WEBINAR: The 1st Timer's Guide to Buying HR Technology

Buying HR Technology (System of Record/HRMS, Applicant Tracking Systems, Performance Management Systems, Recruiting solutions, etc.) should be as easy as buying a high-priced handbag or the latest pair of Jordans! Or Puma Clydes, since I am more of a Knicks fan.

You see it. You like it. You know it’s going to fit and work for your needs. GO! Make the purchase. But it’s not that simple. Buying HR Technology is hard, confusing and frustrating.  A miss can potentially stall your career and undermine your credibility.

But fear not, gentle readers, your pals over at Fistful of Talent are here to help, with the latest installment of the popular (and FREE), FOT Webinar series with Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology, set for August 28 at 12pm ET and which is designed to help the HR pro navigagte the sometimes tricky waters of the HR technology market and buying process. I will be on the webinar, joined by FOT's Tim Sackett to break it all down in classic FOT-style.

So plan to join Tim and I on August 28 at 12pm ET and we'll hit you with the following

1. The Difference between a Suite or a Best-of-Breed Product: Why you should care? Which one is right for you to buy? We'll break it down based on your unique needs.

2. The Decision Tree/Process That Helps You Arrive at the Right Decision Regarding Which Solution to Buy. Yes, we can tell you exactly what to buy! But we won’t, because great HR Pros need to understand how to make these decisions. But don’t worry---we’ll show you how!

3. Six Tips and Tricks the HR Vendor Community Uses to Get You To Buy Their Product---which might not be the product you actually need. Learn how to make sure you don’t succumb to these tactics when making your next buying decision.  This section alone will ensure you take control of your next buy like a pro!

4. The Secret for Getting Your Organization to Invest in HR tech and How to Build ROI for your Executive Team. Every buying decision comes down to the why and ROI, and your ability to persuasively and concisely get your organization to support your recommendation.  Sometimes the hardest part of an HR Tech buy is your ability to get approval to buy!

Bonus Feature: CEO Ben Peterson, from BambooHR (an HR solution specifically designed for small-to-medium-sized HR departments), will stop by and do a quick Q&A with Tim and Steve to discuss the biggest mistakes he sees HR buyers make when making HR Tech purchases... and how to avoid making those same mistakes yourself!

Things that are hard:  Riding a bike on a freeway. Getting your kids to eat peas. Buying HR Tech. Join us on August 28 at 12pm ET for "Buyer’s Remorse: The FOT 1st Timer’s Guide to Buying HR Technology," and we'll make buying HR Tech easier. You're on your own with the other two.

Please join Tim and I on August 28, I promise, as always, 60% of the time our advice works every time!

REGISTER HERE:

WEBINAR: How Smart HR Pros are Becoming Better Marketers

The next Fistful of Talent (where I am a contributor in case you did not know that), FREE webinar is set and it is a good one - details are below faithful reader.

Kris Dunn and Tim Sackett will present "How Smart HR Pros are Becoming Better Marketers – By Using Company Reputation Sites Like Glassdoor.” on Wednesday, July 30th at 2pm ET, and they plan to hit you with the following topics:

 - How the the yelp-ification of America—the trend towards consumer-based reviews in almost every area of our economy—is changing the way employees and candidates think about job search and employer brands. It’s second nature for your employees to rate a restaurant, a book or a movie online. That means that employees of all types (not just the ones who want to complain) are more willing than ever to participate in your brand through user review.

- Why the explosion of social media and deep coverage of every aspect of our lives through video and photos is changing the willingness of smart companies to increase their transparency.  Every employee and candidate who interacts with your company is a potential reporter, and they expect you to share the good, bad and ugly about working with your firm openly and honestly. Old versions of employment brands won’t cut it—you”re going to have to give up some control to maximize your brand.

- They will cover the 5 Biggest Myths about company reputation sites like Glassdoor and tell you which ones are completely BS and which ones you actually perpetrate by not fully engaging on sites like Glassdoor.  They will hit the usual suspects here: “The only comments are from the bad employees”  and “The salary data out there isn’t factual,” and tell you why things have changed. More importantly, they will hit how you actually may make the myths a reality by not fully engaging on reputation sites.  Think about that last sentence: You’ve got to be in the game to influence the game.

- Last but not least, they will give you a 4-step playbook on how to engage on reputation sites and become more of a Marketer as an HR/Recruiting Pro.  It’s true—you wouldn’t have read this far if you didn’t want to learn more about how to use reputation sites like Glassdoor to maximize your company and your career. We’ll help you get started.

