If you’re highly active in HR and Talent Acquisition in the social space (read: blogs, sites, pod/videocasts, webinars, conferences, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you might be caught up in this mindset that what you’re doing is not what you should be doing.

You’re being told what you should be focusing on by idiots like me, and thousands of others, most of whom don’t even work in HR or Talent Acquisition at this moment.  That’s not a bad thing, some are brilliant and took their brilliance to the consulting/analyst/vendor side of the fence because the money was better, or the balance was better, or both.  This isn’t a consultant vs. practitioner post.

This is a post to remind you that it’s alright if you just put your head down and do actual HR and Recruiting work for a while.

That it’s okay not to be instituting the next best practice or innovation.

That it’s okay not to be focusing on recreating HR and Talent Acquisition in your organization.

Sometimes we just need to keep the train running down the tracks.  Allow ourselves to catch our breath. Get and build a strong team around us, and get ready for big things in the future.  In the meantime, we just do what we do.

We make sure our employees are doing alright.  Is there anything we can do to help them be better?

We make sure our employees get paid correctly and benefit card works when they show up at the doctor.

We make sure to kick managers in the shin, under the table, when they’re being idiots to their teams.

We make sure new employees have the tools they need when the show up on their first day, and they feel welcomed.

We give bad employees the gift of finding a job they will truly love, by letting them find that job on their own time.

Sometimes when I’m writing I forget what it’s like to have a million priorities in your day, and knowing you won’t get to half of them. That’s the daily grind in HR and Talent Acquisition.  So, I write about how you should do this or do that, how you should be all innovative and shit, but I get that many days (sometimes weeks and months!) you just need to do the basics.

I’ve been there.  I struggled to just do the basics many days.  When thinking of being the best and innovating seemed so far away from reality that you felt like giving up.

That’s when I would tell myself, “Today, I’m just going to do HR”.  Focus on what I’m good at. Focus on what I can control.  Make it to the next day, where just maybe, that day would allow me to get better.