From the category archives:

HR Technology

Carnival of HR Mardi Gras Edition

by Michael Krupa on February 16, 2010

The Carnival of HR has landed right on the tail of Mardi Gras  so grab a Sazerac or Hurricane and some Jambalaya, pull up a chair and settle down for some fantastic blog posts.

As you know, Mardi Gras is a downright fun celebration but sometimes people imbibe a few too many hurricanes and need their friends to keep them from embarrassing themselves.  At work sometimes you also need a network of friends and mentors to help guide you.

Mary Jo Asmus at Aspire Collaborative Services kicks off the carnival with Leading People Can Be Messy about unpredictable people.

Continuing the theme of messy people who probably need a mentor, Melissa Prusher from The Devon Group suggests you rely on your mentors in Count on Change – and a Mentor to See You Through.

Speaking of friends and support systems, Paul Smith continues his story from his previous post about being gay at work and asks you to take stock of your support system in Support (if It’s Not love, Then It’s the Bomb).

If you don’t do mentoring then my guess is you don’t do Succession Planning. With a blog post titled Got Succession Planning Phobia? You’ve Got Problems, you can bet that the CEO of Aquire, Lois Melbourne has some specific thoughts on the subject.

Friends don’t let friends make HR mistakes so please read the HR Observations post by Michael Haberman on the Top 5 HR Mistakes That Small Businesses Make.

I’m sure the HR Bartender has a fabulous recipe for Hurricanes but more importantly, Sharlyn Lauby in Failure is Nothing Personal explains that it might be your methods that are failing.

Continuing the discussion on failures, Mark Bennett over at Talented Apps wants you to Focus on Failure! and learn from your failures when they happen.

Steve Boese thinks that Gartner may have forgotten that HR can and should play a role in Social Media initiatives and would like your thoughts on subject. Head over to What’s Missing from the 2010 Social Software Predictions to add your comments.

Now sometimes when you are enjoying the Mardi Gras celebration you need a little encouragement in form of Beads.

Speaking of needing some beads, over at Simply Lisa, Lisa Rosendahl gives us some thoughts on how to free up the mind to write in The Anti-Writing Demon.

Over at Humor That Works, Drew Tarvin talks about what you can learn from an improv class. I wonder if the 10 tips include tips for attracting bead throwers.

Beads are a powerful motivation but more importantly Three Star Leadership’s Wally Bock tells us about a different type of motivation in Putting Drive to Work: Intrinsic Motivation.

Continuing our discussion of motivation, Mr. Renegade HR himself, Chris Ferdinandi, wants your thoughts on How to Turn Average Performers into Rockstars.

Beads are also currency and The HR Store answers a write in question about negotiating a better salary for a job offer in Job offer negotiation.

Let’s not forget our international currency by reading Three Rules for Compensation Surveys in Smaller Developing Markets by Warren Heaps over at the International HR Forum.

More than just about beads, Bill Kutik writes What Does Salary.com Actually do and lets us in on the best kept secret in HR Technology and as a bonus gives us his thoughts on the SuccessFactors purchase of Inform.

Giving and collecting beads are a passion for some people and in the appropriately titled Passion – It’s Not a Dirty Word in HR, Steve Browne guest posts at the Cincy Recruiter blog to tell us how to be passionate about HR.

I don’t know how Naomi Bloom feels about beads but she has become passionate about blogging.  Read Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion and learn about who Naomi has beaten on over the years and why she is publishing her methodology for strategic HRM delivery systems planning.

Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Advisors wants to throw beads to everyone with his simple plea to be passionate about something in A Plea For Passion.

At some Mardi Gras celebrations people wear masks to conceal their identities.

Let Lance Haun over at Rehaul show you how to take off the mask of your current career and show the real you in his book review post Doing a Career Transition the Right Way of Alexandra Levit’s new book.

Office politics: It’s Personal is the final installment of the 5 part office politics series over at Jennifer Miller’s blog where you can explore your personal influence.

Speaking of being an influencer, Heather Stagl at Enclaria gives us Ten Essential Tools for Change Agents to help influence when you have no direct authority.

Ready to switch to a mask that is unfamiliar to you?  At the Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy has some advice for people ready to make a lateral move into a role that is unfamiliar to them in Career Advice Part 3: Lateral Moves.

Masks can also be used to hide things we are uncomfortable talking about but Kathleen Nicolini over at the Omaha.net blog tackles obesity with A Big Problem: Obesity and Employee Rights .

Put on your mask of shame and head over to Susan Heathfield’s post Your Worst Job – Ever? where Readers share their worst job – ever.

Sometimes the goal at Mardi Gras is just to party on and have safe and sane good time.

