Yesterday I attended a seminar called “the Impact of Social Media in the Workplace.” The event was sponsored by the BNHRA and Buffalo JSEC. It was held at the Erie 1 BOCES location in West Seneca, NY. There were dozens of HR and Marketing professionals in attendance.
The event began at 8 am with a nice breakfast and time to network. The first speaker was an employment law attorney from Jaeckle Fleischmann & Mugel. His presentation was very informative and he really attempted to go over the dos and don’ts of using social media in the recruiting process. Unfortunately, since social media is new and growing, there are no real black and white laws. Most of the existing precedent says don’t use social media in the hiring process, but then you could also be penalized for negligent hiring. My overall takeaway from his presentation is that the NLRA contradicts itself a lot. This seems to be a trend when dealing with Human Resources and employment law.
The second speaker was unable to attend, so the organization found a last minute IT professor from ECC to speak about social media. Unfortunately, I didn’t find his presentation that appealing. He basically described Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and RSS feeds. I already know what these platforms are- I want to know how to use them to promote my business agenda. I understand it was last minute and he didn’t have much time to prepare, but I would have rather spent the time networking with other HR professionals.
Overall, it seemed like a long 4 hours. However, it was nice to be in a room full of other people that love HR as much as I do. That’s pretty rare these days..
Miranda Mucci 