Other than me being a glutton for punishment, this has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while. After my work started at TLNT, it became glaringly obvious that I couldn’t write about the same things I wrote about there. That’s bad for everyone.

And I wanted to continue to write, on my own, and more frequently. This wasn’t happening with Rehaul.

Then, I Googled my name and found out that this domain still ranked second for my name. It was defunct and needed work.

I also had kicked around this idea about how I could really continue to write about things that are more interesting but not applicable to TLNT. Maybe a bit more inside baseball, or just things I observe from talking to people in HR and recruiting with a insider/outsider perspective. And I could talk a bit more about what I’m doing without rather superficial restraint. So I think the bracket analogy works alright to describe the new direction. And at the very least, it can justify my love for sports stories too.

So that’s it. I moved. No big deal. And really, what I hope is that I push for more content here going forward.

Kudos to Laurie who just told me to go for it. Everyone knows I don’t have time for focus groups and research. And for those of you worried about subscriptions, backlinks and such, I got it. Even if you have old Your HR Guy links, it should still resolve properly. But if you have a blogroll, you can update it (either with an edit… or a delete, heh).

Back in the olden days, I was barely writing anything. So it was easy to do 2-4 posts a week with no sweat. With my new position at ERE, I was doing a bit more writing but it wasn’t significant. As we were talking about launching TLNT, I knew I’d be involved but I didn’t know how much. That’s where the shift occurred.

I was committed to doing three posts a week on TLNT. I still did a SmartBrief poll (which seems a lot easier than it is), this blog, occasional posts on ERE as well as adding or featuring content from the community. This blog is left out in the cold a little bit. Sometimes I figure out what people want to still talk about here and other times I don’t.

In any case, many of you aren’t subscribed to TLNT yet and if you like what I do here, I think you’ll really like what I’m bringing to the new site (it’s even edited for clarity!). Here are excerpts from a few of my recent pieces:

Thanks For Doing Your Job, Now Here’s Your Pink Slip: So people that worked for the Miami Heat the last couple of years probably thought it was a good gig. The team was a bit up and down and the fan base is generally dispassionate about basketball. After the LeBron acquisition though, the job was really quite good for a couple of weeks — until you ran out of tickets to sell.

Sometimes, HR Should Plan The Office Party: I’ve got news for you: sometimes a party needs planning, and sometimes, you’re the somebody that’s going to make that happen. Now, I don’t know many people who like planning parties. And pre-HR, I didn’t know anything about planning a party outside of what we did in college. That primarily consisted of securing a keg of the cheapest beer, spreading the word, and keeping freeloaders from the tap. This experience didn’t help me that much unless I was going to be working with a bunch of other college students.

Want to Retain Good, Young HR Pros? You Better Recognize Them!: As a young HR pro, you get hammered with the worst kind of work. I remember doing weeks of number crunching on our self-insured benefits data only to find my boss taking credit for discrepancies I found. When I pushed for several changes in a single department to help with retention and culture and got them approved, guess who took credit for the changes he was once fighting? The department manager, of course.

How Will Employee Training Change in Free Agent Nation?: And that’s why, for the most part, that sort of long-term, external training or tuition reimbursement will simply just go away. It will disappear from offer sheets and policy handbooks and then out of the memories of the few people that remembered a time when a company wanted you to develop on their dime. Now I’ve been with companies that don’t do tuition reimbursement or external training and personally, it doesn’t bother me. But I’ve talked to many folks who have lamented this change and blamed every generation, company, and even unions.

Check them out, check all of my posts out and last but not least subscribe (e-mail or RSS is easiest).

Don’t worry. I haven’t changed my mind.

Like what I bought, only smaller

I want to tell you that I did buy flowers for someone close to me even though I feel that the whole thing is stupid. Given that she works in an ultra-traditional office, the parade of flowers today would have driven her crazy (no matter how irrational it might be). I know that she will love them and the meaning behind them.

In other words, I got suckered into it.

I realize that I’ve had it extremely lucky. Rarely do guys have a stigma regarding having a Valentine thing from a special someone. I’ve also had a wife that never cared about getting something on Valentine’s day. I am also extremely lucky because she has worked in male dominated industries and so there is virtually no external pressures on her.

So maybe there isn’t any sort of rational reason why a person should be any more sad on Valentine’s day than any other day of the year but I think there is something to say about brightening a person’s day who may be feeling down about it (even if it means violating some principles). Maybe it wouldn’t be bad to go out and have a great time together with that person? That’s what we’re going to do. It won’t be a pity party but we will have fun and it will be memorable.

