Wow. This is the most astonishing hogwash based rant I've read in a long time. And that's not just because I work in HR/Payroll, but simply because generalising invariably means that the rant is wrong.

Yes, there are dud HR departments out there, just as there are dud accountants, public servants, garbos, labourers, journalists etc. No one is going to argue this.

However, if you've ever been in an organisation where the executive group have bought into HR management then you'll see the benefits. You'll see remuneration policies that match the way that the business works, you'll see an organisation that's reasonably on top of OH&S, recruitment functions that are reasonably efficient, payroll that's reasonably accurate etc. The reason for using the word 'reasonably' so often there is because we're dealing with humans who don't always get things right, especially where they need to make a judgment call on priorities.

Contrast that with one where you have poor HR management/exec buy-in, you'll get poor bonus pools, overcomplicated processes and managers and employees who are irritated at how things that should be simple aren't.

Generalise like this and you're setting yourself up to fail. The author had a bad experience - fine. Deal with it and get over it. Contact AHRI (http://www.ahri.com.au) and find out who the good employers are and try with them before ranting with generalisations like this.

Well, I certainly won’t be seeking help from Republic Resumes or Republic Media.

Having written that, the author is right to rail against the tide of HR as a growing force. Back in the late 70’s, organisations were full of Personnel Managers. As we entered the dreadful Labor government inspired years, these Personnel Managers were thankfully set adrift as business streamlined itself to cope with the inevitable belt tightening that comes along with every incompetent government.

This time again, just like the time before, and the time before that, a Labor government is overseeing a decline in our economic performance, making our labour force less flexible, imposing ridiculous restraints on workforce participation but doing it all in the misguided belief that none of the hardship is due to them – its all magic or voodoo or something. This time it’s the Global Economic meltdown/crisis/crunch, last time it was the recession we had to have and before that all I remember is Khemlani and loans.

On the bright side, we can only hope to see the HR industry shrink and responsibility (a very un-Labor word) for looking after people given back to line management. It is true that the HR industry constantly tries to baffle brains with bull#*$t. The conga lines of blindfolded fools following a ‘leader’ peeping incessantly on a whistle, while meandering across the playing field outside my office attest to the irrelevance of their core competencies. I’m sure when they finish this politically correct team bonding that they will all be better team players as they retreat to their ergonomically designed cube-farms.

My experience with HR is that in the public sector they are a phenomenal drain on productivity living in an un-costed fools paradise; as long as the process is right the outcome is irrelevant. In the Private Sector they are a little more focused on outcomes rather than process but they’re well overdue for a cleanout.

This article hits the nail on the head time and time again - and from an insider too. This is about the most damning article I've read on HR - Horrid Realities. It reads as a researched piece in to recruitment practices looking by King's profile.

He should have gone in harder and named names. What a waste of space these people are. Sure, there are good people in the 'profession' but if you read the HR newsletters such as Recruiter Daily and the waffle that is printed in the dailies as 'career advice', you'll realise that HR, as the author says, is a value subtract.

They are a useless link in the recruitment supply chain.

I couldn't agree more with the author of this article. Okay, I've only had one experience lately with an executive recruitment firm (I was the employer) and it was woeful!

I was most disappointed with the administrative aspects. The advertisement was not properly researched and even the name of the organisation I was representing was branded incorrectly in the newspapers. Our employees were none too pleased.

Most of the long list of candidates for the position did not even know they were on our list for consideration. That might be reasonable for a database starting point, but a majority of them did not have the skills or the experience we were looking for and had advertised for. As it turned out, the successful candidate applied for the position by answering the advertisement.

Mmmm - I'll need a lot of convincing to use another recruitment agency in the near future. The overall cost of the exercise was phenomenal, but I have to admit that their Boardroom was a rather pleasant place to conduct the interviews.

Is OLO trying to become the Fox News of the Australian blogosphere? Lately it specialises in uninformed ill-considered sprays like this one.

