We just had a 'water coller chat' with out HR Manager this morning.

The topic was - When did HR change from being a helping hand to employees to running the corporation?


She said it was always intended to be a strategic and stand alone check / balance of a corporation's financial goals. They "earned" their seat at the table by controlling people costs when operations managers lost their way. Even finished up with their importance above Finance, Accounting, Operations...basically everything.


Does anyone else have an HR group that has lost its mind? Ours cannot even tell you which payroll provider we use any more.

HR people are bottom of the barrel with an authority complex.

Hr's role has always been to keep the company out of trouble, not to assist employees. Years ago they were really good at convincing employees of the opposite which made it easy to flush out employees that were going to be a pain. I'm with you, I'm completely shocked how well they have been able over the last 10 or so years to go from a necessary evil to being consistently structured across industries and having their fingers in every aspect of business

HR is there to protect the company.

Unionize.

And I hate the union. But I love them.

evestor1 said:

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We just had a 'water coller chat' with out HR Manager this morning.

The topic was - When did HR change from being a helping hand to employees to running the corporation?


She said it was always intended to be a strategic and stand alone check / balance of a corporation's financial goals. They "earned" their seat at the table by controlling people costs when operations managers lost their way. Even finished up with their importance above Finance, Accounting, Operations...basically everything.


Does anyone else have an HR group that has lost its mind? Ours cannot even tell you which payroll provider we use any more.

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Man, I could be convinced that you work where my wife does. You are not alone.

HR has become the enemy within at most large companies. While no one outside of HR thinks they are anywhere close to being important, everyone in that organization thinks they now rule the roost. And, unfortunately, that is starting to become true.

HR has gathered so much power at my wife's company that they now just do stuff on their own accord without any thought to financial repercussions or legal ramifications. On average, it employs the dumbest and least accomplished people of any company.

They are not your friend and you should avoid them at all costs. Ironically, as their power has grown my wife has told me that entire departments are now going around their HR department and flat out ignoring them because they are so incompetent. So you have this completely diverging reality happening.

seemed appropriate

If you were to test the HR Dept on what you do as a company or ask them to describe the products you sell, they would be clueless.

Yeah HR is there to protect the company, not the employees.

At best they can be viewed as a fleet manager for people. Basically, there mission is to get the most utility for the longest time out of people at the lowest cost.

Different companies may have different strategies for achieving those goals but they all share the same goal.

HR has managed to grab the diversity / inclusion stuff at a lot of corporations which has given them newly found influence that they are not used to having and are overly-enjoying.

I will say they are a necessary bureaucracy in large organizations to make sure line managers aren't getting the company into compliance and labor law trouble. To a lesser extent they also help protect employees from really egregious mistreatment by poor managers who are managed by poor managers (sometimes it's hard to see what is really happening behind 2-3 layers of bad leadership.) I suppose that does fall within protecting the company.

Beyond that they really just get in the way, sometimes due to deliberate corporate governance decisions but mostly because they are bored and have an inflated sense of purpose of authority in organizations (and have turned into a dumping ground for bodies in order to meet diversity hiring metrics, particularly in technical organizations where women are substantially underrepresented in the labor pool.) I have had good HR managers and directors who viewed HR as a service organization and were fantastic partners...but they are few and far between. Individuals with P&L responsibility are much more effective when they, not HR, have more direct control over positions, grades, compensation, hiring/firing, and work/life policies.

Before I left the corporate world last year I was fortunate enough to end up at the right level in the company (a Fortune 50 type org) and within a group that was deemed critical to the growth strategy. We were able to grant our own exceptions to just about every HR policy (obviously not things like corporate wide retirement / benefits / insurance stuff) as long as we had legal sign-off. We completely bypassed HR for all of our position creation, comp grading, terminations, remote work, work schedules, etc. We were even able to grant unlimited vacation exceptions to our team, which was the backdoor way to move to an "untracked" PTO policy. HR absolutely hated it. We even completely cut out their talent acquisition / recruiting team, which seems to be one of HR's favorite roles because they usually get to sit in interviews and "consent" to hiring decisions and offers.

