Good News

Here's a warm welcome for Michael Specht's new offering, hrblogs.org. Specht, who is the smartest industry commentator on the planet (through his blog), announced the new toolset last week. Part of our excitement stems from the fact that this Australian operation is about to have a big impact on the American market.

Over the last few months I have been exchanging emails with James Farmer over several of his different projects all of which get me fired up.

One such project which I have borrowed the idea from is edublogs to create hrblogs.org a free blog tool for HR professionals! Over the last few weeks I have been setting the service up and now it is ready for use. hrblogs.org is a free blogging service for HR professionals that will provide Wordpress based blogs to anyone who works within the HR profession regardless of location. If you work as a generalist, manager, recruiter, industrial relation specialist, or remuneration and benefits, in fact any area of HR, hrblogs.org will enable you to establish a free blog. hrblogs.org uses Wordpress Multiuser, the multiuser version of Wordpress, which is not production software and therefore there might be minor bugs.

The features provided by hrblogs.org :

• Fast, easy and free
• Choice of user names
• Use of a Wordpress blogging engine
• Choice of WordPress themes (25 to choose from, more coming)
• Upload photos (10MB of space)
• and more…
  (A free blogging tool for HR professionals) from My blog of HR, and technology stuff by Michael Specht

On a separate front, we're excited about and proud to be in the same industry with Gerry Crispin. On September 1st, he published The Katrina Dilemma: Fantasizing about a solution  which described a recruiting support project in some detail:

My fantasy solution is that the 1000s of companies willing to offer a specific job(s) would also be willing to delegate the screening and selection of their new employees to a volunteer group of sharp recruiters who donated their time criss-cross the South in Winnebagos stopping along the way in towns and holding impromptu careerfairs at the local Starbucks (which incidentally would provide wirelss internet access).The recruiters would help folks search the best opportunity and then call the sponsor of the job to introduce their new employee and let the welcoming committee know what additional needs they might have- shelter, clothes etc

By September 14th, he was on the road in a Winnebago to survey the landscape and get into the process of delivering the solution. That's nothing sort of amazing. Reading Gerry's trip reports offers eye opening insight into the needs of the survivors (from an employment perspective) and lots of details about trench level operations wherever the Winnebago lands. This is awe inspiring stuff and well worth following. Thanks, Gerry.

- John Sumser