If you’ve been in the HR world for a while, you’ve probably heard of #HRCarnival. For 11 (!) years it’s been a place to come together as a community, find new voices, and share ideas. I’m delighted to host the final Carnival of HR for 2018.

Some months the Carnival has a theme — the future of HR or March Madness. For the final Carnival of the year I wanted to look back at the best (and sometimes most controversial — Robin Schooling, I’m looking at you) posts published in 2018.

Did I miss a post you think we should include in this list? Let me know! You can find me at on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Recruiting and Onboarding

Want to help and hire veterans? Cici Clark has a few ideas.

We all know that candidates expect high-grade technology and easy-to-navigate experiences. After all, that’s what they get in their personal lives. But what about the recruiter experience? How could we bring over some of the best features of our personal tech (say, dating apps) to improve recruiting? Melissa Suzuno breaks it down on the Greenhouse Blog.

Once your new hire is on the job, how do you make them feel welcome and at home? You might find a new idea or two on Helo Tamme’s list of 10 ways to make new hires happy.

Culture

Often, company culture is aspirational. We all want to build a positive culture. But when you’re designing your ideal culture, leave some room for polarity. That’s advice from Jesse Lyn Stoner, who says that even the most collaborative culture can use some balance from the other side of the scale.

Culture doesn’t become toxic overnight. Dorothy Dalton argues that a culture goes downhill when people start to normalize bad behavior: overworking, promoting one group at the expense of another, allowing a negative communication style to predominate, and accepting the unacceptable. She gives us five ways to avoid toxic workplace cultures.

Professional Development

Learning doesn’t stop at graduation. In fact, curiosity and the ability to learn new things has become a differentiator for the modern employee. Julie Giulioni calls this skill “learn-gevity” and writes about how you can cultivate it for yourself.

Analytics

Prasad Kurian takes a deep dive into two disciplines: organizational development and HR analytics. He thinks of organizational development as the most “mystical” you can get in HR, while HR analytics is all about the data. His question: Is there anything that the analytical and mystical can learn from each other?

The Future of HR

What are your predictions for HR in 2019? Over on Fistful of Talent, Mary Fogel is hopeful that 2019 will be the year that HR finally takes some risks.

At this year’s HR Tech conference, Mary Faulkner started thinking about representation and why it’s so important: “I believe in representation. I believe it impacts a company’s success. I believe it builds strong talent pipelines. I believe it builds strong, confident women who refuse to take a lower salary because they should just be grateful they got the job. I believe it continues to help women realize they should never ever apologize for their success, nor should they be considered rare and magical when they show up at a conference and share their knowledge like the badasses they are.”

If you think AI is all about tech, think again. Ben Eubanks literally wrote the book on AI for HR, and the final chapter is all about skills that will matter a lot in the future: soft skills like creativity, curiosity, collaboration, compassion and critical thinking.

…Etc.

And finally, Robin Schooling brings us HR’s worst nightmare. Have you ever walked in on this at work?