this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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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.