The HR Carnival - Annoucing the March Madness Brackets....

Welcome the March Madness version of the HR Carnival!  Who's the Cinderella Story going to be?   Who's Duke, who's UConn?  Who is Butler?  Who is Dick Vitale?

In the endless quest for themes to freshen this thing up, I think I’ve got a good one – we’re deeming this HR Carnival MARCH MADNESS, a hat tip to the coming college basketball craziness that will consume America for most of the month.

Here’s how it’s going to work – the blogs and posts below have been entered into the carnival as normal, and we've used them to create a MARCH MADNESS bracket with all submissions. 

We’ll use the attached bracket to run our next installment of the Talent Management Blog Rankings over at Fistful of Talent. Instead of asking our staff at FOT to vote on the blogs, we're doing a a web poll and asking the participants and readers to vote on the head-to-head match ups. We’ll start with the round of 32, and then move to the rounds of 16, 8, 4 and then of course, the final match up. Winners move on, survive and advance. 5 rounds in all, 2 days to vote on all the matchups in each round (10 total business days in the tournament).

Below are the first round match-ups, and we've linked to the blog and used the submitted post as a "highlight" to satisfy the Carnival feature (highlights of everyone's work).  You can see a bracket of the entire tournament here, and once you take a look at the first round matchup and the highlights, we're asking you to go vote on each match up by clicking on our web pool here.

Have fun!  Remember, anyone can win.  You just need a dream, a jump shot, and of course, an aggressive audience that will vote for you..

RULES AND THOUGHTS BEHIND THE HR CAPITALIST/FOT MARCH MADNESS:  The brackets have been set up to be as balanced as possible, and #1 Seeds were determined by the results of the last Talent Management Blogs Rankings over at Fistful of Talent.  While we've listed each post submitted as part fo the HR Carnival as a "highlight" to the side of the blog, we're not mandating you vote for the strength of that individual post, because we know no one reads all the submissions to every Carnival.  Instead, we're simply asking you to vote for the blog you believe is the strongest in each matchup.  If the post highlight influences that, more power to that blogger. 

First Round March Madness Matchups for the HR Carnival/FOT Talent Management Blog Power Rankings are as follows (see entire bracket here):

The "Shaquille O'Neal Twitter Account" Regional:

Game #1 - The Recruiter's Lounge (highlight post here) VS. McArthur's Rant (highlight post here)

Game #2 - Renegade HR (highlight) VS Incentive Intelligence (highlight)

Game #3 - Tracy Tran (highlight) VS Jessica Lee Writes (highlight)

Game #4 - Great Leadership (highlight) VS HR Thoughts (highlight)

The "Dick Vitale Needs to Shut the **** Up" Regional

Game #5 - Cheezhead (highlight) VS Andy Headworth/Sirona Says (highlight)

Game #6 - Talented Apps (highlight) VS Infexion Point (highlight)

Game #7 - Punk Rock HR (highlight) VS Nina Simosko (highlight)

Game #8 - Personal Branding Blog (highlight) VS Taleo (highlight)

The "Our Team Stinks But You'll Work For Us After You Grow Up" Regional

Game #9 - Compensation Force (highlight) VS Find and Attract (highlight)

Game #10 - Social Media Headhunter (highlight) VS HR Observations (highlight)

Game #11 - All Things Workplace (highlight) VS Cincy Recruiter (highlight)

Game #12 - HR Minion (highlight) VS Your HR Guy (highlight)

The "AGI Wrote a Check in 2008 But Couldn't Back Out of the Sponsorship Because They Were Legally Bound" Regional

Game #13 - The Recruiter Guy (highlight) VS The Staffing Advisor (highlight)

Game #14 - Steve Boese's HR Tech Blog (highlight) VS HR Bartender (highlight)

Game #15 - Three Star Leadership (highlight) VS Jason Seiden (highlight)

Game #16 - Rise Smart (highlight) VS The HR Capitalist (highlight)

Comments

[Jon Ingham]

Really exciting Kris, well done. Sorry I didn't get my contribution to you in time, but I'll be adding my vote to these and look forward to reading the results. Cheers, Jon.

[Paul Hebert]

Absolutely-freaking cool... Love it Kris! Vote early and vote often.

[laurie ruettimann]

I applaud you for embracing the bracket system. If you could somehow apply the bracket system to federal agencies and programs that need stimulus money, I'd offer your name as Secretary of Commerce.

[HR Minion]

Aw man, you put me up against Lance to start! Looks like tough competition all the way up though. Awesome job!

[Sharlyn Lauby]

Great job Kris! From all the Tweets I'm seeing, we're in for some fun and friendly competition. Thanks for including HR Bartender in the playoffs.

[Marsha Keeffer]

Hey Kris - what a smart idea....just voted. Love it!

[Hayli @ Rise Smart]

Kris:

Love this idea! Thanks for putting the time into it, and thanks also for putting Rise Smart up against your bathroom article. ;)

[Tribe of HR]

Excellent idea and very creatively done. I've already found a few new names I hadn't heard from in a while. This'll be way more entertaining than NCAA for those of us that don't know how many points a basket is worth. 7, I know. I'm just sayin'...

[Sarah]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Sarah

http://www.lyricsdigs.com

[Rob @ JobSerf]

Great idea but lets do one on twitter accounts!

JobSerf searches and applies on your behalf. There is unique as no one is doing both! Other services only search for you but they do not apply! Hence you have to fill out online applications which takes up your time when you should be networking! How much is your time worth? JobSerf submits the online applications for you!

JobSerf's advantages are:

1. This frees up your time so you can focus on networking!
2. This expands your reach!
3. This week, the JobSerf Team submitted positions for a VP level client. They had 70 jobs applied to this week - that was $1.43 per job!
4. The JobSerf Team will search for positions as based upon your search criteria and also submit resumes and cover letters per this criteria!
5. You get a list of all the positions applied and this includes the Job Board & Link, Job Title, Date, City-State, Company, etc.

Here is an About.com article the founder wrote, "Great tips for job searching"
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/jobsearchtips/a/searchwords2.htm

Follow JobSerf on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jobserf