The outside world now has a huge say in how your company/employment brand is perceived, whether you engage or not. We think you should engage.  Join us for “How Smart HR Pros are Becoming Better Marketers – By Using Company Reputation Sites Like Glassdoor” at 2pm ET on Wednesday July 30th and we’ll show you how.

REGISTER BY CLICKING THIS LINK OR FILL OUT THE FORM BELOW!

WEBINAR: HR Moneyball: How to get started with Big Data for HR

You have heard the hype: Big Data is taking over the business world, and HR’s going to be expected to make decisions—not through feelings, relationships or gut instinct—but via numbers.  The problem is… your HRIS, ATS and Performance Solutions are all different systems and weren’t built with the big-data revolution in mind. In short, you feel less than ready for workforce analytics—you’re just trying to get the basic reports generated.

We feel your pain, people. That’s why I am glad to participate in the June installment of the Fistful of Talent FREE webinar series with a jam titled, HR Moneyball:  The FOT Bootstrapper Guide To Getting Started With Big Data. Join Kris Dunn and I for this webinar on Thursday, June 26 at 2pm EST(sponsored by ThoughtSpot, a cool business intelligence startup), and we’ll share the following goodies with you:

- A brief review of where HR stands with Business Intelligence (BI)/Big Data. We’ll cover some of the trends, what the bleeding edge is doing, the 3 types of data sources available to HR shops and what the CEOs and business leaders you support are asking for related to data and BI out of the HR Function. We’ll also talk about what your options are when HR is the last priority for an over-burdened IT function.

- Why HR pros need to shift/lean forward. It’s not what happened, it’s what going to happen. Getting your head around business intelligence and data means you have to shift your focus from reporting the past and move to predictive analytics. We’ll give you examples of great reporting decks from the HR Hall of Fame and tell you how they have to change to meet the call from predictive analytics out of your HR shop.

- The Five Best HR Plays for Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data. Since we’re all about helping you win, we wouldn’t do this webinar without giving you some great ideas for where to start with a data play out of your shop. You’re going to stop reporting turnover and start predicting it. You’re going to stop reporting time to fill and start showing which hiring managers are great at—you guessed it—hiring.  We’ll give you five great ideas and show you how to get started piecing the story together.

- A primer on what’s next once you start channeling Nostradamus. Since you specialize in people, you naturally understand the move to using Business Intelligence (BI)/Big Data that helps you predict the future is only half the battle—you have to have a plan once the predictions are made. We’ll help you understand the natural applications for using your business-intelligence data as both a hammer and a hug—to get people who need to change moving, and to embrace those that truly want your help as a partner.

You’re a quality HR pro who knows how to get things done. Join KD and I on Thursday, June 26 at 2pm EST for HR Moneyball: The FOT Bootstrapper Guide To Getting Started With Big Data and we’ll help you understand how to deploy Moneyball principles in HR that allow you to use predictive Big Data to position yourself as the expert you are.  

Hope you can join us on June 26 at 2PM EST.

WEBINAR: The Recruiter Makeover

Just in time for the Springtime hiring season (that is a real thing, right?), I call your attention to the next installment of the often imitated but never duplicated Fistful of Talent webinar, this one tailor made for recruiters and talent acquisition pros that might need their own professional spring cleaning.

Titled, The Recruiter Makeover: 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves as Marketers, the FOT crew are partnering with the cool folks at Jobvite for a fresh and edgy look at ways recruiters can re-cast themselves for today's 'everything is marketing' age. In this FOT webinar you'll see how the world’s full of great products/services that eventually became commodities, and how unfortunately, there are a lot of recruiters in danger of becoming commodities as well if they don’t change with the times. Odds are you feel the shift under your feet—great candidates are less responsive than ever to average recruiters, which means you have to become a more effective marketer of the brand and opportunities you represent to keep your closing rate high.

If you’re still reading, that means you haven’t been average in the past.  Join the FOT crew on May 8 at 2pm EST and, and the gang will give you the roadmap for a career makeover that includes the following goodies:

- The Ugly “Before” Picture. We’ve all seen the “before” pictures used in makeovers and this one is no different.  Using your “average Joe/Jane” recruiter, we’re going to take a snapshot of the recruiter most in need of our makeover.  Brace yourself, because “before” pictures in makeover workups all look like mug/prison shots of Lindsay Lohan, right?

