USU Students win HR Games for 8th straight year
Teams from USU’s Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) took first and second pace at the state level HR Games competition at Weber State Saturday for the eighth consecutive year. HR Games is an academic bowl for human resources students.
“It’s a Jeopardy-style game where students are quizzed on the HR body of knowledge,” said Carrie Belsito, assistant professor in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business.
Participants selected categories and had to put forth their human resource management knowledge in the form of a question as difficulty levels increased.
“The event was sponsored by the national organization,” Belsito said. “The idea is to prepare students to for the PHR (professional human resources) exam.”
Categories included strategic management, benefits and risk management.
Although teams from BYU and the U of U planned on attending, they backed out in the week preceding the competition, Belsito said.
“We just do really well. I think people are a little scared because we dominate,” Belsito said,
Members of the first place team were Emily Halterman, A. J. Kim and Tate Matta. Coming in for second was Stephen Allred, Lydia Bushman and Brian Francom. The winners receive an opportunity to take the PHR exam for free.
“These students, besides just being smart, they are really a great group of people,” Belsito said. “They are beyond genuine and a fun group to work with.”
Belsito said she has worked with Al Warnick as a faculty adviser and coach.
Allred, junior in human resources and president of USU’s chapter of SHRM, said the event was organized with judges, lunch, semifinals and finals. The competition was hosted by Weber State University.
Kim, senior in psychology, who competed on the first place team said there was “actually a very friendly competitive atmosphere. It was a great opportunity, a great way to meet and work with professionals in the field, in the career.”
The two teams will go on to the SHRM regional competition, Allred said, which will be held March 21 and 22 in Denver.
Belsito said as many as 15 of the best teams in the southwestern U.S. will compete in the regional competition, where the teams will vie for the opportunity to attend the national conference of the chapter.
“It’s quite intense,” she said.
“(The competition is) run in conjunction with a student conference. It’s a pretty intimate conference,” Belsito said.
Students will have opportunities to meet with many professionals from the field up close and personal, she said.
As preparation for the event, the team met twice a week, starting in the fall. They studied anything from textbooks to modules, Belsito said, and in their efforts to prepare the students master the material.
“They really do become the experts,” Belsito said. “They understand it and can work through it in their heads, not just memorizing.”
The students went to great lengths to learn the information, Kim said.
“We had weekly practices to review the material,” Kim said. “I would study on my own, flashcards and stuff like that.”
Kim said he was pleased with his performance, especially since the competition was moved up by three weeks.
“There were definitely issues we had to work out,” Kim said. “We reviewed strategies of game play and how we’d work best as a team.”
In addition to help from the two faculty advisers, this year’s master’s students – Aaron Lambert, Emily Maycock, Kortney Teigen and Mark Torrie – have been a great support, working to inspire and motivate the team, Belsito said.
The students put in a lot of time and effort. There were six categories to cover between the six students. Each student thoroughly learned two of the categories. Then, in the actual competition, they competed against each other on teams of three, Allred said.
“They deserve a lot of credit for their time,” Belsito said. “No attitudes; these people just enjoyed what they were doing.”
–r.perkins@aggiemail.usu.edu