In most organisations, HR managers are comparatively junior executives doing what senior management instructs them to. To the extent that they engage in poor practices, it is because they are permitted/encouraged to do so by top management. Describing HRM as 'an incompetent profession' is plain silly, not to say meaningless.

The truth is that many senior managers are besotted with the promise they see in HRM. Getting staff to be highly motivated and hard-working because they love their jobs and have faith in the organisation's 'mission' is the holy grail of management: a final solution to the labour problem at minimal cost.

I think I understand why the author was unsuccessful in his many job applications. The whole post is ridiculous.

BTW anyone equating HRM with commercial recruitment agencies does not understand what HRM is.

I couldn't agree more with the author - there is a whole industry out there that trots out useless mumbo-jumbo in an attempt to sound impressive to its clients. They add ZERO.

The fact is HR "practitioners" (for want of a better word) out there are useless to their clients whenever they speak generically or according to some predetermined template. I work in an organisation that has had some dealings with HR contractors. After their focus groups - whose main activity revolved around a spruiker giving a pep talk with the backdrop of butcher's paper on the walls with targets drawn on them - there was nothing of value to show for one's attendance. I'd have thought that value would only have been generated if the HR staff had studied the work/profile/needs/etc of the organisation and tailored their courses to suit.

But that would take knowledge on the part of the HR company. And work.

Such outfits have about as much credibility as tarot card readers or itinerant gypsies doing work on your house.

I'm with you BN. One swallow does not a summer make. The same could be said about, oh, any career in the service industry. Can we pick on waiters next?

This is the type of article that I look forward to on OLO. One where the author manages to demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

Mind you, it is not entirely his fault.

He has the same weird delusion of anyone who thinks that what they read in the free commuter newspapers is unvarnished reality, that HR's entire function is recruitment. It isn't, as any business that has a properly functioning HR department will tell you.

(Incidentally, a business generally gets the HR it deserves; the worse-managed the business, the poorer the HR. It is the effect, not the cause).

The recruitment "industry" is his real target, and I have a great deal of sympathy with his frothings against this particular wart on the bum of commerce. All the sins he rails at - from the impenetrable jargon to blind faith in Myer-Briggs - are lodged here.

Anyone who goes "into recruitment" with the view that their people-skills will make a difference become very quickly disabused of the notion. It is a volume game, only. Sign up the jobhunters to stick in your body-inventory, put them through the jargon sausage-machine, then flog them to businesses who are too lazy or incompetent to manage their own intake.

But the other aspect of this holier-than-thou burst of self-promotion is its staggering lack of understanding of business.

>>For individual job hunters, the secret to getting a job is cold calling and asking for an appointment to pitch your skills<<

If I want a storeman, or an accountant, or a marketing manager, it is a decision that I come to after careful evaluation... then, and only then, do I go to the market to find one. I really don't want people knocking on my door on spec., to "pitch their skills".

All in all, a spectacular spray against entirely the wrong target.

Not bad for thirty minutes' work, though.

Including thinking time.

Some fab posts here from people obviously in the recruitment industry. I bet that's the first time they've hit a keyboard in anger in the last 10 years.

HR Office - Boss: What's got Wally so stirred up?
Hireling: Someone is attacking the HR industry.
Boss: Not again! Prepare to defend the indefensible.

I read Michael Burge's story in The Aust recently about being messed around by recruiters - he took the same angle. The very lowest common denominator in Australian bureaucratic life is HR.

Congrats to OLO for publishing such a penetrative expose. It's about time these wallies were sent packing.

The problem here is generalization on two levels.
• There are almost as many versions and responsibilities to HR as there are companies.
• There is almost as much quality variability as there are HR departments.
Some observations I would make (albeit generalized) are
• In large companies they have too much power often to be in touch with the realities of the coal face and not enough at higher level to affect much.
• Senior management often don’t understand what HR is and what functions they NEED. Much less know how to hire a good one.
• Let alone how to assess one.
Many of the problems the author rightly identifies are therefore more likely faults in the company snr management not having any real HR knowledge. Often job specs for these positions are written by ‘consultants’ that have no real understanding of the nature of the business. Consequently the department is created on a bureaucratic model ‘one size fits no one’. Many work on standardization in the belief that this will solve all problems. It doesn’t.

