March Madness – The FOT Talent Management Blog Power Rankings

Welcome the March Madness version of the FOT Talent Management Blog Rankings!  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, we think we’ve got a good one – we’re combining the HR Carnival and FOT Power Rankings and creating our own version of 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 HR Carnival as normal, and we've used them to create a MARCH MADNESS bracket with all submissions. 

We’re using the the matchups below to run our next installment of the Talent Management Blog Rankings. 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 FOT/ HR Capitalist 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 of 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 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)

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)