SEO Presentation to Utah Society for Human Resource Management

On March 8th I presented to the Salt Lake City, Utah chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management on the topic of SEO and the HR industry. I was then invited to be on a panel afterwards, where I got some good laughs. I suppose it’s possible they were laughing at me, rather than with me.

The presentation was for a “technical training” where HR professionals get credits, which I assume go towards some sort of annual certification. How come web designers and SEO types don’t have something like that? We don’t even need a college degree, for Pete’s sake. Talk about an industry that’s regulated by nothing more than market forces.

The training was attended by about 90 HR professionals, then we had a nice lunch were another 100-120 people filtered in, and then we had the panel presentation which included myself and four other people who had quite a bit more experience in the HR industry than myself. I was definitely the odd man out. I mean, I’ve run a company since 1999 so I have my own experiences, but it’s not as though I’m part of the “HR establishment” or consider myself an HR person. I just hire and fire people (probably too much of the former and not enough of the latter).

Luckily the presentation was more about social media sites, SEO, and online marketing and how they affect HR activities, especially recruitment, so I was able to stick to the basics and not embarrass myself.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have made that comment about how my accountant always tells me I’m lucky I haven’t been audited by the IRS. I suppose that could come off as sounding as though I’m involved in criminal activities and am trying not to get caught, but what I was referring to was the normal irregularities contained in any small business’ history when they’ve been through 3 accountants and 6 bookkeepers, each of who had their own way of doing things and half of whom were completely incompetent. Yeah, I probably should have just stayed away from that subject, but it kind of just came up when the guy asked me if I had any problems when I switched my employees from being full-time to 1099.