Got it? Okay good.

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This is a pretty silly post title, right?

Especially if I want people to read my post and become regular readers. Getting a discount code is purely transactional. I wouldn’t get a single reader if that’s all there was here. And there is a pretty good lesson about it that is relevant to HR technology space.

Technology only works well when it is done in conjunction with your overall strategy.

People familiar with blogging and basic SEO know why I picked this post title. As far as I can tell, I’ll be the only page on the internet with a page title and h1 tag that specifically says “HR Technology Discount Code”. That’s search engine gold, baby. Add in Las Vegas and the year in the first line of text (along with the date of the post) and you’re pretty well covered. In the next few days, I expect to see a steady stream of traffic flowing in…

And leaving just as quick.

Head and hand moving in concert

My goal isn’t to get people to come to my blog to then just simply leave though. My goal is to attract long-term readers, get them to read through more of my material and connect in some way (subscribing, following on Twitter, etc…). A post title like this doesn’t encourage any of that.

I’ll get great technical results, sure. In fact, this post went about as perfectly as it could. But it didn’t align with my overall strategy for my blog so it could be considered a major failure.

One of the things they’ll talk about in Las Vegas is the importance of making your technology choices in concert with your strategy. In sessions, you’ll often hear horror stories of attendees going out with RFP’s that are a hundred times more complicated than they need to be (or a hundred times less complicated, though that seems more rare). All because they were sold on technological capabilities before they considered their core strategic necessities first. There are many people there that will be trying to fix past technological pains and you don’t want that to be the legacy you leave.

As much as I think the HR tech show is for the geeks of our industry, it can be just as helpful to those guys and gals in more traditional HR leadership roles telling those geeks what they need. It’s easy to become enamored by the shiny objects known as HCM software (especially when you’re running a piece of software on a server in the basement with a decade’s worth of dust on the cabinet).

If you don’t figure out your strategy, you could end up like me: running a post title that seems like a good idea (and is technically sound) but totally doesn’t fit the profile nor the goal of this blog. Only, I’m guessing your boss probably takes it a lot harder than the boss of my blog when you screw up like that.

I’m not going to HRevolution this year. I enthusiastically went to the first two and I was happy to be part of the original crew who bought into it. And this year’s event is already sold out so it isn’t like I’m getting bribed to say nice things about it, that they needed my ticket or required my presence to make it a success. Look at the agenda. It’s going to kick ass.

I’m looking forward to the flurry of writing activity in May as people attempt to digest the event. In my post after the last event, I said that the HRevolution days themselves were the easiest part of the journey. Harnessing that sense of wonder and the feeling like anything is possible the other 363 days of the year? That’s tougher. Taking action on the things you are excited about? That’s tougherer.

I feel like I’ve made good progress in the year since the last HRevolution. I wish I could talk about that with a group of people who get it. I’m going to miss the crew of people who are attending and a bunch of new faces too. That’s always tough.

It’s such a unique event and I hope that everyone who goes enjoys it greatly. And if you don’t go this year, you may be able to catch it next year if you sign up early.

Recruiting Innovation Summit

An exciting development for me professionally is the first conference I’ve programmed with ERE: Recruiting Innovation Summit. I worked with the speakers to get an agenda that will be all about pushing the envelope in talent acquisition. This summit is the next generation of the Social Recruiting Summits that we’ve held the last couple of years. It’s a single track, one day, hard hitting program.

You’ll hear from practitioners, experts, analysts and outsiders. That’s the kind of mix we want to keep going as we move forward on these events.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, the next one is coming up May 17th at LinkedIn Headquarters in the Bay area and there are still spots open.

We will be having another one that will be coming up in the Fall as well and I am starting my search for speakers. I’m looking for some traditional and non-traditional speakers that are really driving innovation. While we definitely want to keep the focus squarely on talent acquisition, it is a good opportunity to expose innovations from other areas of the business and see what lessons can be applied for recruiting. I’m very easy to contact of course so let me know if you have any great ideas.

Now the easy part is over.

That’s right. Simply coming to #HRevolution might have been a step in the right direction but it was an easy step. Maybe for some attendees, that was a tough step too. It isn’t going to be any easier going forward.

