Now a Certified Internet Recruiter (CIR)

I obtained my CIR (Certified Internet Recruiter) certification today. Yeah. I hope I do as well on the SPHR exam in May.

Today was my second visit to a client site. This one was interesting because it has a research facility in addition to the plant. It's really cool to see the work in the field and it's great to meet more of our Austin Employee-Owners. They really seemed to be a lot of fun to work with; many of them were quite humorous. That's always fun to see. I'm looking forward to the next site visit which is scheduled for next week.

HR Carnival

HR Carnival is up at Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog.

It's a good day in my neighborhood.

Today is a great day! Our new Business Development Manager started today. She's the first manager I've recruited at my new company. I'm really excited to have her on board.

Also, our executives are expecting to put a contract in place for our company's largest project ever (since the company was founded in 1918). That is thrilling. This is a huge project. We will just have 1 piece of it. This work is for the largest refinery expansion project in the US in over a decade. It's great for the company, but it will be very tough work for many of us. It will be hard to find all the people to do the work in this tight labor market. This is a very exciting time to be in the industrial construction industry.

New Website

We have our new website up. It's exciting. Also, I am now able to post the employee-owner picture that we took recently. We'll be using this picture on the new booths we're having made to take to career fairs. All these updates are so exciting. Check out our new website with this link: Austin Industrial website.

1.7 Billion Dollar Company

On Tuesday, we had our annual manager's meeting where our company executives talk about company performance for the previous year. It was very exciting. My company, Austin Industrial did $334 Million in revenue for 2007 and our parent company, Austin Industries, did $1.7 billion in revenue for 2007. Woohoo! That's important, because the company stock we are given (through our ESOP program) is for our parent company and reflects the performance of our 2 sister companies as well as my company. It's so cool to be given stock just for doing our jobs. Our stock is now worth $84.33; up from $8.79 when it was originally issued. It's a great feeling to know that we will be set for retirement if we work for this company. Can you afford to retire when you reach 65?

Think about your family and loved ones!

I completed my first project site visit yesterday. It was great! We started with the monthly safety meeting. The speaker was Randall Royall. If you are ever looking for a speaker on the topic of Safety, consider him!!! He was excellent!!!! He was severely injured on the job when he did not follow the procedure of working with a second person when he went to check out a leak. He was paralyzed for a period of time due to those injuries. One of the points that he made in his presentation was that the consequences of not using safe procedures doesn't just affect you; it has a big impact on your family and friends as well. His wife had to quit her job to take care of him. He lost his new house and his new truck. This, of course, affects his entire family.

The rest of the site visit was wonderful as well. It was great to personally meet a number of Austin employee-owners who work at this client location. Our people are so cool! I'm very much looking forward to my visit next month to another client site. I wanted to take some pictures while I was there to include in this blog, but the client has very strict policies on that.