this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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In my experience, the job that HR excels at is creating and perpetuating the view that the company needs a HR dept. Generally, the most unneccesary people in an office are HR.
Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.
So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by "governmental endless bureaucracy" or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.
My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.
I can't really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn't run by genius.
20% of the company!? My last company had useless HR like that. Only 3 of them for 35 of us, but they did nothing and that was 2 too many. The "Director", with all of two people under her, was so wildly incompetent we all thought she had something on the owner.
They couldn't even handle their core job of bringing us solid candidates. Had no one under me but was still treated a management (IT) and finally put my foot down. Made it crystal clear, with many examples, that the people HR was bringing in didn't have the most basic office related PC skills, and that I could tell on day-1 who was and wasn't going to make it. Changes were made, success was had.
So ask yourself, how the hell is the IT guy a better judge of candidates than a "professional" HR team?!
I should add, my current company's HR is rock and roll. It's really nice working with them and I'm still good friends with one that left last year.
Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.
The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn't even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.
At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.
HR as a department seems largely useless unless you're hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can't keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.
The job I was talking about was IT at a payroll company. Running payroll can be surprisingly complex, so most small businesses farm it out to a employee leasing place, let them hassle with the regulations. Lot's more to it than multiplying hours by pay rate.
But it sounds like they were farming it out? Sending hours and pay rates to an accountant?
We're a software dev, and despite the low turnover, we're constantly growing and hiring. Not easy to pull in solid devs because it's such a competitive field. HR earns their money in my outfit. We've needed a new security person in DevOps for 2-months, haven't heard a peep from the boss about candidates.
But yeah, I feel you on the useless HR people. When I say our director was so dumb and useless, I really meant we thought she had blackmail on the owner. We were not joking, it was the only explanation that made sense.
Yeah, payroll was outsourced and they met with the firm once or twice a year. The firm took care of mostly everything legal, including insurances and tax benefits afaik. The head of "HR" was a lifelong friend of the owner so I guess he didn't want to go there.
My experience in a big software company was different and probably just like yours. The people there were rockstars.
This. 100x this.
The problem is that most times HR person is all you'll get at the first interview and you'll only get someone marginally tech-versed on the second interview. Even then you risk having some bozo who regrets not being hired by Google so all the questions are hyperbolic in the extreme and not related at all to daily tasks.