I’m guessing the partying is kept to a minimum at these top 11 HR Masters Programs described by Jared Lucas over at The HR Patriot.

Mardi Gras can suck you in and so did the SHRM website for April Dowling. Head over to PseudoHR to read From APA to SHRM for the juicy details.

Mardi Gras is also about meeting new people and in Networking – Online of Off, Joan Ginsberg thinks the “traditional forms of networking are pointless time-wasters”.

If you don’t have any free time you probably won’t be able to go to Mardi Gras so be sure to stop by Blogging4jobs and let Jessica Miller-Merrell teach you 6 Time Saving Business Social Media Tools.

Of course you can’t have a good time at a party if you have not honed your conversational awareness so head on over to Jason Seiden’s wrap up of how-to posts on developing organizational savvy for Tips & Tricks: Develop Your Conversational Awareness (5 of 5).

The amazing HR Maven, Deirdre Honner, tells us why she continues to party on work, write, blog & talk with her blog post Why I do it.

I don’t know about you but I always get a return on my investment when attending Mardi Gras (beads anyone?) so read on about HR ROI.

What is the #1 HR Metric to Report to Your CEO? I am not going to give it way so you will just have to read this post from Cathy Missildine-Martin at the Profitability Through Human Capital blog.

I usually get a return on investment from my beads but do you know how to evaluate the ROI for your Learning Programs?  If not, you had better go read Reviving Training’s DOA ROI by Kevin Oakes.

Payroll is a topic not always covered in our sexy HR blogs but Tusha Bhatia over at the Talent Junction blog has a great post covering ROI on automating the Payroll Function.

Thank you everyone for your fantastic contributions to this Carnival of HR and to the readers for taking time to find some new blog posts to read.  Stay tuned for a very special Undercover Boss edition of the Carnival of HR hosted by Bryon Abramowitz at The HR Technologist Blog on February 24th.

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To Change or Not to Change?

by Michael Krupa on February 1, 2010

One of our top notch HR Bloggers and HR Technology instructor at RIT, Steve Boese, asked the HR blogosphere if we would host some guest blogs for his students.  I raised my virtual hand as fast as I could and I sure am glad as one of Steve’s students sent me a fabulous guest post.

Today I am hosting a guest post from RJ Nicolais. RJ is just getting into the Twitter thing so if everyone could please follow him and give him encouragement to update his BIO and avatar and maybe add a couple more tweets, that would be great. I don’t want to embarrass RJ by mentioning all the wonderful things he said about my blog but lets just say he will go far in life if he keeps up the compliments.  RJ and I share some similar thoughts about HR and technology and all kidding aside, please give RJ your full attention for this great post about being afraid of change.

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To Change or Not to Change?

I’ve worked at several different organizations throughout my career in human resources and have noticed that they all have one thing in common: they are afraid of change.  Not just any change, but a special kind of change.  As HR professionals, we are supposed to be the “champions of change” and yet have difficulty changing ourselves.  We can take on wellness initiatives and change whole benefit structures (not to mention that we shoulder the responsibility for broader company culture shifts) but when it comes to technology we’re just plain frightened.  I would have used another colloquialism to tell you how I feel about it but that would be inappropriate.

The rate at which “technology” changes and evolves is totally insane – but that is the nature of the beast.  You can learn to accept it and embrace those changes or you can choose to resist and get left the in the proverbial dust.  I should probably tell you that I don’t think I’m really frightened, so I make that correction to the statement I made above.  There are those of us who truly embrace technology changes and get downright excited about them.  So we demo software and the newest (SaaS) solution for HR and we start to drool thinking about how much we can accomplish in so little time.  We may even start to sweat a little when we see the pretty interface we get to look at every day.

Then we talk to our bosses about it and our dreams are shattered.

“It’s too expensive.”  “There is too much at stake in a change.”  “It’s just not possible this year – maybe next year we can talk about it.” Or, my all-time favorite: “What we have now works just fine.” Those are all valid answers to valid fears.  I think that we need to get past those fears.  HR needs to spend the money to get the right solution at the right time.  Get the product that will be the most use to the company right now when growing the business is more important than ever.

Trying to work within the constructs of old software that doesn’t support the business any longer isn’t productive.  Excel isn’t a means to an end.  That is what scares me – outdated software and massive Excel spreadsheets.  It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

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My 2010 Predictions

by Michael Krupa on December 31, 2009

Since @williamtincup over at Starr Tincup did not ask for my predictions for 2010, I guess I will have to blog about them right here on my shiny new WordPress Blog.  Since it is New Years Eve and my brain is now official mush for 2009, I could only come up with 5 (really lame) predictions.

