Day 1: Halogen Conference Recap










Halogen's User's Conference kicked off last night at the Atlanta Hyatt. With over 300 attendees, the conference was off to a great start.


This morning we heard opening remarks from Paul Loucks, CEO of Halogen. He spoke of his customer focus. Paul was just not saying "nice to hear words." He was actually giving examples of their customer intimacy strategy citing examples of user advisory boards, customer account managers and actually giving customers their product development person's name. It was refreshing. This strategy has certainly paid off as Halogen has been growing at 40% per year.


Paul also discussed Big Picture Talent Management. The idea is that by linking your typically siloed HR functions like compensation, recruiting, onboarding, succession planning, to your organizational strategy you will have the platform to build a world-class workforce. Halogen gets linkage and their software is built in a way that allows their company to leverage talent in a world-class way.



I had the honor of presenting the keynote this morning. My topic was "HR's 5 Most Important Roles in Talent Management." The roles we discussed were:



1) Strategic Role-Be a strategic planner and an executer


2) Performance Manager Role-Pay for performance and mean it


3) Goal Cascader Role-Make sure all employees know what is expected and how they will be measured.


4) Talent Manager-Hire the best, Succession planning is a must to be competitive. Talent mobility allows organizations to be flexible and competitive.


5) Metrics Guru-Tracking measures like cost per hire and days to fill are no longer enough. It's all about being predictive using analytics.


I had the pleasure of attending a Session conducted by Sean Conrad and one of Halogen's customers, Scott Chase, Human Capital Manager at INTRAA. Their session was on goal alignment. My big take-away there was that not only do you cascade goals down from the organizational level to the departmental level but you also need to cascade goals up from employees to managers. The reason for this is so that employees are ENGAGED with their own goals. Makes perfect sense!


To round out the day, I participated on a bloggers panel that included:



1) Kris Dunn from the HR Capitalist


2) Chris Havrilla from Recruiting Chicks


3) Mike Haberman from HR Observations


With Kris as our ring leader discussing "Tools to Attract and Retain Your All-Star Talent Pool." The panel discussed interesting ways to attract and retain talent in a medium sized business environment. Company culture was also discussed as an attraction and retention tool.



"Culture has to be created deliberately or one will be created for you."


I wonder who said that very wise statement....



If you are interested in reading all the tweets, check out the back channel at #HSUC11.