Inhuman Resources

Jack Welch offers some cut­ting thoughts on HR departments:

In the wide-ranging Q-and-A with Claire Ship­man, Welch took HR pro­fes­sion­als to task for play­ing the vic­tim a lit­tle too often. “I’ve seen too many orga­ni­za­tions where HR whines about their role,” Welch said.

If you want senior man­age­ment to take you seri­ously, he said, “get out of the pic­nic, birth­day card, and insur­ance forms business.”

Instead, he told the crowd, their focus should be on build­ing trust through­out the com­pany and devel­op­ing recruit­ment and reten­tion strate­gies that attract the best work­ers in good times and bad. “Your job is to raise the qual­ity of the team.”

I have fre­quently been very under­whelmed by the per­son­nel human-resources depart­ments at many com­pa­nies — large and small — for whom I have worked in the United States and Israel. Too many of them have been essen­tially use­less, if not down­right harmful.

It starts, per­haps log­i­cally, with the hir­ing func­tion. One Mass­a­chu­setts hos­pi­tal fired me from my mar­ket­ing man­age­ment posi­tion on my sec­ond day because I had the audac­ity to ask a few pointed ques­tions dur­ing the ori­en­ta­tion rather than be a nice, lit­tle sponge like every­one else and absorb the cliche speeches and videos. (They hired a for­mer jour­nal­ist, for cry­ing out loud.) “The hos­pi­tal” had “deter­mined” that my per­son­al­ity was not good match for the cor­po­rate cul­ture. And don’t get me started on the far­ci­cal sexual-harassment video.

At one high-tech com­pany in Tel Aviv, a per­son in HR took me and another new hire out to lunch. Offi­cially, it was a getting-to-know-you thing, but I was sure the man­ager went back with a full report on our per­son­al­i­ties and capa­bil­i­ties. The hir­ing inter­views were enough pres­sure — HR should leave the schmooze-based analy­sis for my boss. They did not even know what I did on a day-to-day basis. HR man­agers usu­ally can­not do what the employee of a given depart­ment does on a day-to-day basis, espe­cially in fields like high-tech and finance.

But it goes beyond my per­sonal expe­ri­ences. I recently read an arti­cle (which I can­not find now) report­ing that peo­ple were dumbing-down their resumes because many large cor­po­ra­tions have changed their resume-filtering soft­ware to exclude for­mer C-level employ­ees because are overqual­i­fied. (In this econ­omy, even erst­while CEOs need a job!)

HR usu­ally makes the first cull of poten­tial job appli­cants, whether through com­put­ers or eye­balls. But they always stick ruth­lessly to point­less check­lists — no one, for exam­ple, with­out a col­lege degree is wor­thy of an entry-level posi­tion — that may rob a depart­ment of some­one who could be tai­lored into a great asset and resource. When a per­son looks at dozens of resumes every day, it is too easy to see the per­son and instead reduce every CV to a col­lec­tion of yes-he-has or no-he-does-not-have checkmarks.

When I was the direc­tor of a sales depart­ment here in Israel, I went through every CV myself. I made the time to do it. The man­ager of a depart­ment knows exactly what he needs; HR does not.

But if HR should not play a sig­nif­i­cant role in hir­ing, what is left for them to do? Every HR per­son I have ever known has told me that they went into the field because they like work­ing with peo­ple. But, in real­ity, their jobs seem to involve look­ing at pieces of paper, keep­ing abreast of labor law, and act­ing as enforcers of com­pany codes. What fun.

I have always envi­sioned HR depart­ments as being some­thing sim­i­lar to the ombuds­men that most major news­pa­pers have. In jour­nal­ism, the ombuds­man rep­re­sents the read­ers. He is appointed by the edi­tor or pub­lisher to a spe­cific term of office, inves­ti­gates com­plaints about sto­ries (or what­ever), and writes an impar­tial cri­tique of the sit­u­a­tions. Most impor­tantly, he crit­i­cizes the news­pa­per — and even indi­vid­ual writ­ers and edi­tors — when­ever he thinks it is justified.

Since labor unions are increas­ingly irrel­e­vant, HR depart­ments could tran­si­tion to being the ones who rep­re­sent the employ­ees. If a man­ager treats an employee badly, HR could inves­ti­gate in a neu­tral man­ner and make a rul­ing. Most impor­tantly, HR could have the power to decide that the com­pany or man­ager acted wrongly — even if mak­ing such a deci­sion would go against the best inter­ests of the com­pany as a whole. The CEO or chair­man of the board could appoint the vice pres­i­dent of HR to a spe­cific term of office dur­ing which he could not be fired (except in spe­cial cases, like doing some­thing ille­gal). Now that would inspire work­place morale! And HR man­agers would finally ful­fill their dreams of work­ing with peo­ple rather than pieces of paper.

I hate see­ing HR man­agers as the police as much as any­one, but employ­ees fre­quently have nowhere to turn when the boss slams any given door in their face. Per­haps a rev­o­lu­tion in human-resources is needed.