Want a tea lady take std TL1 give it to the girl to cut and paste …oops she doesn’t need a HDV licence? I must have taken TD1! Training and appropriate staff comes to mind.
Then there are those aptitude tests. If they have the answer it must have been a silly question. They have more caveats than a lawyer’s wet dream.

Simply put people and jobs aren’t standardized. I remember asking for a bench jockey and because of lack of understanding in issues like transfer skills they come up with zilch. My senior tech review the discarded resumes and found 4 acceptable candidates…we hired two. Good salesmen are equally difficult to standardize and a successful one even harder.
These comments cover only some elements but space precludes more.
In short HR departments are do have their place but they are often misunderstood, misdirected, miss-focused , and under staffed for what they’re often expected to do.

Not sure what you're trying to prove, Mr Smith.

>>99% of industry is BS<<

You're not welcome here, Wayne, crawl back under the rock you came from

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,20551434-3102,00.html

Graham, please feel free to delete this message as soon as you have rid our pages of this parasite who is currently posting here using your name.

From my 35 years experience in industry’s and exposure to a variety of HR practitioners I still ask myself the question

“Why HR?”

The true “line of management” is through an employee’s line manager. It has nothing to do with any “staff management”. My observations would conclude ‘HR’ can be efficiently represented as some part-time consultant who advises on employment legislation and practices.

Graham Young, “The whole system can be improved by getting rid of the paper shufflers”

Problem there Graham, dispensing with all those paper shufflers would contract the economy, businesses would lose sales in a declining market, thus the workers would follow their paper-shuffling brethren and we all go down the gurgler together.

But we are due for a taste of these mass expulsion of paper shufflers next year, around Jan / Feb when instead of reopening after the Christmas break a lot of places just go under.

The task anyone does must always be challenged by the question “What Added Value to I contribute?”

I have rarely had any problem defining what my “paper shuffling” contributes, although I feel HR is one function which does merit closer scrutiny.

And after reading a second post from “Graham Young”, versus the fabled “Graham Y”, I agree with Pericles

After 30 years of working in an industry that uses "head hunters" to fill positions I agree with the author.

The head hunters never understand the technical requirements of the position, always misrepresent the role. The optical scanning software used to select candidates on the database discriminates on age, sex as well as previous experience. It will find a candidate the same job as the last job not a role they can grow into.

Telstra used head hunters to search for 135 COBOL programmers for CABA maintenance in 2005 before deciding Australian candidates didn't have current experience and hiring raw graduates from India.

The Alfred Hospital now runs its own nurse bank after the owner of one nursing agency bought the most expensive house ever sold in Toorak.

Am I allowed to take a swipe at JobNetwork, the most expensive and inefficient use of taxpayers money to get people ogg welfare and back to work. How can a system be efficient if one operator can make over $20 million in 10 years of operation?

Couldn't agree with you more, Mr King. HR is a boil on the backside of businesses the length and breadth of this country. I have had the extreme misfortune to use a number of employment agencies in the past in my search for work. Apart from one or two excellent ones at the top end of the market, they have all been diabolical. Calls go unreturned, applications unacknolwedged, e-mails never answered. As for the misinformation pedalled in most employment ads - simply disgraceful. It really is a fifth-rate profession. Kudos to you for summing it up so brilliantly.

"BTW anyone equating HRM with commercial recruitment agencies does not understand what HRM is."
A number of us seem to think that HRM does have something to do with recruitment of staff, albeit only one aspect of HRM.

HR a boil on the face of progress.

The corporatised recruitment industry is a bit different to pure intra-company HRM which is quite a different animal.

The recruitment industry is characterised generally by under-staffed, overworked consultants who job is to get bums on seats rather than find real jobs for real people.

Hmm. A few things to ponder.

Firstly, I'll point out that the article is bang on when it's referring to recruitment HR.