We talked a good game about the future of the HR function, social media, technology and other issues hitting our collective worlds. The question on everyone’s mind at the end of the day was “Now what?” Loads of information was shared. Debates and discussions flowed over into hallways, tweetups and dinners. And tonight people started flowing out of Chicago as quickly as they came in. The question I want to ask when you get to your desk Monday morning: Will your behavior change at all or are the things that inspired you getting shelved until you have more time (which ends up being never)?

While you can get other benefits from attending the unconference, the primary purpose of the unconference style is to get more participation from the audience. Participation demands action.

The hard thing for me is I can’t do these things. I’m not in HR anymore. And when someone asked me about how not being in HR anymore changes my credibility, I had to be honest.  I can inspire action. I can help with finding business cases or contacts or speakers or educational material. But I can’t lead an organization through the fire.

You can.

Making The Choice

Productive change isn’t accidental. You have to make the choice to alter your actions (even slightly). When we talked about breaking out of the social media echo chamber, I tried to emphasize that you have to actually first want to break out of the echo chamber in order to do anything else.

We have a strong group of core people right now but we need your boss, your peers and the people you know from around HR to become a part of this group. And part of the point was introducing them to social media on their terms and in their language. Instead of telling people to go to a blog, copy and paste the content into an e-mail and send it to them. Instead of saying my Twitter friend, say my colleague so and so.

All of these things are small things but they are the result of a conscious choice to provoke change.

Credible Activism

Becoming a credible activist in your own organization for your proposed changes is a risk. A risk that you should be ready to take. Jason Seiden said it best today when talking about facing the fear of failure whenever you first make that choice. You can alleviate that fear by just a tiny bit by being prepared to talk to them about the change on their terms.

Consuming content from the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and The Economist may not sound like the best use of an HR person’s time but it is actually one of the best ways to learn about the issues that your boss probably cares about. And that’s where a conversation can start.

Interested in additional education? It looked close to unanimous at the unconference that people believed getting a MBA was superior to getting an HR certificate when it comes to building organizational credibility.

Are all of these silver bullets? No. Your organization will have specific ways that you build credibility (which may mean doing things in a traditional way).

Influencing Beyond The Organization

There was a bit of a debate over whether job titles matter. They do, especially when you’re talking about building influence beyond your organization. There are certainly some caveats there but the biggest one is this: don’t waste the opportunity to leverage that title to positively influence. That means when you have the title, you step up to the plate and you take your best swing.

Here’s the main dig with that: when you’re talking about reaching out to those higher level executives and influencing their thinking and behavior, they want to hear it from someone like them. For someone you can’t get to know deeply, a job title that conveys authority can open their mind to ideas that they might have otherwise rejected. That’s unfair but true.

I wish we could have gotten more into how you can do it if getting that title is either impossible or if you’re just uninterested in it. When you’re in that position, you’re fighting the battle of of one by one. Instead of being a speaker where you can influence hundreds at a time, perhaps you can get a dozen or so people in the best case scenario. That’s still a useful function and I didn’t want anybody to get the impression that I was downplaying its importance.

What We Didn’t Say (On Purpose)

We didn’t say:

• Start or keep blogging
• Become a Twitter superstar
• Look at every new piece of technology that comes out
• Sell social media as the solution to everything

We don’t mention it because it is certain to continue whether we want it to or not. The battle to get our community of likeminded HR folks isn’t going to be won on that front. It is going to be won through reaching out to people who are generally unreachable through traditional social media using language that makes sense to them as well as building your credibility and influence.

Are you ready?

In any case, here are some of the places I will be in the coming month:

HRevolution – May 7th-8th – Chicago

Causing chaos from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic. It's getting all "Mid" up in here.

This will be my second time attending and facilitating at HRevolution and I am excited about it. It’s been a month plus since I’ve really gone on the road so this will be a nice break in period. I can wear jeans and a t-shirt. No Powerpoint decks to prep. And really, the audience is going to be great. That’s the best part.

I know these guys have worked hard and they have a sold out show.

#socialrecruiting summit – May 17th – Minneapolis

Going both as a presenter and as part of the crew at ERE who puts on the show. Kris Dunn is the chairman of this event and he’s already let it get to his head. It is not only going to be a fun mixture of old and new faces but it is going to be heavy on the practical side. If you need to get results on the social recruiting front, this is the place to go.

We’re running out of spaces quickly so check it out!

