Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is arguably the most well-known and established association for HR professionals. With its classes, certifications, local chapters, and multiple annual conferences, which have drawn thousands of paying attendees to hear the musings of marquee guests like Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin and singer Janet Jackson, SHRM is a household name (or acronym?) for industry pros nationwide. But SHRM isn’t the only player in the conference game—others include Workhuman, HR Tech, and HR Vision. Now add HR Mavericks to the list, an organization that’s vying to steal SHRM’s thunder, producing what it positions as an alternative to the industry’s biggest bacchanal.
The goal? “Democratizing” HR by offering similar lectures and workshops for free, Stephen Fortuna, community organizer for HR Mavericks explained to HR Brew.
Fortuna said the price of attending SHRM’s conference in-person makes it difficult for many industry pros. (Early bird tickets for in-person admission for SHRM’s June 2023 conference are $2,395 for non-members.) Among others, the price may exclude “small business HR professionals who can’t…get their employer to foot the bill on conferences or membership,” Fortuna said. HR Mavericks hopes to open its doors to more professionals by offering its virtual conference free of charge. The date? June 12, smack in the middle of SHRM’s shindig, which takes place June 11–14.
HR democratized. HR Mavericks, which is produced by the all-in-one HR platform Eddy, strives to toss out the traditional HR education curriculum and start anew. The current landscape provides a “centralized model of HR education,” which is dominated by SHRM and can feel exclusionary, Fortuna argued. Instead, HR Mavericks is about getting “everyone who’s in HR into a space, and they can talk about what they’re doing, what’s working for them, what’s not working, and have a more person-to-person feeling in education.”
SHRM has a “very select body of best practices they want to promote,” which can narrow the scope of how HR operates, he said. (SHRM did not respond to email requests for comment.)
As far as programming is concerned, HR Mavericks is striking a zeitgeisty tone. Remember the HyperSocial CEO Braden Wallake, who became a meme after a video of him crying on LinkedIn over laying off employees went viral? He’s set to speak on “what he learned from his experience” when his image catapulted across the web. There will also be a panel of laid-off Twitter employees, who are ready to discuss the company’s cultural shift after the Elon Musk acquisition. “You’ll [also] see sessions on [the] four-day workweek, on remote first,” said Fortuna.
What’s the status? So far, only around 1,000 attendees have signed up for the conference, Fortuna explained. For comparison, SHRM hosted around 18,000 attendees via online and in-person attendance at its 2022 conference.—SB