HR Star: Steve Boese

Although I’ve known Steve Boese as long as anyone I am covering for this series, he was one of the first people I connected with on a subject outside of HR. Namely NBA basketball.

Now there are a lot of pro basketball fans in the Portland area as you can imagine. It’s the only pro franchise in the city. And most of my friends were fans of either the Portland Trail Blazers or other west coast teams. Steve was one of the first people I personally knew who really liked a team on the east coast (the New York Knicks). So over the course of a couple years and a few dozen David Lee jokes, he was included (along with several others) into a sphere of both HR and basketball loving people.

But you’re not interested in that, right? Let’s get to why he is included in this series.

Getting a start in HR Tech

Boese follows the track that I know many of us in HR followed: the track of accidentally faling into this profession. He was implementing enterprise financial software and a client wanted him to stick around to work on their HRIS and payroll systems. Although he didn’t know much about it, he decided to give it a shot. “I decided that while HRIS and Payroll may not be all that glamorous, it was a step up from Accounts Payable and Cash Management,” said Boese.

He has been involved in the profession ever since. He’s gotten deeper into HR Technology by taking on more project work, eventually becoming an expert in the field. This has led to other opportunities in addition to leading HR tech initiatives such as speaking at conferences (most recently leading a session at the HR Technology conference) and actually teaching the next generation of HRIS geeks.

Social media work and online radio

While not in HR in a traditional sense, Boese really embeds himself in the profession. He seeks to understand the pain points of HR much more thoroughly than many of his HRIS focused comrades. And while HR tech folks have always seemed to been outcasts from both the tech world and the HR world, he seems to have been embraced by both fairly well.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out Boese’s blog (creatively titled Steve Boese’s HR Technoloogy), I’d encourage you to do so. I believe this has been a major factor in him relating so well to the HR space. As far as I can tell from reading the comments, most of his readers are HR folks. Ten years ago, I don’t know if you see that same interest in what a technologist says or cares about but you certainly do now.

His popular online radio show HR Happy Hour has grown from this sort of goofy online show where a bunch of insiders talked amongst themselves (sometimes literally) to a top notch program. How could I judge this? I only get invited on when we can talk about basketball and a contrived connection to HR. And to the show’s credit, we don’t do that nearly as often as I’d like.

HRevolution and beyond

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Boese’s connection to HRevolution. As I mentioned in my post about Ben Eubanks, HRevolution is an unconference aimed squarely at pushing beyond the status quo. They are neat, intimate events with the trademark differentiation between shows being who was there. I liked them both for different reasons which is unique and Boese is definitely a primary driver behind that event.

Boese’s commitment to the HR community has a real impact in terms of the relationships he builds (he includes as influencers all of his co-organizers for HRevolution, HR tech leaders like Mike Krupa and Bryon Abramowitz along with, somewhat inexplicably, Tim Sackett). He’s reaching the next generation of HR technology leaders and is leading them by example of how to build influence in the online world the right way and how to make real, meaningful connections to his customer base: HR leaders.

Now when will we be seeing that basketball game together, Steve?

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