross; thinking a little more deeply about these environmental forces and how they shape workplaces is not only fascinating, but critical.

And when thinking about 'Consumerization' in the workplace, some other questions come to mind:

Who hasn't felt at times that the tools and technologies that are available at work are in many ways less appealing and effective than what we use in our personal lives?

How many folks carry around multiple mobile devices, one for 'work' that tends to be more basic and utilitarian, (and controlled by IT); and an iPhone or Droid to for 'fun' only to conclude the 'fun' device and its collection of carefully and personally selected applications create an incredibly powerful mobile computing powerhouse.

Finally, what consumer trends can be safely ignored, (for now), by HR professionals, and which ones should you make sure you don't miss?

Our guest on the Happy Hour tonight to talk about these ideas will be Yvette Cameron from Constellation Research. Yvette brings a wealth of experience and perspective as a business, technology, and Human Resources leader and will be sure to inform, challenge, and hopefully inspire.

The show will be live tonight, December 8, 2011 from 8PM - 9PM ET. You can listen live on the show page here - or using the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

Also, if you'd like to participate more actively with the show, you are invited to call in live on 646-378-1086, and follow the backchannel conversation on Twitter - just track the hastag #HRHappyHour.

It will be a fun and interesting conversation and I hope you will join us!

Occupy HR - Tonight on the HR Happy Hour

There are probably few things more tired and lame than bandwagoning on a popular internet meme or pop culture phenomenon and twisting it for your own designs. So with that, I apologize in advance for the easy and hack use of the 'Occupy' protests for the title of this post, and for the theme of tonight's HR Happy Hour Show, also titled - 'Occupy HR'.

It doesn't take a cable news pundit to realize that most of the impetus and energy around the growing 'occupy' movement is drawn from economics - at least the perception of some people that economic opportunity is no longer fairly or even reasonably distributed or available. No doubt that is an arguable point, and I am sure you have heard of many stories of success, or even looked at your own background and career arc and thought, 'Heck, no one gave me anything, I worked my way through college working two jobs, anyone can get ahead if they just work hard, etc.' And you'd probably be right for thinking that way. But I have to believe the issues are more complex than that, and taking a look at some of the underlying issues seems to bear that out.

Last night I spent some time doing some background reading in preparation for the show and within twenty minutes I had found about a dozen pieces describing the confluence of sustained high levels of unemployment, mounting pressures from the rapid increase in the costs of higher education, (and the corresponding student load crisis it has spawned), a 'skills mismatch' causing millions of open jobs to go unfilled, significant gains in corporate profits as a percentage of GDP, reports about the trillions (that's with a 'T'), of cash that corporations are sitting on, and the growing percentage of people surviving at or near the poverty line.  It's enough to make one pretty angry I suppose, and the 'occupy' protests certainly have to be feeding off of that anger.

It's a subject worth discussing I think, and since so much of the protest seems to be about work and the workplace it makes sense for Human Resources professionals to have a chance to weigh in.

So tonight at 8:00PM ET, we will open up the lines on the HR Happy Hour Show for the HR and Recruiting community, (and really for everyone else too), to call in and talk about the issues surrounding 'occupy', and the implications for the workplace, workforce, and for the world of work our children will inherit, (or re-invent).

What can HR professionals actually do to make a difference?

Can we do better at getting people back to work?

Can we influence and change the way higher and vocational education programs prepare people for employment?

Does it make sense to see our organizations as more than self-interested entities and that have a role and responsibility to our larger communities? And if so, what does that even mean?

And whatever else you want to discuss.

So I hope you will consider listening in to the show tonight, and better still, calling in between 8:00 - 9:00PM ET on 646-378-1086 to share your views and ideas.

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

Aside - For the benefit of what I perceive to be a group of new blog readers, the HR Happy Hour Show is a weekly live internet radio show/podcast that I host where we discuss workplace issues, technologies, talent management and recruiting, industry trends, and sometime sports and movies.  You can learn more about the show here.