SocialMediaPlus – May 25th – Philadelphia

While I am pretty excited to be moderating a panel on building internal and external talent communities, I am probably more excited about the fact that SocialMediaPlus isn’t HR or recruiting specific. While I love the conferences I go to, it can be refreshing to hear how marketers, executives, and IT professionals are using the tools we all have access to.

You can still register and catch all of the tracks.

recruitDC – May 26th – Washington, DC

After SocialMediaPlus, I’ll be catching a train down to DC to see recruitDC being chaired by Jessica Lee. Another unconference with a whole host of great speakers and broad panels to talk about both DC specific and industry wide concerns and strategy in recruiting.

This event has also sold out!

I am looking forward to seeing many of you at these upcoming events. I suppose I should start packing though!

Next week, I’ll be all up in San Diego attending two great events: SourceCon and ERE Expo. Here’s what I know

1. San Diego is my second favorite west coast city
2. There are going to be some great people in attendance
3. There will be a bunch of fantastic speakers and presenters

What is crazy is that this is the 10th annual spring show for ERE! You want to know what I was doing ten years ago? Skipping classes in high school, chasing girls and laughing at fart jokes. Things have changed since then (okay, maybe not the fart joke part) but the ERE Expo is still going strong.

The cool part is that I get to be there as a member of the ERE staff. I guess that means I have to shave and wear something other than a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. Luckily we have a fantastic group of conference organizers that keep the rest of us in line and make a job like mine relatively simple.

I know I’ve met many of you at other events before but I am looking forward to meeting a bunch more people live and in person. And for those of you that can’t make it, we are streaming a bunch of content on ERE.net for free.

1.) Educational opportunities that you have to be there for. I am very much a hands on person so if there is something that I need to learn about my craft that I absolutely must know and I know that learning it in person is going to get me there quickest, I am there.

2.) A speaker you can’t miss. This isn’t something I would go solely for but it is something that can seal the deal. I fully admit that with some speakers, you have to be there. Even a video of it doesn’t work the same.

3.) It is incredibly focused. Jobster talked about the fact that they were in between LL Bean and background checks at the last SHRM conference. While I might be interested in Jobster’s offerings, how am I going to find them in that mass? If it is laser focused on a subject matter I want to hear, let’s do it.

4.) Networking opportunities that are too good to pass up. Sometimes you’re in a position where it is simply most convenient to rub elbows with a lot of big wigs at once in one place.

5.) It is convenient. I am on the West Coast. When you get past Denver, Dallas and Minneapolis (all one flight hop and not three time zones away), it makes me really start to really question how necessary the conference is.

6.) You get an ROI. There has to be some kind of return on your trip to justify the expense. And if the cost is too big (some conferences are just ridiculously priced), it is going to be hard to get that return in real results.

7.) You have to be there. You can watch a DVD of a rock concert but you’ll never really be there. Some conferences are so good, you just have to be there. And the reason you have to be there is probably due to the fact that a bunch of the above six have come together in one place.

SHRM didn’t have these for me this year.

Take for instance the supposed necessity of meeting in person at a centralized conference to essentially do three days of networking (which most HR guys would say is the most beneficial). I don’t need to meet people in person to network. Give me a phone number or an e-mail address and we’re good to go. Coming to a central location for a conference is cumbersome to a global network of HR professionals. If we have embraced telecommuting, internationalized employees and communicating creatively in a digital age, why are we still meeting in person?

Now meeting people in person may be “nice” and “useful” but sometimes it isn’t practical. It isn’t practical for me. It doesn’t seem practical for people to be in Washington D.C. right now (even if it is closeby). It isn’t practical for the HR guy in India. The in-person interview has started to fall by the wayside in some companies (especially ones where working by telephone and e-mail are more important). I’ve hired people without meeting them in person. What’s the big deal? If I ever do meet them, it won’t be out of necessity.

While HR may be trying to position themselves as “change agents” or at least “not-that-opposed-to-change-at-least-compared-to-a-couple-decades-ago,” these old school meetings with these (mostly) old school vendors who offer old school solutions (sometimes wrapped in pretty new packaging) are going to become outdated. Attendance at conferences in almost all industries has gone down. With podcasts, video-conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, blogs and more and more experts communicating on a regular basis rather than limiting their comments to an expensive, cumbersome conference, there isn’t a compelling reason to go.  It isn’t surprising that other professionals have found better things to do with their time.