For starters, I love working for MeritBuilder. I would love to continue working for MeritBuilder full time. It is a really great fit.

We have spent the last month pushing forward on exciting plans that are making MeritBuilder what I imagined it could be when I first joined in August. What has developed is a fee free but fully featured way of managing your employee incentive and rewards program. We developed it to the point where the platform is completely self-service. You can sign up, load your company e-mail addresses and have a fully featured and hosted employee incentive program in a fraction of the time and cost of most programs.

Exciting right? I am thrilled.

In the process of planning for this though, we knew we had limited financial resources going forward. So what is important to our current and future customers? That the service will continue to be there, that the system will be maintained and issues can continue to be addressed. Since our lead programmer is also our CEO, the system will continue to be maintained as long as we still have customers. As far as servers and bandwidth are concerned, we’ve got that covered as part of this financial plan as well.

Where does that leave me? Basically I’ve become an adviser (unpaid) to MeritBuilder while also retaining a stake in the company. I’ll continue communicating on their behalf (as I can), working with customers (as I can) and basically continuing the service as we need to even at the certainty of a slower pace of customer growth. We’d rather do it right.

Ready or not, here I come

So given that apparently things like bills and other financial obligations do not take a pause for continued customer growth within your bootstrapped company, I am now throwing myself back out in the market. I am an experienced human resources professional with a solid background at large and small companies. I’m a PR/marketing newbie for the HR vendor space with some heavy emphasis on getting stuff done in the social media space (even though I am no Social Media Rockstar or Ninja). I have been writing this blog for almost four years which means, at the least, I can deal well with doing something like this on a consistent basis, measuring results and leveraging that into productive relationships. I also have a record of thoughts that I will have a hard time shirking.

What am I looking for?

• I am based in Portland, OR with a very happily working wife so something local or telecommuting with travel would be ideal. Relocation would have to be very compelling.
• Obviously I am most experienced in the human resources realm. My life continues to revolve around issues related to that too so it would make sense to continue my involvement there.
• I really love working on the HR vendor side of the business and would enjoy the opportunity to continue doing that (can’t be in the incentives or rewards space though).
• I’d love the opportunity to continue to help companies reach out to other HR people using social media. Continued involvement with my blog is essential.
• Of course, with any of these, I’d be open to part-time or full-time employment, contractual, project based or consultative roles.

Does this spark your interest? For more information, you can check out my LinkedIn profile or download a PDF copy of my resume. And if you want to get in touch with me, please do.

Here’s what I know: I asked for $1,500, I got over $1,700. Was it the biggest campaign in the world? No, but it helped. It was a step forward.

The Haiti disaster has thrown this idea back at me and it is time to take action. I love Portland based Mercy Corps and I want to try to support them. They are mobilizing teams of people (everyone from engineers to public health advisers to disaster specialists) to the area as we speak. Organizations like Mercy Corps are also critical for helping to direct any governmental based aid and making recommendations for actions. I’ve personally made a donation to them and I am hoping the HR and Recruiting community can rally around this cause.

Donate To Mercy Corps’ Haiti Response

If you’ve made a donation to another charity or are unable to make a donation, please don’t feel the need to respond. In fact, Laurie at Punk Rock HR has some tips on how to help if you are unemployed or otherwise unable to give.

I know if you are anything like me though, you may feel trapped by tragedies like this and even a generous monetary response won’t fix that. I don’t have any great advice for that. Tragedies on this scale can be overwhelming.

What you should know is that your donation can still make an impact no matter how you feel. $10 is $10. It goes somewhere. And that’s a start.

Influence Insiders – Wednesday 12 Noon EST

Everyone has talked about what might happen and what will happen in 2010. We’re going to talk about what did happen in 2010. You’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth as we tell you what did and didn’t happen (and I have a surprise that will blow your mind, or, at least one person’s mind). Paul Hebert moderates the panel and it should be a fun discussion. (Show info)

HR Happy Hour – Thursday 8 PM EST

Laurie and I are going to talk about our project The HR Calendar and talk about some of the upcoming events to hit the HR and recruiting spaces. We’re going to be joined by several big wig conference organizers too. You won’t want to miss this awesome show and you’ll get to find out where you can see me in my board shorts getting sunburned in 2010. (Show info)

If you wanted to hear the one and only this week, now is your chance. Looking forward to these two shows.