It made us as managers / leaders so much more effective at building the right team and we consistently had the highest employee satisfaction scores in the entire company and were also always #1 or #2 in meeting our corporate objectives (generally about 25% of the annual to-do list reported to the street fell to us.) I wonder why?

I will say I have no idea how that would play out at scale within a company that has 75k+ employees. I think it was probably highly dependent on good leadership with a ton of visibility and oversight from the c-suite. If we stepped out of line it would have been very obvious and HR wasn't needed as a hall monitor.

evestor1 said:

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We just had a 'water coller chat' with out HR Manager this morning.

The topic was - When did HR change from being a helping hand to employees to running the corporation?


She said it was always intended to be a strategic and stand alone check / balance of a corporation's financial goals. They "earned" their seat at the table by controlling people costs when operations managers lost their way. Even finished up with their importance above Finance, Accounting, Operations...basically everything.


Does anyone else have an HR group that has lost its mind? Ours cannot even tell you which payroll provider we use any more.

---

Are you sure they said "running the corporation" and not helping run the corporation? Ive worked in HR a long time and have never heard an HR dept claim to run the corporation. Most HR departments want to be strategic partners to business leaders, and I have seen a lot of leaders rely on HR for advice about a lot of things relating to the business.

I know its popular to crap on HR, but in my experience we have always saved the company a ton of money and potential lawsuits. A lot of hiring managers want to open up positions without getting the proper approvals, pay whatever they want to a new hire etc. There has to be checks and balances when doing this or a company will lose a lot of money opening up new positions that aren't in the budget.

You sound like some of the great HR partners and leaders I've worked with who behave more like navigators than first officers trying to drive the ship.

However, a simple solution for managers who open and hire un-budgeted positions without approval from their organization is to fire them. I would expect my managers to know their headcount and payroll budgets and who their subordinates are hiring without HR's help. The flip side of this when HR is stuck in the middle can be months of delays for a position the organization critically needs.

Perhaps some of the issues are lazy leadership dumping bureaucratic monitoring / reporting tasks onto HR when they should stay with management (headcount and hiring approval as an example.)

I have noticed a change when interviewing over the years. HR used to be facilitators of the interview process. If the hiring manager was interested after taking a glance at your resume, HR would be brought in to coordinate with the candidate.

Now it seems that HR also is the initial gatekeeper. Even before the resume is seen by a hiring manager, HR does the initial resume screen and schedules a short interview before deciding if the candidate deserves a look. In the past HR has screened resumes, but at least the hiring manager also took a look before reaching out to the candidate - an indication that there is at least some interest.

LostInLA07 said:

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You sound like some of the great HR partners and leaders I've worked with who behave more like navigators than first officers trying to drive the ship.

However, a simple solution for managers who open and hire un-budgeted positions without approval from their organization is to fire them. I would expect my managers to know their headcount and payroll budgets and who their subordinates are hiring without HR's help. The flip side of this when HR is stuck in the middle can be months of delays for a position the organization critically needs.

Perhaps some of the issues are lazy leadership dumping bureaucratic monitoring / reporting tasks onto HR when they should stay with management (headcount and hiring approval as an example.)

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If this were the case then companies would have no managers because they all do this at every company Ive worked for lol. But thanks for the compliment and I try my best!

Johnny04 said:

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I have noticed a change when interviewing over the years. HR used to be facilitators of the interview process. If the hiring manager was interested after taking a glance at your resume, HR would be brought in to coordinate with the candidate.

Now it seems that HR also is the initial gatekeeper. Even before the resume is seen by a hiring manager, HR does the initial resume screen and schedules a short interview before deciding if the candidate deserves a look. In the past HR has screened resumes, but at least the hiring manager also took a look before reaching out to the candidate - an indication that there is at least some interest.

