Why “Employee Engagement” Is The Successories Poster of HR.

Employee engagement is one of those perpetual trending topics in HR and recruiting, probably because for years now, pundits and practitioners alike still haven’t figured out how to confront what seems to be a fairly endemic case of malaise and apathy perpetually plaguing our workforce.

I’m not sure why it is that talent leaders and recruiting pros can’t to have a near obsessive fixation on what’s inherently an amorphous and highly ambiguous concept, but I think the primary driver of our engagement fetish is that it seems to be a convenient, categorical catch-all that’s more or less seen as the whipping boy for all of the manifold problems plaguing the HR and recruiting profession today.

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The Top 10 Reasons HR Bloggers Suck.

There’s the A List, the B List, and so forth. Of course, as Courtney Stodden and Andy Dick prove, even the F List at least get invited to the occasional VH1 awards ceremony and shop at Kitson. Below that, on the totem pole of fame, there are local network affiliate meteorologists, inspirational speakers and newspaper columnists.

Then, one level below that, you’ve got your King Curtis, Omarosa or Joe the Plumber types, and below them, you’ve got your convicted militia leaders, Congressmen and Canadian Football League players.

And then somewhere, somewhere far, far down in the bottom, like Dante’s Inner Circle, but with way more self-loathing and latency issues, are those people who sit somewhere between fame, infamy and dreams of grandeur.

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We Want Eazy: Recruiting Doesn’t Have to Be Hard.

Recruiting is never easy, but for some reason, many talent acquisition professionals make it somehow much harder than it really needs to be.

The fact that recruiters inherently work in silos and are largely forced to figure out the intricacies of talent sourcing and screening independently means that we tend to all make the same mistakes.

For the most part, they’re easily avoidable, but again, recruiters don’t really like to focus on what’s not working – after all, there’s too much work to do.

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Our Employer Brand Is Crisis.

I can’t really say I miss my days in PR with any sort of nostalgia, nor do I think of it fondly – in fact, in retrospect, it kind of sucked. So, why do I bring all of this up?

Well, recently, one of my friends forwarded me an article in the Boston Globe with the kind of title that gives anyone in PR (or HR) nightmares: “Hubspot book is an unflattering portrait of Cambridge company,” the headline screamed. And, of course, immediately caught my interest.

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No Can Write? No Problem. This is Marketing!

While there are a lot of great software products out there for the HR professional of today, who is as important to business in our rapidly changing times as were the trusty smithies or habadashers of yesteryear. But there are only 8 hours in a workday. You’ve got a limited budget, and even more limited time. 9-5 is hard time, sometimes. But that’s why God invented whiskey!

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