Fistful of Talent has released their rankings of the best HR bloggers and guess who made the list? Better yet, guess where I ended up on that list?

That’s right folks. For the second consecutive rankings (both the March Madness style ranking and the FOT writer’s ranking), I have ended up as the number two choice for HR blogs.

How does it feel being the perennial Vice President of HR bloggers? I’d like to think of myself as more of a Dick Cheney styled VP, controlling the HR blogosphere in the background while I deviously laugh about my evil plans. More likely though, I am like Joe Biden: congenial, but consistently putting my foot in my mouth at the most inopportune time minimizing my impact on the political landscape.

Here are the top ten bloggers (with scores):

1.    cheezhead™ (Power Index Rating – 96 | 1st Place Votes – 1 | v. 2.0 ranking – #1)

2.    Your HR Guy (Power Index Rating – 72 | 1st Place Votes – 2 | v. 2.0 ranking  #6)

3.    HR Bartender (Power Index Rating – 68 | 1st Place Votes – 1 | v. 2.0 ranking – #17)

4.    Compensation Force (Power Index Rating – 66 | 1st Place Votes – 1 | v. 2.0 ranking – #4)

5.    Seth Godin (Power Index Rating – 57 | v. 2.0 ranking – #20)

6.    Punk Rock HR (power index rating – 51 | 1st place votes – 1 |  v. 2.0 ranking – tied #22)

7.    Renegade HR (power index rating – 49 | v. 2.0 ranking – N/A)

8.    TalentedApps (power index rating – 48 | v. 2.0 ranking – #24 + v. 4.0 winner!)

9.    The Recruiter Guy (power index rating – 47 | 1st Place Votes – 1 | v. 2.0 ranking – #2)

10.  All Things Workplace (power index rating – 45 | v. 2.0 ranking – #8)

Congrats to everyone! And big thanks to the FOT team for putting this thing on.

Note: This is my final formal post on the 2009 SHRM annual conference. All of the other information is being wrapped into more topical posts in the coming weeks. I think you’ll enjoy this post anyway so read on.

I have the day off today but it certainly doesn’t feel that way. I am way behind on e-mails, I have been sick since I got back from New Orleans and now my wife is sick. I’ve had a lot of time to think about my conference experience, why I ended up going and why I might do it again.

The main reason I went was to speak at the conference on a panel about HR blogging. Everybody has asked me how it went. I always tell people that it went great but that I feared we spoke to an audience that already had an understanding (or at least curiosity) about using blogging and social media as tools. I’d really like to explore how to reach out to people who aren’t using these tools. It is my hope that future sessions of this nature will be given a better timeslot (the last session of the conference is pretty brutal). I thought the idea of live broadcasting over the internet was outstanding though. Here’s another trend I hope SHRM embraces as well.

I came into the panel with three points I wanted to emphasize

1. Anyone can blog – It is a skill like writing a newsletter or a memo or learning a new software program.
2. Blogs can make you smarter – I’ve learned more from blogging than what I’ve given back.
3. Your blog isn’t part of the press – Even though it isn’t, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a wealth of information to be gained.

The conference experience was great if not a whirlwind. I met up with people I had only known through long lines of communication (including our entire HR blogging panel) and was introduced to hundreds of new people that I didn’t know beforehand. Kris Dunn hit upon something in his post that explains why my conference experience may be different than other’s: I connected with my niche. I connected with fellow bloggers and social media interested people in our space. I connected with companies who are doing cool things in this space. Outside of that, my conversations with other HR professionals were mostly along the typical networking paths.

SHRM is a huge organization. If I had come by myself without an established group or niche to connect with, I would have been disappointed with my experience. The enormity of the conference coupled with many of the sessions being repeats of content I’ve received through other local events would have made it hard for me to sell it to my employer.

Mark Stelzner’s idea about appealing to the stratification of HR professionals in their current role (generalists, managers, VPs, etc…) is a good start. I think SHRM also talked about different tracks to take depending on your skill level. Neither one of them matters if SHRM doesn’t help encourage some community built around these niche areas in their membership. Maybe SHRM Connect (SHRM members only) helps. I don’t know.

What I do know is that SHRM members should have hope about the organization moving forward. SHRM COO China Miner Gorman has shown she has what it takes to lead the organization forward if it is willing. SHRM’s Public Affairs staff treated bloggers as well as any of the traditional press. I honestly don’t have a single negative thing to say about the execution of the conference or the SHRM staff I worked with.