- Trendspotting 101. We can’t start prescribing the skill equivalent of makeup or liposuction for recruiters until we tell you about the trends that are causing the need for the makeover.  Candidates have more options and messages flowing to them than ever before.  Whether its the emergence of Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn or the social recruiting scene, recruiting is morphing into marketing.  We’ll compare and contrast some of the trends to tell you why recruiters are evolving into marketers even as they keep their core recruiting skills strong.

- 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves As Marketers. Makeover time. We’ll hit you with our list of things you can do to reinvent yourself as a marketer who just happens to recruit for a living.  You can do this. Don’t believe the naysayers that will say this is hype.  Those people are just trying to keep you average.

- Our Top 5 List of Recruiters Who Have Strong Marketing Game. It’s all empty talk until we give you examples, right?  The FOT crew will break down our top 5 list of recruiters who have added the marketing toolkit to their games, complete with emphasis of which of our “7 Ways” list they specialize in.  Everyone in the world needs role models—even recruiters.  We’ll tell you who to connect with and emulate to become a marketer in the recruiting game.

Evolving your game as a recruiter isn’t easy. It takes thought, expertise and time you don’t have, because you’re busy filling positions.  Join FOT on May 8 at 2pm EST for The Recruiter Makeover: 7 Ways Recruiters Can Reinvent Themselves as Marketers, and we’ll show you how to add marketing chops to your personal recruiting brand so you don’t get left behind.

Use the link above to register for the FREE FOT Webinar and feel better about yourself for at least the next 12 minutes.And as always the FOT Webinar comes guaranteed - 60% of the time it works every time.

Have a great weekend!

Update: WEBINAR: Don't Fear the Future - Today at 2PM EST

UPDATE: With last week's travel nightmares a distant (kind of) memory the Webinar originally scheduled for January 29 will now be TODAY, February 5, 2014 at 2PM EST.

All the details are the same, and just in case you missed the opportunity to sign up last week, you can still jump in to the webinar today:

Here is everything you need to know and thanks to the fine folks at Silkroad for sponsoring the webinar called:

Don't Fear the Future: 5 Tech Keys to Raise Your HR and Game in 2014 and Beyond

This is meant to be a lively and hopefully interesting look at some of the most cutting edge or innovative technology trends, (robotics, wearable technology, etc.), talk about where these technologies are heading, why they matter, and then talk a little about how understanding how these technologies can and will be used in the workplace can help you raise your HR game in 2014 and beyond.

Here are all the pertinent details, including the registration link for the FREE Webinar:

While most of us with busy and chaotic jobs in HR are busily trying to get 2013 closed up -- there were some remarkable developments in the consumer, business, and economic arenas that you might have missed. Amazon introduced us to the concept of package delivery via a fleet of drones. Google wants to put a self-driving car in your driveway. And Rethink Robotics wants to supply you with your new office-mate, an eight-foot tall, fully articulated, and happy industrial robot named Baxter. Meanwhile, the workforce is getting older, entire industries are worried about finding the talent they need, and EVERYONE is fighting over the same superstar technical workers.

But you are a progressive HR, recruiting, or talent management pro (that’s why you’re reading this), and you know that in order to help drive your organization boldly into the future you’ve got to stay ahead of the rest of the pack and be the lead dog so to speak. And not only being aware of what is happening in the world outside of the HR office but how these technology and environmental developments will help inform and shape your talent management strategies.

You already get that the key to winning in 2014 (and beyond) is probably not going to be found in creating a better PTO request approval workflow, but you might not yet have the time and the bandwidth to think more deeply and creatively about how to leverage these changes in your organization and for your career.

That’s why Silkroad created their latest webcast – Don't Fear the Future: 5 Tech Keys to Raise Your HR and Game in 2014 and Beyond. Join us for this webcast, and we’ll give you a quick look at what these trends will mean for our work and workplaces, and more importantly, share some creative ideas about how to apply them to your HR and talent practice (and make you look like some kind of clairvoyant in the process). So make plans now to get your 2014 started in the right way - by getting your creative juices flowing and thinking about how your organization can be ready to win the future!

February 5, 2014
2:00 p.m. (Eastern)
1:00 p.m. (Central)
12:00 p.m. (Mountain)
11:00 a.m. (Pacific)

Date or time doesn't fit your schedule? Go ahead and register anyway. We will be sure you receive an email with a link to the recorded webinar following the event.

You can register here and I hope to see you on the webinar!