HR Happy Hour 196 - Career Management and Technology

Recorded Thursday November 20, 2014 

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Joe Brooks, CEOZapoint

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Trish and Steve were joined by Joe Brooks, CEO of Zapoint, an HR tech solution provider that focuses on employee career management, individual and organizational skills identification and mapping, and by providing access to learning content to help employees build out their skills and achieve their career objectives.

We talked about some of the most common barriers to effective career planning - lack of visibility into existing opportunities, limited ability to assess if you were a good 'fit' for a given role or career path, and lack of transparency and willingness of managers to develop and share talent. 

The conversation also touched upon the HR and organziational leader's need to have a better understanding of aggregate skills and capabilities of the organization's talent - to help enable organizational objectives and to facilitate ongoing succession planning. Joe also shared some insights into how organizations can have success in meeting both sets of these challenges - for employees as well as leadership - by leveraging modern technologies like Zapoint and their innovative skills mapping and career management tools.

Also, Steve and Trish talked about the potential release of 'Facebook at Work', Steve (finally) remembered what day it was, and we reminisced about the long gone Google Wave produce.

This was a fun and interesting show and many thanks to Joe and to the folks at Zapoint for sharing their insights.