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Lets say theres 50 candidates who applied to a job posting. Typically how its done is the Recruiter/HR will view all resumes and select a top 10, then send those 10 resumes to the hiring manager. The hiring manager will select 3-4 resumes and the recruiter will screen them and set them up to interview with the hiring manager.

Doesnt make sense for the recruiter/HR to screen every single candidate if the hiring manager is only going to select 4.

Sorry, but HR s*cks.

Most companies don't even need them anymore. Just outsource employee payroll and benefits and get rid of the dead weight.

They bring ZERO VALUE to a company and what's worse - THEY KNOW IT.

ea1060 said:

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Johnny04 said:

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I have noticed a change when interviewing over the years. HR used to be facilitators of the interview process. If the hiring manager was interested after taking a glance at your resume, HR would be brought in to coordinate with the candidate.

Now it seems that HR also is the initial gatekeeper. Even before the resume is seen by a hiring manager, HR does the initial resume screen and schedules a short interview before deciding if the candidate deserves a look. In the past HR has screened resumes, but at least the hiring manager also took a look before reaching out to the candidate - an indication that there is at least some interest.

---

Lets say theres 50 candidates who applied to a job posting. Typically how its done is the Recruiter/HR will view all resumes and select a top 10, then send those 10 resumes to the hiring manager. The hiring manager will select 3-4 resumes and the recruiter will screen them and set them up to interview with the hiring manager.

Doesnt make sense for the recruiter/HR to screen every single candidate if the hiring manager is only going to select 4.

---

I'm currently fighting HR because they are reluctant to set up interviews for the people my managers are wanting to talk to.

HR is saying that aren't right for the role. HR believing they know who is a better fit for the role than the hiring manager is beyond ridiculous.

I'm starting to believe that HR has been told to screen based on DEI goals which is why the people we want are getting pushed back on.

Hell they just named out new departmental c suite exec a few weeks ago.

No experience in the field, given a multi level jump from an unrelated middle management position in the company to the head of the dept making probably close to a million a year. This person was chosen over a SVP in the department with ten years at the company and 25 relevant experience overall. Person B was well liked and recommending by the retiring previous exec.

Hired Person A - woman
Passed Person B - man

This new DEI authority wielded by HR is going to drastic effects of the bottom line at many many companies.

My wife's firm pulled a move out of the Office similar to Meredith getting a pass for saving the company money. Her group went to HR for work harassment claims with evidence along with one claim of sexual harassment. Talking 7 or 8 different people. Essentially, he brought in clients/revenue to the company when times were tough so the female executives turned a blind eye to it. HR stepped in to train my wife and the staff on harassment along with a written warning against the women filing the claim.

My wife removed herself from her job and transferred out to another area. All 8 transferred out of the clinic within a few months. She told me recently it's still going on and nothing being done about it. One of the women looks exactly like his wife so he makes very inappropriate jokes. Funny part is of the people that were harassed, two are one position away from having a say in his career path. They haven't forgotten.

If she lasts long enough at this crap job, I cannot wait to see what happens.

Red Red Wine said:

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Sorry, but HR s*cks.

Most companies don't even need them anymore. Just outsource employee payroll and benefits and get rid of the dead weight.

They bring ZERO VALUE to a company and what's worse - THEY KNOW IT.

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That would be a lot more expensive than hiring internal HR lol. What if a company has 100+ positions to fill in a year. Do you realize how much that would cost to outsource every single position?

That makes no sense.

HR doesn't hire anyone and if they do you won't have a very good workforce. Do it yourself.

I don't think you're picking up what ea is putting down. If you don't have an internal asset to apply to, then you have to go contingent staffing. There are markups associated with that and they're based off annual salary. If you have to fill 100+ positions, you're going to bleed money. I guess you could always self source, but what is that going to do to productivity?