Will I go next year? I hope so. San Diego is my second favorite west coast city and is a quick two and a half hour direct flight down there with no time zone change. I am hoping we can get another chance to talk about blogging or social media to SHRM members. More importantly, I hope to meet up with my HR niche and continue to work on advancing HR.

In conclusion, my feelings about raging against SHRM haven’t changed thanks to the conference. I saw people that, given the same opportunities as everyone else, went hunting for swag instead of making connections or going to sessions. Being a rockstar in HR has nothing to do with SHRM and everything to do with how you operate.

Apparently eating delicious (but unhealthy) food, drinking hurricanes and walking 1,000 miles in one day isn’t a good way to avoid waking up with a foot cramp. That’s how SHRM Tuesday started out for me. It was a great day after that.

I spoke in the morning with Silkroad about their talent management suite and what they are seeing from their client companies. I was familiar with their Red Carpet on-boarding software but didn’t know much about it either. The most exciting part (to me at least) is that they are launching a blog soon. My advice? Keep it real and keep it focused on delivering great content.

Jennifer McClure (Cincy Recruiter) told me that her post about her post about executive presence just blew up. It was picked up by Guy Kawasaki and retweeted everywhere. Great to see the recognition for all of the great content she puts out.

After my meeting, I headed over to a session about effective planning put together by blogging buddy Sharlyn Lauby of HR Bartender. I loved the presentation but people said I looked grumpy. Hey, I loved the session and the message. Thoughtful planning cures a lot of organizational woes. Great video in the presentation too.

After that, both Sharlyn and myself went to lunch with my good friends and sponsors Halogen Software. Great conversations especially between a practitioner, vendor and consultant about performance management (surprise!). Honestly, this is one conversation I walked away with a different point of view than the one before. Call my wife, she won’t believe it.

I touched base with the Bureau of Labor Statistics because they reached out to me. I was honestly shocked they would contact a blogger to talk to about their new programs. They were really fantastic though and talked about some resources that HR professionals can use to get started talking about compensation and benefits. All of this, of course, free of charge. Glad to see them make the effort.

Lastly, I talked with Benefitfocus to talk about how their benefits software helps companies improve their overall benefits comprehension and enrollment levels. They actually had a customer that was sort of a walking testimonial which I thought was a different marketing tactic for sure.

I had an opportunity to meet up with Judy Clark from HR Answers in Portland which was just fantastic. I am not joking when I say we spent an hour and a half talking and we hadn’t met in person before today. One of the best conversations I had at the conference and that’s not a joke. We’ll be getting her set up blogging but she is already on Twitter and is a great example of a leader in HR who really and truly gets it.

We had the big tweet up Tuesday night too and I think most people who RSVP’d ended up coming for most of it. Thanks so much to Austin from WorkNOLA and Franny Oxford for organizing it and the sponsors for their help with the food. Just a couple quick thoughts about this event:

• Turnout was great and we even had some of the SHRM exec Twitterers in our midst. Next year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the numbers triple if we continue to adopt technology at this pace.
• I love that Gary Rubin (SHRM CPO) shared with Laurie and I that he had such passion for William Shatner’s “music.” Interesting facts that you share become easy ways for people to remember you. And honestly, I think Shatner is brilliant too.
• Please take an accurate photo of yourself for your icon. It helped people spot me very easily (I am easy to spot and sort of loud so that may have helped). I blanked on a couple people tonight because I had a hard time associating their Twitter icon with them.

After the tweetup, Laurie and I were going to go out to dinner with Mary Ellen Slayter from SmartBrief Workforce. This turned into a huge group of 14 people having a loud, fun time at Broussard’s in the French Quarter. It ended with Michael Long playing guitar. You know we like to party.

Tuesday was the last of my formal meetings and Kris Dunn asked me if I would schedule that way again if I had the choice. I told him Monday was too much but that I loved the way Tuesday worked out. I thought it was important to maximize my opportunities at SHRM.

My presentation tomorrow will be live streamed on YourHRGuy.com today starting at around 11:30am CENTRAL time zone. Stay tuned!

Monday was a good and busy day for SHRM and Your HR Guy. Here’s a rundown of what happened and how things are playing out.

I started out the morning talking to the Disney Institute about their training programs and they invited me to come check it out at some point. As long as it isn’t during the steamy summer months, I’d be happy. They have been reaching out quite a bit to other industries.

After breakfast, I talked to Perspectives Ltd. about mental health parity and how many professionals are freaking about it. I am honestly surprised as to the balanced approach they are advocating. Many vendors are taking advantage of these fears. The only bad thing? They are Chicago Bulls fans.

