Wow. I have four, count them FOUR, HR Happy Hours to talk to you about. I guess that’s what happens when you have three shows in one week. But you’re like me and just can’t get enough of the HR Happy Hour, right? Of course you can’t. So let’s get to all the HR geeky goodness!

Episode 60 – Seiden Says
For our 60th show we have a special treat for you all! Steve took the night off but that just meant that we could bring in a special guest host for the evening: Jason Seiden!! I won’t lie to you, it was a fun time. Jason gave out some great advice, I giggled like a weirdo, and everyone learned why I call Jason “punk monkey”. How can you not check it out below?

Episode 61 & 62 Live from HR Florida
We were live from HR Florida this week with two special shows at a special time! And this wasn’t just coverage of the event either, we had some amazing guests on, like first time guests William Tincup and Cathy Martin, who brought some great conversations around HR technology, leadership, and engagement to just to name a few things we tackled. It was so good I sneaked out of work to attend! (Shhhhh! Don’t spread that part around…)

61 – The World According to William Tincup

62 – Leadership and Engagement with Cathy Martin

Episode 63 – The HR Tech Conference Preview
Finishing up the week and back at it’s regularly scheduled day and time, episode 63 was all about the upcoming HR Technology Conference, coming up quickly on Sept. 29th – Oct. 1 in Chicago, IL. To tell us all about the show, the Godfather himself, Bill Kutik was our guest, and he did a great job stealing the show away from Steve! It was great to learn more about the show and I am more excited about attending this year! want to know why you need to go too? Check out the show below!

Thanks for listening in and as always, check out the crazy active #HRHappyHour back channel for the full story!

The latest Carnival of HR is up and it’s on your TV!! Well, not really, but our host this time around, Bill Boorman, wanted to do something different and asked people to submit video or vlogs! You know the best part? You can still get your submission in!! That’s right, go here to not only see all the great Carnival videos but also submit your own! Feel free to just skip over that first video of that weird Shauna person though, who does a video in the car?

In a whirlwind of Carnival of HR events, I have two, yes two Carnivals coming up to tell you about! First up, straight from last night’s HR Happy Hour show, the dancing queen Sarah White will be hosting a Special Carnival on September 8th: Why you should go to the HR Technology Conference! Now, I know a lot of you already have that post published or are about to, so be sure to send it in to Sarah! You can email her at imsosarah at gmail dot com. Second, The regularly scheduled Carnival will be on September 15th and hosted by a long time friend of the Carnival of HR, Jon Ingham, at his Strategic HCM Blog! Jon always does an awesome job with the Carnival so don’t forget to get your submissions in to him by Monday September 13th!

On more than one occasion, I’ve had people mention to me that they felt the HR online community was a clique. Apparently there are “cool kids”, you know, the ones who get invited to all the cool parties (conferences) and get all the attention (blog traffic). I’ve also been told that it is really hard to get into that “cool kids” group. When I hear stuff like this, I can tell that a good deal of frustration, and maybe even hurt feelings, is behind it. In the end, the HR online community is actually fairly small, especially when you consider how many HR professionals aren’t involved. It’s a little discouraging to think that people seeking a place to belong online feel left out. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I got involved myself. But you know what, I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, the HR online community is like a clique and that’s not a bad thing.

Here’s why:

1. Popular doesn’t just happen. One of the biggest mistakes you can make about a “thought Leader”/”cool kid”/(Insert another meaningless blogger title here) is to assume that their popularity just happened. That’s crap and anyone who has dedicated hours, and I do mean hours, of their time building their social media presence and reputation will tell you, it doesn’t just happen. Your content has to be good, well-written, and informative. You have to be entertaining, market yourself, make connections, and build an audience. Yes, luck does come into play too, but if someone is popular, they are working hard for it.

2. You get what you give. Related to my first point, popularity doesn’t just happen, and sometimes the problem isn’t that people are ignoring you, they don’t know they should be paying attention to you. When I hear from someone that they don’t feel like they can get a foothold in the community, one of my first thoughts is, “How much are you putting into it?”. Social media is an investment. You contribute time, ideas, interaction with other members, and eventually you can start reaping the rewards of your involvement. Give people a reason to want to get to know you and read what you have to say.