SaaS continues to pick up steam

As company’s budgets open up in 2010 and they start looking at upgrading or replacing their aging legacy in-house HCM applications, they will turn to SaaS replacements.  Additionally many companies already using SaaS applications for Talent Management, Recruiting and Learning will switch to another SaaS provider based on perceived but not necessary real shortcoming of their current system  (grass is always greener syndrome).

Consumer information such as Social Security numbers will continue to get stolen

Many companies still have not implemented procedure changes and technology solutions to keep employee information safe.  Too many system administers, database administrators and developers have inappropriate access to employee information in the HR systems.  Additionally, too many people in HR also have access to sensitive employee information.  Controls are still not in place to prevent or detect when files containing social security numbers have been emailed, copied to USB drives or otherwise been spirited out side the company firewall.

Social Media sites will start to be unblocked

More companies will finally get the hint that blocking social media sites is not actually causing employees to avoid spending work time doing social media.  The rise in popularity of smart phones such as the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices that can easily access Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites convinces companies that blocking is futile.  However as more people start using sites such as Twitter and Facebook and post before they think, we will see an increase in the number of employees getting the boot at work for posting negative information about their company, co-workers or management.

Oracle Fusion Applications will…

…nope, sorry, no way am I going to predict anything about Oracle Fusion Applications

Bryon Abramowitz and Sarah White will move to a self hosted WordPress Blog

Okay, I sort of get to cheat on this. I started writing this blog post a couple of days ago when Bryon was asking for Blogger Theme help and I predicted that he would eventually be persuaded by his fellow bloggers to move to WordPress.  However Bryon jumped on this faster than my speeding greyhound and moved to a self hosted WordPress blog yesterday.  Sarah will eventually get plugin envy after seeing all the really cool buttons on other people’s blogs and will move her Wordpress.com blog to a self hosted site.

There you go. I hope everyone has nice New Years Eve and I am looking forward to continuing the conversations in 2010.

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While you wait

by Michael Krupa on December 28, 2009

Apologies on the delay in moving my blog to Wordpress. I could bore you with all the reasons for the delay (work, work, work, bad cold, holiday gatherings, learning the Thesis Wordpress theme etc…) but I know you could care less. You just want some new content to chew on. Especially that darn @thehrmaven who has been snapping her fingers at me. So how about a compromise? Let’s turn back the clock and remind of you some of my earlier work while you wait.

In my very first post, I told you to SaaS your SaaS. Now that was one sassy post. How about this beaut from last February when asked if you Twitter in the bathroom? In April I showed you how to convert filing cabinets into a ping pong table. Finally for all my new readers, this gem of a video from August entitled What I do (Wednesday edition) will give you the low down on my work and my passion for rescued greyhounds.

Now run along and don’t come back until I tell you I am ready.

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Psst Vendors – Some Software Demo Tips For You

November 23, 2009

I have attended many many hours of software demos the last couple of months. Some have been great but unfortunately most have been mediocre. So, I thought I would write up some quick software demo tips for the Vendors out there. Most of these seem OBVIOUS to me but if they were obvious [...]

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Is HR afraid of Technology?

October 27, 2009

I have had a nagging feeling for awhile that HR people are actually afraid of technology. I thought back on my last year of twitter conversations with my HR tweeps and could not think of any significant evidence of HR people talking about technology. In fact, many times during the monthly #HR_Tech chats, the [...]

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Oracle OpenWorld Fusion Apps Blogger Extravaganza

October 25, 2009

So I realize this post is VERY late but I had a couple of conversations this week about Oracle Fusion Applications where I ended up pointing people to the blog posts I could remember off the top of my head. Since it is cold morning, I though I would trudge over to the local coffee [...]

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HR Technology Conference – It was about the Tweeps

October 5, 2009

Wow. What a great time I had at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago last week. The show floor was overwhelming and my brain is full from the sessions and keynotes. I will be blogging over the next week about my impressions from the conference sessions and keynotes.
I have to say that the biggest [...]

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BEEP, leave a message – I’m at the HR Technology Conference

September 29, 2009

As an HR Technologist it is de rigueur to attend the best HR Technology conference of the year. So, this week I will be at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago. If you see me passing by on the show floor or in one of the many sessions, stop and say hi. [...]

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How do you handle saying no to a LinkedIn recommendation?

September 17, 2009

I posted this tweet recently trying to get some help from my expert tweeps:
Here are some of the responses I received:
“Ignore it. ”
“Just say no!”
“I have ignored requests from persons I was less than happy to recommend. Nothing nice to say, say nothing!”
“I shan’t do the requested recommendation.”
“ignore it & pretend like [...]

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