Personnel Department

The HumanResources People: Please see the Head Custodian about the Janitors that work for him.

So is the problem here with the PersonnelDepartment, or other more general dynamics at work in your organization? Maybe this page would be more useful to readers if it had a more descriptive title.

The page was initially created as a gateway to the JustAnIdiot page. Please look there for the larger dynamics (perhaps you might look at SanitationEngineer also regarding the deletion subject). Specifically, yes, I have problems with companies that think they need a HR dept. As a prospective employee, I want to be interviewed by someone who can understand me (i.e. hopefully, the person to whom I would report -- the one who has use for my skill set). As a prospective employer, I want to be the one screening candidates who would be working for me directly. HR is an unnecessary filter that, as I see it, worries about superficial junk that most of the time has no influence on how well a person might actually perform. -- GeraldLindsly yes, I might as well own up to being the opener of JustAnIdiot ;)

The HR department serving as initial screeners is indeed an AntiPattern. However, HR people do a lot more than that -- candidate screening is a small part of the job. Believe it or not, they actually do a lot of useful things. Spend a few hours taking care of paychecks, insurance claim forms, 401K questions, and the mountains of paperwork associated with your employees, and you'll come to appreciate HR a great deal. Or go work for a medium-size company that needs some HR experts, but has none. -- KrisJohnson

I admit I threw good apples out with the bad there. Is there such a thing as the Accounting Dept nowadays? Payroll / VP Finance? You are absolutely correct that I don't care to handle accounting tasks. Perhaps you see my point though? HR should not handle 'human resources' (potential employees). In a nutshell, we don't need the PersonnelDepartment to manage our set of Personnel either. This should be handled within the hierarchy of who reports to whom. As you stated, they do perform some useful tasks, but my point is that the names/concepts are bogus.

There are two types here. Human Resources are supposed to be specialists in dealing with the human condition. Personnel departments centrally handle all the admin that would otherwise have to be handled by the operational departments. The latter can be easily outsourced as a non-core operation. The former is vital to any business using human capital, but I have yet to see one that works effectively. The problem is that a lot of Personnel Departments try and do Human Resources, thinking that they are one and the same. They are not.

Ok, then, two types: A) Administration. This I can accept. B) 'Human Condition Specialists'? I believe these are known as Ministers.Psychoblitherers certainly cannot conceive how their own mind works, let alone mine.

I can understand the cynicism. To be specialists, HR must understand that each individual is unique and that for maximum effect the organization must be fitted *to the individual*, not the other way around. Unfortunately, most HR is about rough categorization of an individual and then forcing their irregular shape into a round hole.

I'd say what's not automatable about it is certainly outsourceable. It's one department that is never part of the core business yet loves to imagine itself as so.

^5 -- gl

A friend manages the branch of a large national chain of bookstores in a major northern city. He's good at selling books, passionate about his job, popular with his staff. And about to be sacked for "incompatibility" with the job.

What this means is that he's unable to meet the arbitrary profitability targets set by his senior management (who work for the parent company, a huge international media conglomerate, who don't understand that bookshops don't work the same way that record shops -- their core business -- do).

What the senior managers have done is to make underperformance not a performance management issue, involving support, training and such, but rather a disciplinary one. Involving the personnel department.

What they did was to launch a "competition": various strenuous goals for improvement were set, and prizes would be awarded for the book-sellers, shop staffs and managers who showed the most improvement. Seems like a nice way to motivate the staff, yes? After a few weeks it was revealed that these "targets" were in fact mandatory minima, and that the prize would be getting to keep your job.

So, my friend's shop scored in the high seventies (percent) against these targets. Not as good as some, but a lot higher that most. Result: my friend is given a few weeks to try again and get the store up into the 90's. Oh, and is placed on a final written warning and so at the same time has to appear before a series of investigatory and disciplinary panels to justify keeping his job.

What adds the little surreal touch is that, when a branch manager is up before one of these boards for being no good at their job, a peer (one of the other managers) comes along to observe and ensure fair play. This other manager, of course, very likely also being on a final written warning for incompetence, too. And when he faces his panel, another manager comes along, who very likely is also...

Update

He was sacked, appealed, lost the appeal and appealed against that. Having still not heard a result of that second appeal, some weeks after the fact, he's requested a tribunal. In fact, the personnel department still haven't sent his copy of the appeal minutes, and they have lost the form he needs to make an insurance claim to get his mortgage paid. This sequence has been happening a lot, and the company has been losing tribunals, so it might be that news of another one on the way will result in a reassessment of the (unannounced) result of the second appeal. Meanwhile, some middle managers have been sacked under the same scheme, their disciplinary offence being to have not sacked enough branch managers on concocted disciplinary issues. The senior managers who devised this policy in the first place have themselves been sacked since they were, usually reliable sources suggest, caught sniffing their lunch on the way to a business meeting.