Tomorrow (Tuesday December 15th) at 2:30pm EST (11:30am PST), we’ll be doing a live webinar with many of the guests in the series including:

• Josh Bersin
• Kris Dunn
• David Creelman
• Richard Hadden
• Ed Lawler
• Libby Sartain
• and myself

You can register for the webinar here. Looking forward to hitting a couple of the issues live!

Okay, maybe it’s not the opportunity of a lifetime but an opportunity nonetheless. Have you ever thought of blogging? Are you a blogger who is looking to expand their reach? Do you want to have a permanent spot in the history of one of the most storied blogs ever (may be an exaggeration)?

You can guest post for Rehaul! And now, because I am all official, I’ve got some guidelines to make the process quicker and easier. Here are the guidelines that are the most important to me:

Do something funny, or brilliant, or just kick some ass and you’re in.

You game? Check out my guest post guidelines and hit me up!

Speaking of game, if you’re getting excited about the World Cup draw today, here’s a clip that should prepare you for what you’ll see a lot of:

Why Did I Rejoin?

Everyone will probably guess that China Miner Gorman at SHRM had a lot to do with it. That was helpful sure. There were three mitigating factors that made it worth the cost of joining:

1. Easier access to updated information – I am still very much in the HR world yet I am disconnected from colleagues on broader issues coming up through the chain. SHRM will certainly help maintain my knowledge as a generalist. Being able to speak to current issues facing my customers is important to them and to me.
2. Access to people I can’t connect with any other way – It is difficult to make connections with many HR people outside of SHRM. At least locally, there are a couple of groups but I miss some bigger companies. If I want the opportunity to touch base with those people, SHRM makes sense.
3. Perhaps I can change SHRM easier as a member – It is worth a try but I am skeptical about this one. Look, SHRM is hierarchical to the max. To gain true influence, you have to move up through layers of local, state and regional associations before you can get to the ear of the strategy makers. Perhaps as a member, my blog will be listened to by more at SHRM though.

How Did SHRM Try To Stop Me From Rejoining?

There are three things that killed me that I had to ignore in order to join:

1. SHRM Legislative Alerts – I have continued to receive these even though I let my membership lapse because it was important to stay up to date. This continues to be a sore spot to me. The issue advocacy first approach instead of providing education and presenting multiple sides of the argument is entirely wrong for an organization like SHRM. Other associations get away with it because they focus on one industry. SHRM has hundreds of industries in their ranks.
2. The local association versus national association disconnect – I want to be a part of my local SHRM chapter so I went to their website to get information and if I want to be a part of them, I am required to be a SHRM member and I am required to mail in my local membership dues as well as my SHRM dues (if I am not current). There needs to be a tighter association between local and national levels and it is time to stop the insanity with separate dues.
3. SHRM Connect - I saw a preview of it and knew it was going rough. The good news is that I changed my mind about SHRM making this a public facing product (as of now, only members can access SHRM Connect). Non-members will basically find little use for the product as it lives today. Want to connect with likeminded folks? Go to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. All of them have better interfaces, more people and a higher rate of conversation going on.

Did I Jump The Shark Like The Fonz?

Probably.

The important stuff:

• Backlinks will continue to work
• Subscriber? You don’t need to do anything.
• Your comments? Still here.
• My posts? All there.
• Have a blogroll? Update it yo!

So why?

Simple: I wanted to follow my own advice.

I tell HR people that there is a great big world outside of HR that we need to explore, understand and embrace. And then I sit down at night and write a blog about HR, for HR, named Your HR Guy.

It felt weird. I love being Your HR Guy (that will always be a part of my identity) and I’ll obviously be holding on to the domain name for a long time but I want to really explore how people and businesses interact. And really, not all of that goes through HR. I’ve been holding on to this domain name for a while because I know I wanted to do something with it but I wasn’t sure what. This is a perfect opportunity to change over.

Why not just start a new blog?

No. Just no.

Where are HR topics going?

Nowhere. I am still going to talk about it obviously but I crave the freedom to explore how technology is changing our relationship with businesses both as a consumer and a worker. I want to talk about dumb marketing schemes, using attractive females on expo floors and social media screw ups. And I could do it under Your HR Guy but new readers need to understand what the site is about and it isn’t solely going to be about HR anymore.

So sit tight and thanks for joining me on this next iteration. I think you’re going to enjoy this.