Website Reviews

Offsite Human Resources

www.humanresources.com.au

Offsite Human Resources promotes itself as the "A to Z" of human resources, and having surfed around their site for a while, it's hard to argue they don't have something for everyone. While obviously a business keen on attracting your dollar, Offsite Human Resources does offer a lot of free and interesting information for the Australian Human Resources practitioner. In fact, there is so much to look at it is understandable why when navigating the site you are always returned to the site map. It takes a little getting used to but overall it serves the purpose.

The passing planets create an interest from the first click. Here you can gain access to an HR Library with a gathering of texts with a rating system attached. This has to be of use to students and researchers. The Education planet provides you with a comprehensive list of every imaginable HR course available, including overseas institutions. Also on this page are the current seminars running around the country in human resources.

The Hot Issues planet featured HR and the GST, which, while a little old as a topic, provokes some thoughts as to what might appear here in the future. My favourite planet, however, was the Jobs Factory. Here, according to the company, are all of the advertised vacancies in human resources around Australia every week. While I would have liked to have each job linked to the source, I was informed by the developer that copyright issues prevented that. Despite this, it is obviously a page to book mark when you're in search of your own next role.

Once into the site itself, Offsite Human Resources demonstrates its wide product offering on the areas of consulting, outsourcing, recruitment, information systems, tools and legal services. By hunting around you can find interesting offerings such as "talent incubators", HR data mining and, perhaps the most interesting, "true positioning". True positioning claims to evaluate your people management capabilities and feedback in a simple report your commercial and legal exposures, as well as accuracy, ease of use, consistency and comparison to best practice in 170 areas of human resources.

By the end of my visit I was convinced that this was a company larger than 30 employees based in Sydney, simply by the depth of their site and its offering. I only wish I'd found the Corporate Overview download earlier as it would have saved me printing all of those interesting pages I found along the way.

The last comment I male is reserved for the Network page which offers a great array of links useful to an HR practitioner or student.

readability: 9/10
legibility: 8/10
surfability: 7/10