Twitter and Human Resources : The Contest

On the Cutting Edge of HR? Not so much!

I spent the day yesterday at "On the Cutting Edge" - the annual 1 day conference put on by the Suncoast Human Resource Management Association (SHRMA) of Pinellas County Florida. The conference was great!

I had not been to a SHRMA meeting in a long time and was glad to be able to reacquaint myself with some former colleagues and meet a number of new ones. I even added Lynn Heckler of PSCU to my LinkedIn network!

Some quick thoughts on speakers:



Doug Hardy from Monster was awesome and gave away free books! I was also happy to hear him mention twitter along with a number of thoughts about how now is a key time to invest in recruiting top talent if you can hire, or to build relationships with people you may want to hire someday f you can't hire now. Check out the new from Monster "Finding Keepers" for more details.

Charles Pascual about what HR peeps can do to help their organizations weather the storm when the economy and business outlook puts the squeeze on pay and benefits programs. His presentation was the final one of the day because he had to come late due to layoffs in his organization. Kudos to him for making the meeting at all during such a difficult event, and more kudos for showing peeps what his company, Catalina Marketing did and how they did it the right way.

William Grob pointed out that 2009 is shaping up to be a landmark year for employment legislation and expalined why. Legislation and court cases will dominate HR attention all years it seems.

Ann Rhoades formerly with Southwest Airlines and Jet Blue Airlines, spoke about HR’s role in creating cultures focused on delivering outstanding service. Ann also mentioned twitter, more on that in a moment.

For me, this was the most important talk of the day. I am going to do a blog post devoted to what she said tomorrow. One nugget for today:

Let your employers and your customers have input into the development of your business processes, including benefits. You will be surprised at what you don't know!

Another big takeaway from the meeting: too many of us who work in Human Resources are waaayyyy behind the curve on social networking and how it applies to our profession. I was frankly blown away by the number of people who asked me:

"What's a Twitter?"

C'mon people...we have to do better than this! So, in the true spirit of HR, I am going to provide an incentive to find out more about Twitter. I am running a contest for the next week. In return for one of three things, you get a chance to be randomly selected by volunteer judges for our grand prize package.

1. Sign up for twitter and follow me at @mvndrvrt. (You must send a tweet telling me you are following me to be eligible!) or
   
2. Send me your definition of twitter or
   
3. Send me one HR trick that you use twitter for in your work
   

Prize package will be a signed copy of "Finding Keepers", one 30 minute coaching session on using twitter in HR from me.. (Trust me - this is more valuable than it sounds!) and a gift card! Contest ends April 9th.

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