BLR’s CEO Bob Brady invites you in for a “sneak preview” at something he and a lot of other good people have been working on for a long time.
This column is about something I’ve been working on for over a year and something that will, I hope, benefit many of you. (And, if you’ll allow it, I’m going to toot my own horn just a bit about it here, as well.)
Several months ago I wrote about Jack Sullivan, the HR consultant turned editor, who nearly 50 years ago saw the importance of state law to the HR function and who started What to Do About Personnel Problems in Connecticut—the first program to compare federal and state law in a convenient way to make compliance with both bodies of law easier.
He became a mentor to me and encouraged us to extend his concept to the rest of the country. Since the 1980s our “Red Books” (AKA the What to Do About Personnel Problems in [Your State] series) have been helping HR managers serve their companies better. Some 20,000 employers now use them.
Six years ago we began moving this content onto the Web with our groundbreaking site, “HRNext.com” (since rechristened HR.BLR.com).
The site has been well received, but there were aspects that kept bothering us. For example, with the book version, you can see how state and national law relate to each other, easily and naturally, because the national and state pages on any given topic follow one right after another.
With the Web, we tried to replicate this by linking the national and state. Unfortunately, in practice, it often necessitated going back and forth.
Say you were researching “family medical leave” in California. First you’d look at the national, then “toggle” to California. How many days of leave in California? How many under federal law? Back and forth, back and forth. It could get frustrating (not good because you are a busy group, impatient if you can’t find what you are looking for).
A True Aha! Moment
Finally, about a year ago, it hit us, in a true “aha!” moment: Why not just display national and state information on the screen at the same time? We mocked it up and showed it to a number of HR managers, both familiar and unfamiliar with the site. They loved it!
That set us on a long task of completely redesigning the HR.BLR.com site—always with one goal in mind: making it easier for you to find things quickly.
During that year the site was remade from top to bottom, including redoing every state section (almost 10,000 in total) to permit side-by-side viewing. In addition, we’ve made several other important changes:
* Organized our content so that everything we have on a specific topic (state and federal analysis, PowerPoint® training materials, checklists, news stories, etc., etc.) can be viewed in a single list that can be filtered and sorted by the user
* Added an easy-to-use directed-search “site navigator” that makes it easy to find topics
* Added a job descriptions tool that makes it easy to create and edit standardized job descriptions for over 2,000 jobs
And the list goes on. Anyway, it’s all now finally in a “beta” version. (That is to say, although we think it is finished, we’re not officially launching it without a little more testing.) But we’d like to give you a “sneak preview.” So consider yourself officially invited! Use the number below for your invitation to the new HR.BLR.com!
I’d love to hear what you think. E-mail me at RBrady@BLR.com and let me know.
Your Invitation to a Sneak Preview of the New HR.BLR.com
Call us right now at 866-696-4825, press 1, and ask for your SNEAK PREVIEW and we will setup your trial of the HR.BLR.com.