Red Red Wine said:

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That makes no sense.

HR doesn't hire anyone and if they do you won't have a very good workforce. Do it yourself.

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So your suggestion is for hiring managers to do all the recruitment themselves? Not sure that would go over well with them, and they typically dont have the time or resources to do it.

What if zero qualified applicants apply to a job posting, how do you expect managers to fill their own jobs?

Otto 08 said:

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I don't think you're picking up what ea is putting down. If you don't have an internal asset to apply to, then you have to go contingent staffing. There are markups associated with that and they're based off annual salary. If you have to fill 100+ positions, you're going to bleed money. I guess you could always self source, but what is that going to do to productivity?

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100%. The average recruitment agency fee is 20-30% of the candidates base salary. Lets say each hire costs the company $20k per placement, thats $2MM/year in recruitment agency fees the company would have to pay for 100 hires. 1-2 Internal recruiters could hire those 100 people for $200-250k/year in their base salary.

ea1060 said:

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Johnny04 said:

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I have noticed a change when interviewing over the years. HR used to be facilitators of the interview process. If the hiring manager was interested after taking a glance at your resume, HR would be brought in to coordinate with the candidate.

Now it seems that HR also is the initial gatekeeper. Even before the resume is seen by a hiring manager, HR does the initial resume screen and schedules a short interview before deciding if the candidate deserves a look. In the past HR has screened resumes, but at least the hiring manager also took a look before reaching out to the candidate - an indication that there is at least some interest.

---

Lets say theres 50 candidates who applied to a job posting. Typically how its done is the Recruiter/HR will view all resumes and select a top 10, then send those 10 resumes to the hiring manager. The hiring manager will select 3-4 resumes and the recruiter will screen them and set them up to interview with the hiring manager.

Doesnt make sense for the recruiter/HR to screen every single candidate if the hiring manager is only going to select 4.

---

That seems like a much more reasonable way to do things. Multiple times I have had the HR screener, they told me about the group they think I would be a good fit for, everything seemed to go well and then I hear nothing. Every indicator in the interview sounded like they were screening me on technical fit and that no one else had yet seen the resume. Of course, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. I appreciate the insight.

Edit: Also wanted to say that I've had recruiters contact me within a few hours of submitting my resume. I'm guessing that no hiring manager was in the loop in that short time frame.

ea1060 said:

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evestor1 said:

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We just had a 'water coller chat' with out HR Manager this morning.

The topic was - When did HR change from being a helping hand to employees to running the corporation?


She said it was always intended to be a strategic and stand alone check / balance of a corporation's financial goals. They "earned" their seat at the table by controlling people costs when operations managers lost their way. Even finished up with their importance above Finance, Accounting, Operations...basically everything.


Does anyone else have an HR group that has lost its mind? Ours cannot even tell you which payroll provider we use any more.

---

Are you sure they said "running the corporation" and not helping run the corporation?

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It was running the corporation ... mainly b/c i asked the question.

Ain't no company hiring 100 people in a year with a 2 person hr department. Assuming 20% turnover that's a 500 person company. There's an hr director, a couple hr managers, several "hr business partners" at various levels, couple contractors, and they still outsource benefits

Carlo4 said:

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My wife's firm pulled a move out of the Office similar to Meredith getting a pass for saving the company money. Her group went to HR for work harassment claims with evidence along with one claim of sexual harassment. Talking 7 or 8 different people. Essentially, he brought in clients/revenue to the company when times were tough so the female executives turned a blind eye to it. HR stepped in to train my wife and the staff on harassment along with a written warning against the women filing the claim.

My wife removed herself from her job and transferred out to another area. All 8 transferred out of the clinic within a few months. She told me recently it's still going on and nothing being done about it. One of the women looks exactly like his wife so he makes very inappropriate jokes. Funny part is of the people that were harassed, two are one position away from having a say in his career path. They haven't forgotten.

