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.