HR recruitment specialists tend to be the haemorrhoid on the butt of corporate Australia. My contempt for the vast majority of them is palpable.

As for the rest of HR, I can admit, I don't really know, but logic dictates that in large companies there must be a requirement for efficient use of, well, for lack of another term, 'human resources'.

Thus, I would view HR in some form or another, as a kind of necessity. In large companies, somebody has to figure out how to best assign roles, facilitate communication and reduce duplication of roles. These aren't merely fancy words. They are very real requirements.

However, my suspicion is that given the nature of man and the nature of evolving communications, coupled with the inherent drive of any given profession to feather its own nest, that ultimately, HR departments tend to become bloated and self serving. When we are discussing an issue as vague as the value of people and their productivity and contributions, it is inevitable that a certain amount of... (well, there's only one word that encompasses this adequately) bullsh!t, will spread.
The surest sign of this is the use of specialised language, which allows the profession in question to claim a special status as wise practitioners of an art that can't be understood by the masses, thereby ensuring their relevance.

(For further examples, see certain elements of the legal profession).

At the end of the day, some HR departments will serve their company well, however I think this isn't true of most, though that last point is more a general opinion than anything concrete. I certainly think most HR recruitment specialists tend to be charlatans.

No-one gets HR as well as Scott Adams

http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/5000/100/15135/15135.strip.gif

http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/5000/100/15130/15130.strip.gif

I am sure that out there somewhere there are excellent HR agencies and departments, because I am an optimist.

BN wrote:
"Contact AHRI and find out who the good employers are and try with them before ranting with generalisations like this."

AHRI are part of the problem. AHRI is the source of much of the buzzwords and waffle that (some) HR people spout. The author of the original article talks about HR being a parasite - AHRI's existence is 100% parasitic!

Pelican wrote:
"The recruitment industry is characterised generally by under-staffed, overworked consultants who job is to get bums on seats rather than find real jobs for real people."

Since when was the recruitment industry supposed to "find real jobs for real people" ? It's not the CES! A recruiter's job is to find the best candidates for their client (the employer).

"... The surest sign of this is the use of specialised language, which allows the profession in question to claim a special status as wise practitioners of an art that can't be understood by the masses, thereby ensuring their relevance."

I agree with this statement. It's the oracle syndrome: that all organisations have to do is consult 'the wise oracle' and all problems will be magically fixed. Not so. The best way to solve problems is to totally open things up to scrutiny and let as many people as possible get involved to solve them. Where I work we have a corporate database called ORACLE. The problem with it is hardly anyone knows what's in it. As one wag has said on more than one occasion, the only way to access the database is to consult the oracle. Some database!

'As for the rest of HR, I can admit, I don't really know ...'

A wise person would have ended the comment there.

Any system that refers to people as 'human resources' has insurmountable credibility problems.

How does that Barbara Streisand song go? ...
Human resources
Who need human resources
Are the luckiest human resources in the world'
not.

Moz wrote: "Since when was the recruitment industry supposed to "find real jobs for real people" ? It's not the CES! A recruiter's job is to find the best candidates for their client (the employer)."

They are not finding the best jobs for their clients if they have a bums on seat mentality. In this sense I am speaking mainly of the bread and butter business which comes from temporary contractors.

The biggest mistake these recruiters make is in forgetting that candidates are 'clients' too - without them you have no business. If a consultant has an expectation that a temp will just take any old job that comes along regardless of interest or experience and then punishes them later by not referring - that is an a failure of duty of care in my opinion. This just makes good business sense.

I can tell you that the ideology might be finding the best candidate for the role but the practice in overworked and stressed agencies the reality is far from that.

Indeed they are not the CES but if they accept contracts from the government to place the unemployed they have a duty of care to those 'clients' as well. This may well be the biggest argument against outsourcing to the private sector - the lack of a holistic approach to the candidates they are being paid to find jobs for.

The only profession worse than HR is PR. Or perhaps Marketing.

Pelican wrote: "if they accept contracts from the government to place the unemployed they have a duty of care to those 'clients' as well."