3. Remove your ego from the situation. Let’s be honest with ourselves and just admit that part of why we blog is because we all have some ego involved. We all want people to like us and think we are clever. Yes, there are a million and one other reasons why we blog but… Come. On. So when you dedicate so much of yourself to blogging and you aren’t getting as many comments as that person, or don’t get as many RT’s as this person, it can hurt. So learn to take your ego out of the process and enjoy what you are doing for itself.

In the end, cliques happen, but they happen for a reason. People get close to each other, build off each others ideas, and naturally want to work with each other more and more. To someone new to the HR online community, it can feel like you can never break into that inner circle. But that isn’t true at all. I have seen bloggers established long before me fall into obscurity and newbies blast past me in popularity. So instead of worrying about the “cool kids”, focus more on yourself and what you can give. You’ll be surprised by how fast those feelings of being left out go away.

Dude, I know I said last week’s HR Happy Hour show was going to be crazy, but man, that is one show that “exceeded expectations”! Ha! Get it? It was a show about performance reviews and I said it “exceeded expectations”. Hahaha…ha, erm, yeah, so moving on… It was a great show full of controversy, great questions, comparisons between HR and the KGB, and we had a crazy active #HRHappyHour twitter back channel. Be sure to check it out below!

While I have your attention, you have to check out this week’s HR Happy Hour! Steve will be taking a much needed break from the show but don’t you worry cause Jason Seiden is stepping in and will be your personal career coach for the evening! And he won’t be giving you any of that fluffy advice either. No sir, you better be sure you have the balls to handle it. If you think you do, go here to find out how you can get your question on the show and be sure to join us this Thursday at 8 pm EST. That is, if you have the balls for it.

(Dances around the room with wild abandon) Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you all there, reading this blog post. (removes headphones) I was just grooving along to the latest Carnival of HR! That’s right, it’s carnival time again and I hope you are all ready to rock! That’s because Paul Smith didn’t just pull together a great collection of blog posts over at his Welcome to the Occupation blog, he paired them up with some sick tunes for your musical enjoyment! So for all you HR music fans out there, check it out here and get ready to bust a move, just not that vase you have in the corner over there.

Rolling right along, the next Carnival of HR is coming up on September 1st and is hosted by that international man of mystery, Bill Boorman at his Recruiting Unblog! It looks like Bill may be hosting a vlog Carnival again so get those web cams and Flip cameras ready to go! More details to come! In the meanwhile, be sure to go here to learn of all the ways that you can stay connected to the Carnival of HR!

Last week I tweeted out this little gem:

Saw “willing to meet expectations” on a resume. Aim higher people, seriously.

Ah, I do love reading resumes, you’ll never know what nuggets of HR humor you will stumble upon and have to share with the rest of the world. Hell, Not Hired is a whole site dedicated to that sort of stuff. The more I thought about that line though, the more I came to realize how true of a statement it could be. When it comes to down to it, how many of your employees seem to fall into the category of “willing to meet expectations”? They show up, but that’s about all that you can say about them. They do their job, for the most part. Doing the bare minimum is about all that you can expect of them. They have no real direction or career aspirations, or if they do, it’s certainly not in this job or at this company. Come performance review time, they are harder to evaluate than the worst performers. What do you say to someone who does their basic job but that’s all?

Now, clearly these are not your A performers. They aren’t even B performers. Your B performers actual put in effort and hard work. They are apathetic, disengaged, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. But now that they are in your company what are you supposed to do with them? Be honest. Let them know that you expect more from them, why, and hold them to that. Don’t back down, don’t be vague, and most certainly don’t let them get away with the status quo. When you have an employee who breaks the rules or just doesn’t do their job, it’s easy to find the motivation to give them a proverbial kick in the pants. So why is it so hard for managers to do the same for these employees? The worse that will happen is that the employees will turn into bad performers and get fired or they will decide that the job is suddenly too much of a hassle and leave on their own. Harsh? Maybe. But did you want them in your company anyway? Were they contributing anything of value? The worse thing you can do with an employee who is “willing to meet expectations” is to enable their mediocrity. If nothing else, that’s one less painful performance review you’ll have to do.