If she lasts long enough at this crap job, I cannot wait to see what happens.

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This is where you sue the employer for retaliation and bank enough to retire.

Charismatic Megafauna said:

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Ain't no company hiring 100 people in a year with a 2 person hr department. Assuming 20% turnover that's a 500 person company. There's an hr director, a couple hr managers, several "hr business partners" at various levels, couple contractors, and they still outsource benefits

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A 2 person recruitment team could hire 100 people or more. Doesnt matter how big the entire HR dept is. Ive done it before on smaller teams.

It's almost admirable to watch you defend HR, but for many, many people, your defense doesn't align with their experiences. I would suggest you take a moment to understand that many people are airing legitimate grievances.

HR has a great opportunity to be a partner, but for many of us they're not. I've had a two very good partners in HR that understand we are their customer, and they help us be successful and keep us out of trouble.

But in large part, the experience for many has been:
- they keep people in the dark
- they don't understand the business
- they aren't accountable to mission success like the managers and employees performing the work are
- they sandbag and sit on tasks that need quick response time
- they want control over processes, but they don't support in the best interest of the end-users
- they change the rules without communicating them effectively until too late

BenTheGoodAg said:

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It's almost admirable to watch you defend HR, but for many, many people, your defense doesn't align with their experiences. I would suggest you take a moment to understand that many people are airing legitimate grievances.

HR has a great opportunity to be a partner, but for many of us they're not. I've had a two very good partners in HR that understand we are their customer, and they help us be successful and keep us out of trouble.

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I understand, Im just playing devils advocate. Im aware there are a lot of crappy HR people out there, I've worked with a ton. Thats why I prefer to work for smaller companies, because they typically have a smaller HR department. But to act like HR doesn't protect the company from lawsuits and save the company money is ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times throughout my HR career that company leaders were begging for a lawsuit but HR was able to fix it.

HR is a necessary evil unfortunately.

Don't get me started.

The problem with HR is that the real purpose of the role is to align the big bosses expectations for running the company with the reality of every day human work and interaction. If they say something the boss doesn't like, the boss may fire them so they have to tow a line of suggesting what is best for the company but not too much if the boss doesn't like it. This is why so many HR reps develop weak spines bc they basically become the boss's pets. Some even take pride in this fact and turn into HR types like in the OP that think they de facto run the company. In reality they just suck up really well.

BenTheGoodAg said:

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It's almost admirable to watch you defend HR, but for many, many people, your defense doesn't align with their experiences. I would suggest you take a moment to understand that many people are airing legitimate grievances.

HR has a great opportunity to be a partner, but for many of us they're not. I've had a two very good partners in HR that understand we are their customer, and they help us be successful and keep us out of trouble.

But in large part, the experience for many has been:
- they keep people in the dark
- they don't understand the business
- they aren't accountable to mission success like the managers and employees performing the work are
- they sandbag and sit on tasks that need quick response time
- they want control over processes, but they don't support in the best interest of the end-users
- they change the rules without communicating them effectively until too late

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My list if very similar...but it is missing how HR became medical Subject Matter Experts during Covid. They told the HSE group to eff off b/c they were in charge!

One of our group presidents "flipped the script" on HR and asked the HR department to lead the facility covid scanning. They were elated until the realized our hourly workers start at 5am M-F and oh yeah ... 6am on Saturday. He had HR working over 60 hours per week. LOL

LostInLA07 said:

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HR has managed to grab the diversity / inclusion stuff at a lot of corporations which has given them newly found influence that they are not used to having and are overly-enjoying.

I will say they are a necessary bureaucracy in large organizations to make sure line managers aren't getting the company into compliance and labor law trouble. To a lesser extent they also help protect employees from really egregious mistreatment by poor managers who are managed by poor managers (sometimes it's hard to see what is really happening behind 2-3 layers of bad leadership.) I suppose that does fall within protecting the company.

