Human Resource Executive's Ninth Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition

• Using blogging as a recruiting tool. Steve Rothberg of Collegerecruiter.com called blogging a "powerful recruiting tool" for companies in telling prospective employees more about what they do inside after someone gets hired. He listed three rules for the success of any blog: 1) High-quality content; 2) Blogging frequently (better not do one than to do it on an infrequent schedule); and 3) Blogging regularly (once per week minimum, with three to four times per week being best).
  
  
• Video games as a marketing tool. Scott Randall of BrandGames talked about using custom video games to engage prospective employees and to use in training new employees. He pointed to Arrow Electronics' use of a video game for would-be or new employees and how it helps to immerse them in the history and culture of Arrow.
  
  
• Video and podcasts for succession management and workforce development. David Fabianski of Pearson Performance Solutions showed examples of Pearson's "50 Lessons" series, in which business leaders share their knowledge and wisdom in a brief video. The benefit? "We capture the essence of the human experience through storytelling," Fabianski says.

Conference Notes, Day 1—Wednesday October 4, 2006

Show basics: The HR Technology Conference is a good one to attend if you want to maximize your exposure to HR technology in one fell swoop. With 213 booths in the exhibit hall, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 attendees, it's one of the largest gatherings of people interested in HR technology. The seminars seem to be an especially big draw, with overflow crowds at just about every one we attended. They were broken up into five basic tracks:

• Strategic view
• Performance and compensation management
• HRMS, portals and self-service
• Recruiting
• Outsourcing

The structure of the seminars made it impossible for anyone to attend all of them, or even most of them, and the conference organizers made note of this by urging attendees to bring "more of your colleagues next year so you can cover them all." Nice idea, but at a steep $1,345 per person to attend (early registration discounts were available), we’re not sure how many companies would take them up on that.

Keynote speaker, Day 1: Stanford Business School professor (and Business 2.0 columnist) Jeffrey Pfeffer talked about making evidence-based management work to move your business ahead. "In HR, as in life," Pfeffer says, "we don't always make decisions based on the facts."

He went on to show how the failure to use evidence hurts companies in everything they do, from compensating executives and employees to growing and building the business. In fact, he pointed out that organizational decisions are often based on:

1. What senior leaders have done in the past and think has been effective--their "experience."
2. What others are doing--casual benchmarking.
3. Ideology and belief--ideas about how things ought to work.

None of these lead to better decisions, according to Pfeffer, and he called for organizations to use more evidence-based management to make decisions. He gave described evidence-based management as:

• A way of thinking--the attitude of wisdom (knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know) and being willing to act on the basis of what is known at the time while learning as you act.
• Being committed to "fact-based" and "evidence-based" action.
• Being committed to hearing and telling the truth.
• Treating your organization as an unfinished prototype—and having an experimenting/learning mind-set.
• Knowing what the theory and evidence are, and using them in formulating decisions and actions.
• A set of standards for evaluating information and making decisions.

More Pfeffer: He was particularly critical of the famous "forced ranking" system--used at GE and made famous by Jack Welch--that has managers "grade" all employees on a curve. The problem is that top performers receive outsized awards, lower performers get summarily dumped, and the middle group of workers is largely ignored. This does little, he says, to really improve the business or the overall performance of the employees.

Vendor angst: Elaine Orler of the Newman Group gave a highly amusing and informative breakout session on "When and How You Should Switch Recruiting Vendors." Underlying the talk was her premise that "very rarely is it the right decision to switch vendors" because it is very expensive to switch platforms and re-establish a vendor new relationship. She gave three valid reasons for making a vendor switch:

1. The relationship is damaged beyond repair.
2. A consolidation of solutions or foundation platforms is needed.
3. The company needs a broader application footprint for future success.

She also gave three reasons that are NOT valid justifications to make a switch:

1. I liked the product used at my last company better.
2. We've changed our business model (again).
3. Another vendor promised me a better price.

Speaker you had to see to believe: Conference speakers are a diverse group, but even having said that, Day 1 lunch speaker Belle Halpern was one of a kind.

Halpern, founding partner of the Ariel Group, gave her lunch keynote on "Leadership Presence: Dramatic Techniques to Reach Out, Motivate and Inspire." That sounds pretty tame, so imagine the audience's surprise when Halpern came out singing her presentation. Yes, singing--along with piano accompaniment. Just call her "The Singing Consultant."

She didn't sing her entire presentation, of course, but Halpern's unexpected and unconventional presentation style was jarring to much of the audience because it was like one of the old Bill Murray lounge singer skits on Saturday Night Live. Halpern probably had some good things to say about how you can create a greater presence to increase the impact of what you say, but the odd and unexpected singing made a lot of the audience bolt for the doors.

Said one attendee as she got up to leave: "This is absolutely the weirdest lunch speaker I've ever seen." Or heard.

—John Hollon