A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle
One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the
minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road.
I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events
recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference,
and Taleo World
in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent
management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of
the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share
information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give
people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge,
learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative
ideas back to their organizations.
And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well!
If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial
by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR
at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and
delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is
to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and
challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to
better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this
greater perspective.
So what are HR folks discussing and debating?
What questions and problems keep them up at night?
What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts
buzzing about?
From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across
the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas:
Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and
hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies
can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social
networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly
competitive search for talent?
Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on
our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can
help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice?
What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition?
Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best
position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the
organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and
most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals
and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration
tools help in this area?
While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly
they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next
year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise
is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group
of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be
the case 10 or 20 years into the future.
But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by
simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the
many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability,
along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly
share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process,
(and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been
greater.
And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to
connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better
equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams.
We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet,
engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then --
follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
