By Ian AlexanderCytiva is happy to have attended the 61st annual SHRM Conference and Expo last week. We posted updates to our Twitter and Facebook followers throughout the conference and now, after a few days of reflection, it’s time to blog.
The conference itself was well managed as usual. SHRM puts on a great event and makes the entire affair seem easy. From roaming information clerks to convenient and on time busses, SHRM does it right. On the downside, attendance was half of what it was last year, and there were significantly fewer HR vendors in the expo.
That’s fine with us. As a vendor, we appreciate a distilled attendee base and fewer booths to compete with. Ironically, there was a direct competitor to us right across the aisle. This is something that has never happened to me in almost 15 years of exhibiting at SHRM. I don’t know if it was our booth, our staff or our products, but it was good to see that we outdrew our competition in booth traffic by an unscientific three to one.
SHRM has always been a conference that tends to draw smaller companies and (relatively) lower level practitioners. I believe that the lower attendance was good in that it, a) provided a universe of practitioners from companies that are spending money (many travel budgets are frozen these days) and, b) weeded out some of the practitioners who are too early in their careers to have much influence or participation in the purchasing process.
Cytiva made contact with a record number of people at the conference, including several happy customers. And, as always, SHRM is the ultimate voice of reality in the realm of HR technology. As HR technologists, we can tend to get wrapped up in the value and glory of our cool solutions and lose touch with reality. We are, almost by definition, ahead of the curve and SHRM is a great way of slapping us back down to earth and letting us know just how far behind us the curve actually is.
So you think Twitter, Ning, Facebook, SaaS (I’m sorry “Cloud Computing”), bloggers, et al, are changing the face of business/HR?
Ride the SHRM bus.
The SHRM bus to and from the hotel is my personal reality check. Every year I ride the SHRM bus and start talking to people about what matters to them. Invariably, it’s not leveraging the cloud to create a living network of connections that they can use to harness internal knowledge, align employees and source the highest levels of talent.
Of course not. This stuff is only immediately compelling to those of us that bathe in it daily and see the potential for its benefit. Today’s HR has a wide range of issues to deal with, not the least of which is its own place at the strategy table. Cytiva announced several new web 2.0 features for our products and while these things are cool and appreciated by the membership, they will take time to take hold and prove their value.
Some people complain that the conference is too broad, including comp, benefits, legal, incentives, recruiting, and the like. But I say SHRM is a great place to take the real pulse of HR and gauge what you’re up against as a technology product company. Things move slowly on the SHRM bus. And it’s usually full up with a lot of stuff that your technology doesn’t deal with. That’s what HR is: too much stuff that has to be done, not enough stuff that actually innovates and/or transforms.
That said, the conference was upbeat and hopeful in the midst of a lot of turmoil and economic uncertainty. In that sense, it was a great conference to attend and I thank all the people who stopped by our booth.