Blogging from the ME State HR Convention

Okay, okay, it’s true…. I should know better by now and these little things shouldn’t bother me any more, but I have to just vent for one moment. Today, I’m spending my second day at the 13th Annual ME HR Convention in Rockport, ME. I rec’d a call from the manager of the gulf coast territory, and needed to send a file to him via email… Unfortunately, I had to VPN in to my office to get the file, then send it remotely from here. GREAT technology… when it works well. I had no problem getting in and finding the file, composing the email and hitting send… then I hit the wall. I had hit send/receive, and the first function that Outlook performs is to receive. I had 175 emails to receive totaling 10MB. It took 45 MINUTES to receive the files through the VPN connection!!! Ouch… As a result, I missed my morning session of the conference, which is why I have the time right now to write a quick note to the recruiting front lines.

If you are not familiar with the ME HR Convention, this is an annual professional development conference for human resources professionals, and it’s done impeccably well. The event begins at noon on Tuesday, and runs into the afternoon on Friday, which may seem like a long professional conference. The reality, though, is that the content is so in-depth and dynamic that it provides hr professionals with a terrific opportunity to meet and network with others, learn great new practices and initiative to improve their workforce, stay up to date on legal issues, and bring great intellectual capital back to their place of employment. Sessions are given by professionals in all aspects of HR and cover all areas- from dealing with complainers in the workforce, to FMLA regulations, to new compensation strategies to increase productivity. I’ll give a better recap shortly about this event, with some more detail about what I learned, as well as a summary of the presentation I gave. For now though, let me just say that this is one of the best weeks of my professional year. I usually participate in 3 days of the conference each year, and return to my work place with a greater perspective of our business, and energized, motivated, and prepared to bring positive change to our environment in some manner.

There was much talk from vendors about the slowdown, and a great deal of discussion about the generational workforce challenges. Overall, ME is less impacted by national economic factors than others (our highs aren’t as high, and as a result our lows aren’t as low), so business is still moving forward. In fact, I just checked on JobsInME.com, and there are now more than 10,000 current job openings posted, with more than 9,000 being regular and just over 1,000 being temp. These may be record highs for our business, and it’s important to recognize that the permanent jobs postings are still strong.

Well.. almost time to go staff our booth, promote our service, meet incredible HR heroes, and reinforce relationships with the great people and businesses we serve.

So today, I’m sitting back just behind the recruiting front lines… today’s report is coming from the war-room, and the view is of the strategies, competencies, and challenges facing HR professionals in Maine.