Blogs are supposed to be informational resources, right? Not just a bunch of idiots mouthing off at each other. Well, in that vein, I give you a roundup of all the web events I can find that have to do with HR. I’m always trying to see what’s going on out there, and I figure other people must be, too.

Mostly I’m focusing on the obvious sources, so feel free to submit your events and I will update this post as they come in. I hope to do this monthly if it gets a good response. Feel free to chime in and let us know which ones you’re planning to attend

Onward – Listing after the jump.

January 11th
Creating A Corporate University That Succeeds @ HR.com
The Elements of Employer Brand Building @ Human Capital Institute
Getting Started with Performance Management @ WPSmag.com

January 12th
Effective Use of Tools to help you with your PR and Marketing @ HR.com

January 17th
HCM Technology State of the Union: What we learned in 2005 that will affect your decisions in 2006 @ HR.com

January 18th

The small business trends blog has a list of the top technology trends for small business. One of them (they aren’t numbered) is hosted applications. The author points out that:

I saw a post that mentioned my name on Regina’s blog over the holidays, but I didn’t read it fully until now. Wow. I’m flattered, even if she wasn’t looking to get on my good side. Here’s what she said:

A good example of transparency that is unfolding for me right now is Max over at SuccessFactors Blog.  The other day I wrote a post called I’m Not Buying It! which talked about my opinions about  the technology and tools included as part of a product suite that SuccessFactors develops and sells.  As a result of that conversation, Max has offered a few of us naysayers the ability to actually see a demo, etc.  In any event, the demo may sway my opinion or not about the product.  But what the personality and actions behind the blog are offering goes even further in terms of building a connection for me to the SuccessFactors Brand.

In my opinion, the only point in having a company blog is to reach out to the community in which it exists. Those blogs that are purely marketing or "synthetically transparent" run the risk of alienating a highly intelligent audience with a nose for what’s real. In the first instance, the blogging movement was given rise due to a desire for unfiltered, "unfooled around with" content. News from the horse’s-mouth, as it were. Purposefully violating that fundamental tenet of the blogosphere is simply stupid. There are too many options for readers.

With that said, the biggest challenge for any corporate blogger is to balance the needs of the company, the interests of readers and the market and the need to be honest and reasonably open. I don’t think that I get it right all the time, but Regina makes me feel like I’m doing a half-decent job of walking the tightrope.

What do you think? I’d love to get some feedback.

Dubs has it right – there aren’t really any robots hiding in our software, manipulating our performance reviews and messing with your compensation – despite the word and its implications being bandied about recently. Just a way for managers to select from recommended text and then, ideally, customize it to the particular situation and employee (more explanation here). Dubs also coins a good term: "automated content support."  I like it.

Follow the trail at Dubs’ blog, at our blog, at Regina’s Blog, and this guy’s blog. 

If you’ll read into the comments at Regina’s blog, you’ll see I promised a demo of the automated content support functionality for the bloggers and blog readers out there. I wasn’t kidding. I’m working on putting it together right now – more info to come.

We’re at the top of Dubs’ list of things he’s watching this year.

Since we seem to be gaining some momentum, we thought we’d extend the worstreview contest for another month until the end of January. In case you forgot, or took a super-long vacation, we’ve got a contest going on at www.worstreview.com where we’re giving out prizes for the worst performance review stories ever told. So lucky you, you’ve got another few weeks to enter or read and comment on the stories.

My favorite so far is the one about the guy who gets his review given while standing at the urinal next to his boss. Performance review tip: reviews in bathrooms – smelly and also not good. 

While I always hesitate to use the blog as another marketing channel, I’m pretty excited about this and I thought you might be interested to know what I’m excited about. We just got word that SuccessFactors added 100 new customers in the last quarter of 2005, and that our total number of active, on-demand users now stands at well over 1.3 million.

Pretty cool stuff. Now, back to the news…

Happy New Year! 

Thanks for sticking with us through our little hiatus over the holidays. After some much needed R&R, we’re back and raring to go with a lot of great plans for 2006. Though the blog has only been in existence for a few months now, we’re amazed at the response from the HR community and excited about all the possibilities ahead. Thanks to all our readers for your help in making this blog fly – we’re looking forward to the continuing conversation in 2006.

Here’s a little ditty at CLO magazine about the shift from recruiting to succession planning. As the talent pool decreases and boomers retire,  companies are finding they simply don’t have enough good people to fill senior roles. According to the Right Management Consultants survey mentioned in the article, the number of companies in this situation is around 80% and "more companies prefer to build their own future leaders from the ground up…they are assessing their high-potential employees to identify which ones have the qualities they desire in senior-level managers, and then providing them with the necessary training, coaching, and managerial experiences to fully grow them into upper management. Therefore, companies must have a good succession management system which tracks the executive qualities, skills, and abilities that have been the most instrumental in their managers’ and organization’s successes."

We’ve got a number of stories here about customers leveraging our product to reduce recruiting expenses through better succession planning and this survey seems to support the idea.