I talked to Satori World Medical which does medical tourism for non-life threatening surgeries (hip replacements, heart valve issues). What an indictment on our health care system, right? They feel it is more of an additional choice that is an incredible value.

Dave Ramsey spoke at a session here at SHRM that was a mixture of entertaining, enlightening, condescending and perplexing. I love the general message Ramsey has here: stop making excuses and move forward with your finances. Very action oriented. But the session’s connection to employers was almost an afterthought and some of the advice was Madden-like and obvious.

After the session, I spoke with Snagajob.com about the hourly employment market and a new book that is being released focused on hourly employees. We talked about how to balance “overqualified” candidates for retail jobs that companies are struggling with. Truly amazed at how this group is evolving.

Talked recruitment outsourcing with The RightThing folks. They also gave me a good exercise around the entire hall! They have really hit the social media tools hard in the last few months. You can tell they are excited about it and they were giving away a Smart car here. A little small for me personally.

Went over to the HR Career Transition center where I talked to the good folks from Lee Hecht Harrison who sponsored it. They said almost 50% of the people coming into the transition center are currently unemployed and they came to the conference anyway to network and build connections. LHH did free coaching for anybody who was interested in career transition. Great service.

Later on, I spoke with Accero (which is headquartered out of Portland) about some of the trends they are seeing from their customers and what they want out of their payroll and HR system. Interesting to see the differences between the views of different talent management systems.

Beyond.com is doing some interesting things with their products. They have added mobile access and they are starting to build communities around their niche job boards. It is going to be interesting to see how this works out as they roll it out to more and more sites.

I spoke with the CEO of NuView Systems (which is the HRIS provider we use at my day job). They too have gone mobile with some of their applications primarily for field based people. It will be fun to watch them roll this out.

I also spoke with my good friends (and current sponsors) Crimcheck. Ryan and Ted both said people are looking for value and ease in the background check business and that despite lower attendance numbers, they were getting some great feedback.

I met up with the Fistful of Talent crew (Kris Dunn, Jessica Lee and Jennifer McClure) and sat in on a session wth Dianna Booher about communicating with authority. Solid session really and it was fun to see the differences between communicating in one style versus another.

Finally, I headed to Bourbon Street and spent a little bit of time at the Yahoo HotJobs party and spent some time cruising the streets of New Orleans. Don’t let anybody fool you: HR people know how to have a good time. Especially in a place like New Orleans.

Looking forward to putting together more substantial posts based on the hundreds of conversations I’ve been a part of so far.

The first day of SHRM seems to always be a wash. You are exhausted from traveling and you just get thrown into the middle of something that is already going. Being as the conference was in New Orleans, it was litterally impossible to get here before 2:00pm without a red eye flight.

This means I missed Jack Welch which was a little disappointing. If we get a video of it online, I’ll be sure to link to it. Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBrief did a good cap on it here. and Michael Long (The Red Recruiter) has a good post too.

I got the opportunity to meet up with the folks from SonicRecruit/Cytiva. Their ATS just received a big time upgrade on the social recruiting side of things. Everything from native integration with LinkedIn (so you can check to see if you are connected with someone at the company you are applying to) to sharing jobs via Twitter, Facebook, etc… In talking with Ian Alexander, VP of Marketing and PR, more companies have been asking for this functionality. I hope to see more and more ATS providers do this.

We had a press briefing at 5pm and as John Hollon with Workforce.com confirmed, SHRM president Lon O’Neil was not in attendance. SHRM’s PR person explained there were scheduling conflicts because this was his first annual conference as president. There are scheduling conflicts all of the time when you’re the president of an organization like SHRM though so it seems like it is more a matter of prioritization. It will be pretty difficult to get much of a sense of where the organization is going without hearing from him.

The press briefing was decent except this whole embargo thing. I have to hold onto a story for 48 hours that may not even be that interesting depending on how the rest of the conference goes.

Looking forward to my packed day tomorrow and meeting in person for the first time with many of you. If you are around SHRM and want to hook up, leave a comment or e-mail me! Doesn’t have to be formal or anything.

This Sunday morning, I am getting up at the crack of dawn to travel southeast to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) annual conference in New Orleans. What that means for you is that you will get up to the minute coverage of all of the happenings in New Orleans. If you haven’t seen my schedule yet, it is absolutely loaded. Sessions, meetings, dinners, tweetups, parties… folks, it is a rough life.