Absolutely, in fact it turns the tables completely. But that's very different to contingent recruitment, it's almost like an outplacement service.

Pelican also wrote: "I can tell you that the ideology might be finding the best candidate for the role but the practice in overworked and stressed agencies the reality is far from that."

I know this is the case in *some* recruitment companies, but definitely not all. The worst culprits are likely to be the larger firms who's staff are driven by stupid KPIs which focus on a 'numbers game' rather than providing a quality service to both clients (who pay the bills) and the candidates. If you're a client and you get a bunch of resumes for poorly matched candidates on a Friday afternoon, you'll know you are dealing with someone driven by KPIs.

The more professional recruitment firms, which are often the smaller, specialist firms, take a much longer term view and a quality approach, because they know from experience that candidates often become clients. Some of them also simply feel they should treat people how they would like to be treated.

In recent years there has been a trend for large employers to build their own internal recruitment function, usually by attracting recruiters from the recruitment agencies. The problem is, in many cases they're hiring the duds, including people with a bad attitude towards job seekers. It's been trained into them by the "body shop" agencies who play the numbers game and treat candidates as a commodity. These people view the candidates as their product rather than viewing their recruitment services as the product.

However, at the end of the day, no matter what you think of the recruitment industry, it is essentially a product of the HR departments it serves as clients. It's a bit of a vicious circle really.

actually HR is on a par with law and financial planning as occupations lacking in integrity

Recruiter Daily, 4 December 2008

"Only "loser" recruiters accept a candidate's salary expectation at
face value, according to recruitment trainer Greg Savage.

"In today's lead article he provides a script that you can tailor to squash
candidates' salary expectations ..."

That sums up HR.

That's a stupid view (Greg Savage's). Fair enough if a candidate's salary expectations are unrealistic, but there's no point in persuading them to accept a lower package otherwise. If you con a candidate into taking a package they're not really 100% happy with it's a pretty bad way to start a new job. But then Savage is a long time commercial recruiter who's primary focus is making placements. Unfortunately there are too many commercial recruiters out there who continually try to fit square pegs in round holes. It's happening with internal recruiters as well now, I've heard of people turning up for an interview with an employer and being interviewed for a different position from the one they applied for. It's difficult to know if this is down to the recruiter or someone more senior, but it's the height of arrogance on the employer's part (of course it happens with external recruiters as well).

I should also point out that some companies (such as a big Australian phone company beginning with O), pay their internal recruiters performance bonuses as though they were working in an agency. This is a dangerous approach, because it may encourage internal recruiters to take a short term view, just as a lot of agency recruiters do. At least with an agency recruiter there is almost always a replacement guarantee, which will make them think twice before trying to force someone into a job they're not suited to, because ultimately it will impact on their bonus/commission. But for internal recruiters there is probably no personal remuneration downside if the new hire leaves after 5 months.

One other important point to remember, either when making comparisons between HR and recruitment agencies, or when hiring internal recruiters - external/agency recruiters are NOT HR people, they are a completely different animal with very different drivers.

Clown is too kind a word die this author. Probably got his admin person to write it for hi anyway, as they do.

Yes, HR has some morons running them in some places. But they are actually responding to Minister's requests, always.

This author bags the processing functions but makes no mention of lowsalary, no career path, training and all the usual things that allow someone to become competent.

HR is always the place organisations dump those staff that fail elsewhere and the HR staff have to carry them and their incompetence. For years.

HR staff do not spend all their time modelling, no. Rather they spend it doing work. Like paying people, procesing entiitlements, talking to people with problems re their entitlements and, inevitably, their entire personal history. You know, actual work?

These same staff are required to produce statistics out of what are usually automated systems but actually require a lot of manual processing and banging round pegs into square holes as the Executive will not spend the money to keep the system up to date with legislative change or even to allow accurate reporting. Then they blame HR for rubbish reports. Surprise.

How do I know this? I spent a long time implementing automated systems for organistaions across Australia who were all gung ho at the start but their eyes popped out of their heads when you told them they had to be maintained. Thick as two planks, just like this authot.