Don't be like this manager and maybe they won't flip you off on their way out the door.

Speaking of performance reviews, in my personal experience they always seem to make my head ache, well, it’s more of a stabbing pain behind my right eyeball. Sound familiar? Then you are going to love this week’s HR Happy Hour where we talk to Professor Samuel Culbert, author of ‘Get Rid of the Performance Review!’. It’s going to be a crazy show, so be sure to join us, this Thursday, 8 pm EST.

Another HR Happy Hour is in the can and let me tell you, after 58 shows the craziness still hasn’t gone away. This week we were talking to Tom Silver, SVP of Dice.com, the leading job board for IT and other technical positions. Topics ranged from “Are Job Boards Dead?” to “Is it considered cheating if Lance looks up trivia on Wikipedia?”. Intense stuff right? Well no worries, it was a fun show with a lively discussion, check out the #HRHappyHour twitter back channel for the whole story, and be sure to take a listen to the show below!

I found myself over the weekend, in between unpacking and attempting to get the overshare badge on Foursquare (Me? Overshare? Never!), reflecting on my stint being unemployed. As this had been the longest I had ever been unemployed, and hopefully it will never be that long again, a lot of craziness went down and I thought I might share some of that with you. Here are some of the silly, funny, and crazy things that happened. They say it’s important to find humor in things, which fortunately has never been a problem for me. So, for your amusement, here are some of my Tales from Unemployment!

- After the HR manager waxed poetic during our in person interview about how much the candidate experience meant to their company, they proceeded to string me along for another month before I got a canned rejection from their applicant tracking system. Can you say ironic?
- At an interview I was so surprised to be asked what the Fair Labor Standards Act was that for a few seconds I actually forgot what it was. This question was swiftly followed by what is the current minimum wage. Cause, you know, my PHR certification and Master’s degree was not good enough for them, they had to test me themselves.
- After receiving an offer for a contract position I asked a few questions before I would accept the role. The recruiter stated he would check with his boss and get back to me. I never heard from them again.
- There was the recruiter who never seemed to get my messages, voice mail and email, about setting up a phone screen. But she got them for everything else. We never did end up talking. Entirely my fault I’m sure.
- There was the staffing agency that spent 20 minutes telling me how wrong I was for a position only to end the call by letting me know they would be sending my resume in for the role right away.

Have some crazy stories yourself that you want to share? Hit me up in the comments so we can all have a good chuckle together!

That’s right, two more HR Happy Hours are in the can and if you aren’t regularly checking out the show, live or archived, then dude, you are missing out on all the fun!! And useful information and great discussions too. Yeah, I should probably talk that stuff up more than the fun. Anyway, in case you missed them, check out the shows below!

Episode 56
For this episode we previewed all the fun to be had at the HR Florida State Conference & Expo, coming up on August 30th -September 1st in Orlando. Still on the fence about going? Can’t go but curious to hear what they have in store? Want to be tempted to make an 8 hour drive down just to hang with the cool kids? Well, that last one is probably just me but if the rest applies to you then take a listen below!

Episode 57
Do performance reviews make you want to gouge out your eyes with a spoon? Why with a spoon you ask? Cause it would hurt more, and yet, still hurt less than the reviews. Well, then you might be interested in to know that Sonar6 has got your back! Intrigued? You should be. Check out the show below to learn how this New Zealand based software company is dedicated to making performance reviews not only useful but engaging and fun as well!

As always, check out the #HRHappyHour twitter back channel for the full experience and be sure to join us next time!!

It’s Carnival of HR time again and you better be ready for a good laugh. Because this time around, the Carnival is all about the funny. Drew Tarvin, corporate humorist (Dude, how do I get that job?), was our gracious host over at his blog Humor That Works and he has pulled together an awesome collection of posts that will engage your brain, if not tickle your funny bone, so be sure to go here to check it out right now!

Rolling right along, The August 18th Carnival of HR will be hosted by one of my favorite people to giggle with, Paul Smith over at his blog, Welcome to the Occupation. Now, Paul has made some special requests of me for this Carnival and I was more than happy to indulge him. So look forward to more information, start preparing by thinking about your favorite music, and go here to learn about all the fun ways you can stay connected to the Carnival.