I am looking forward to meeting some great bloggers, people doing cool things in our space and getting some swag. I am not into humidity or heat though. This is why I live in the Northwest United States. I am trading sunny and 80 degrees for 95 degrees and a billion percent humidity. Something close to that.

Anyway, we are going to have some great coverage from the SHRM conference. Here are some of the places I’ll be at:

1. This blog will be updated frequently with the latest info next week
2. I’ll be updating from Twitter
3. You can follow the other tweets from the SHRM conference by following the #SHRM09 tag on Twitter (RSS feed)
4. I’ll be posting links to other great posts from the conference
5. We’ll be video streaming the panel session I am participating in on this blog (Wednesday at 11:30am Central).

If you are not into conference coverage, take the week off on me. Catch some sun, enjoy some BBQ and look at the fireworks. Then come back next week. We’ll be back to regular stuff.

I updated my schedule for the 2009 Annual Conference. I forgot to add the fact that I am going to definitely be meeting up with all of my blogging pals before our session. Also, I’ve heard rumor of a tweet up Monday? I don’t know many details about that yet.

I’ve been told the likelihood of getting fresh crawfish at this time of year is going to be pretty close to nil. So that sucks a little bit. Otherwise, I am looking forward to great cajun food and some cold drinks. Also, I should mention that in addition to food and drink, SWAG works as well. I am pretty easy going, I’ll take whatever.

Instead of posting this every time, I am just going to continue to update this as needed. I’ll probably eventually put it into my Google calendar and post a link to that since that’s what will keep me on track.

Want to be added to the agenda? Send me an e-mail (lance AT yourhrguy DOT com) and we’ll see what we can do.

Sunday June 28th

• Plane arrival mid afternoon
• 2:30-4:00pm – Catch the end of Jack Welch keynote
• 4:00-4:30pm – SonicRecruit
• 5:00pm – Press something or other
• Evening – Open

Monday June 29th

• Breakfast – Disney Institute
• After Breakfast until 9:30am – Open/Possible General session at 8:30
• 9:30-10:00am – Perspectives
• 10:00-10:30am – Satori – Steve Lash
• 10:45am- Noon – Dave Ramsey session
• Noon-12:30pm – Snagajob.com
• 12:30-1:00pm – AIRS
• 1:00-1:30pm – FreeConferenceCall.com
• 1:30-2:00pm – Lee Hecht Harrison
• 2:00-2:30pm – Accero
• 2:30-3:00pm – Beyond.com
• 3:00-3:30pm – NuView systems
• 3:30-4:00pm – Michael C. Fina
• 4:00-6:00pm – Open
• Evening – Open/Parties (Yahoo, others)

Tuesday June 30th

• Breakfast until 10:00am – Open/Possible General session at 8:30
• 10:00-10:30am – Silkroad
• 10:45am-Noon – Sharlyn Lauby session
• Noon-1:00pm – Halogen Software lunch
• 1:00-1:30pm – BLS
• 1:30-2:00pm – Benefitfocus
• 2:15-4:00pm – Michelle Sterling session
• 4:00-6:00pm – Open
• 6:00-8:00pm – Tweet up (link)
• Dinner – SmartBrief
• After dinner – ?

Wednesday July 1st

• Breakfast until 11:00am – Open
• 11:30am-12:45pm – Panel talk with Laurie Ruettimann, Kris Dunn, Jessica Lee and myself (you should definitely come!)
• Afternoon – I’ll be at the airport.

Photo by David Dow/NBAE/Getty Images

I watched the NBA Finals on Sunday night like a lot of people. As a Portland Trail Blazers fan, watching the Lakers win was like watching Lex Luthor (Kobe Bryant) take down Superman (Dwight Howard): the villain won. As I watched as the Lakers celebrated and the Magic sat there with glazed over eyes, I was looking for a lesson I could share with you about HR or about organizations or about your career. Maybe I could talk about the fall and rise of Kobe. Or how Dwight catapulted himself into the national spotlight. They were stretches but not any worse than what I have done in the past. Then I decided:

Not everything in life is a lesson.

I think bloggers are particularly guilty of this but it is a very human trait. We seek explanations for everything that happens in life to us. We try to extract more meaning from every little thing. We laugh in the face of microscopic evaluations. “Please! Give me more detail!”

Can I tell you what happened in the NBA Finals this year?

