SHRM Monday: The Party Hasn't Stopped Yet

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.

Tagged as: 2009 annual conference, 2009 shrm conference, accero, beyond, crimcheck, dave ramsey, dianna booher, disney institute, fistful of talent, hotjobs, lee hecht harrison, nuview systems, perspectives, satori world medical, shrm, snagajob, the rightthing