Beyond that they really just get in the way, sometimes due to deliberate corporate governance decisions but mostly because they are bored and have an inflated sense of purpose of authority in organizations (and have turned into a dumping ground for bodies in order to meet diversity hiring metrics, particularly in technical organizations where women are substantially underrepresented in the labor pool.) I have had good HR managers and directors who viewed HR as a service organization and were fantastic partners...but they are few and far between. Individuals with P&L responsibility are much more effective when they, not HR, have more direct control over positions, grades, compensation, hiring/firing, and work/life policies.

Before I left the corporate world last year I was fortunate enough to end up at the right level in the company (a Fortune 50 type org) and within a group that was deemed critical to the growth strategy. We were able to grant our own exceptions to just about every HR policy (obviously not things like corporate wide retirement / benefits / insurance stuff) as long as we had legal sign-off. We completely bypassed HR for all of our position creation, comp grading, terminations, remote work, work schedules, etc. We were even able to grant unlimited vacation exceptions to our team, which was the backdoor way to move to an "untracked" PTO policy. HR absolutely hated it. We even completely cut out their talent acquisition / recruiting team, which seems to be one of HR's favorite roles because they usually get to sit in interviews and "consent" to hiring decisions and offers.

It made us as managers / leaders so much more effective at building the right team and we consistently had the highest employee satisfaction scores in the entire company and were also always #1 or #2 in meeting our corporate objectives (generally about 25% of the annual to-do list reported to the street fell to us.) I wonder why?

I will say I have no idea how that would play out at scale within a company that has 75k+ employees. I think it was probably highly dependent on good leadership with a ton of visibility and oversight from the c-suite. If we stepped out of line it would have been very obvious and HR wasn't needed as a hall monitor.

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Great post. I've had 5-6 different HR business partners in my corporate career and one was competent and looking out for the best interest of my people and department. On the whole, HR has become a bureaucratic nanny state that is now infused with DEI ideology which has overpowered them.

Interesting to see you bypassing HR. I wonder how common this is becoming. My wife has shared with me that she now knows multiple departments at her company that have openly rebelled against HR and have stopped working with them. To the point that these departments have flat out hired their own recruiters against HR's protests because their HR department is so utterly incompetent. My wife is now considering this for herself because they are doing nothing to help her.


Personally, I hit my breaking point with them when we had a toxic female in our department that was abusing everyone around her...specifically other females.

The entire senior leadership team, of which I was one, went to HR as a group with multiple documented accounts of abuse and inappropriate behavior. HR actually interviewed about a 1/3 of the department and came away with reams of evidence and reasons to fire this woman.

In my very last meeting with HR on this topic, I asked our HR lady when this woman was going to be let go so we could all move on from this disaster and I was told, "We aren't firing her. You need to get over it and suck it up." Direct quote. I ended the meeting, cancelled future meetings with HR lady, and never spoke with her again. We were later told we weren't firing her because we were afraid she would sue which is lol funny.

It was a DEI response to keep her. Large companies get sued every day by employees. The ones not worth fighting are settled. This was one we would have won in about 10 minutes. So we suffered through many more months of her being around and she finally left on her own when she became so isolated at work (because of her own doing) that her unhappiness being there overwhelmed her desire to be a total and complete psycho *****.

evestor1 said:

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We just had a 'water coller chat' with out HR Manager this morning.

The topic was - When did HR change from being a helping hand to employees to running the corporation?


She said it was always intended to be a strategic and stand alone check / balance of a corporation's financial goals. They "earned" their seat at the table by controlling people costs when operations managers lost their way. Even finished up with their importance above Finance, Accounting, Operations...basically everything.


Does anyone else have an HR group that has lost its mind? Ours cannot even tell you which payroll provider we use any more.

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The tail will wag the dog when the dog is weak enough that it allows it. It's not just in corporate America. It's America in general nowadays.