The best team won. The other team was great too but it wasn’t enough. There’s no secret lesson to tell you about. No insight beyond the minutia. The most talented, skilled and experienced team won the series. It happens in life all of the time:

• You don’t get the job because the other person had more experience.
• A candidate rejects your job offer because his wife was given a big counter-offer to stay.
• You got the sale because they talked to you first and just wanted it done.
• You get a great deal because the other person just got a call to clear everythng out.
• You stumbled upon a great candidate through a chance encounter.
• You pick the slowest line at the grocery store.

We have become so programmed to look beyond routine happenings and try to replicate the good and eliminate the bad. When we can’t replicate results or eliminate negatives, we figure we just interpretted it all wrong.

Sometimes there is nothing to interpret. As my good friend Rasheed Wallace used to say, when “both teams played hard” and you still lose, there’s nothing to take from that.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and sometimes there is nothing to learn from either one.

Like many HR bloggers, I field several questions a month about how to get started in HR. When I hear that their primary reason for considering entry into the field is that they really love working with and helping people, I almost universally tell them to reconsider HR as a profession. Look, I love the passion and optimism of people that truly love helping people that enter HR. Soon enough though, they figure out their talents can be better used in other fields.

Let’s get something straight: you definitely have to have empathy for people in this position and enjoy the challenges of working with different people in difficult situations. When you are laying off people with families, bills and good company loyalty, I don’t think you can react any other way. When you are helping a person figure out their payouts and beneficiaries for their life insurance because they have terminal cancer, you have to have the right personality and mindset going into the situation. When you are dealing with some of the more sensitive employee relations areas (discrimination, harassment, etc…), having the right approach can be the difference between success and failure.

I don’t know if “Fuzzy Wuzzy HR” (you know, all of the team building, cry on my shoulder, let’s hold hands and sing kum-ba-ya HR philosophies) was ever very successful but it certainly is going the way of the dinosaurs now. Businesses want savvy, business smart HR people that can also relate to the human side of our profession while still keeping the business solvent. It is a balancing act but businesses are demanding that more emphasis be placed on the business end of things.

The problem? People that love helping people (but are less skilled in other areas of HR) are being pushed out of the profession. What businesses are deciding is that you get a person who may be more skilled in HR but less skilled on the people side and perhaps you can prevent some of the instances where you actually need that super high emotional IQ person. If you can avoid layoffs due to better planning or you can offer better training to managers because you have higher skilled HR people, you can feel better about dropping the people person.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that having a high emotional IQ precludes you from having great HR analytic and leadership skills. In fact, the best HR people I know are strong in all of those areas. But I know that many of those people wouldn’t necessarily say their people skills are the biggest part as to why they are successful.

For people who are considering HR and love helping people, learn about HR and see if anything else intrigues you about the profession. If you are coming up short on that analysis, there are a lot of other ways you can help people in corporate America or elsewhere.

I have already received several messages from companies about meeting up at SHRM 2009 in New Orleans and I’d like to throw it out to y’all as well. Are you going to SHRM? Do you want to meet up there? Here’s my agenda so far:

Sunday June 28th

• Plane arrival early afternoon
• 2:30-4:00p – Jack Welch keynote
• Late Afternoon/Evening – Open

Monday June 29th

• Breakfast until 10:45am – Open/Possible General session at 8:30
• 10:45am- Noon – Dave Ramsey session
• Afternoon – Catch a session or two or open
• 4:00pm-5:00pm – Zapoint Software
• Evening – Open

Tuesday June 30th

• Breakfast until 10:45am – Open/Possible General session at 8:30
• 10:45am-Noon – Sharlyn Lauby session
• Noon-1:00pm – Halogen Software lunch
• 1:00-2:15pm – Sharlyn Lauby
• 2:15-4:00pm – Michelle Sterling session
• 4:00pm-8:00pm – Open
• 8:00pm – Sheryl Crow? I dunno.

Wednesday July 1st

• Breakfast until 11:00am – Open
• 11:30am-12:45pm – Panel talk with Laurie Ruettimann, Kris Dunn, Jessica Lee and myself (you should definitely come!)
• Afternoon – Open until late afternoon flight out

Also on the agenda: Spend some quality time with good Cajun food (Southern style BBQ wouldn’t be half bad either), don’t become a sweaty beast, and come home exhausted.

I would like to meet up with fellow bloggers, blog readers, and cool companies (even if they aren’t interested in giving me gobs of money). Those willing to buy me dinner and/or drinks will be given priority though. Just kidding. Sort of.

Hit me up on e-mail (lance@yourhrguy.com) or the comments section and let’s make it happen.