Discussion on:

Dirty little secrets of HR

We're all adults and professionals and some of us don't play nicely, even in HR.
And remember, Gentle Reader, HR works for the company, not the candidate. And when the candidate becomes the fellow employee, HR STILL works for the company.

Were would the honoured company be without the employee?
And where would a large bit of HR be without candidates?

Your remarks only show that this blog has a point.

HR may work for "THE COMPANY", but they have THEIR OWN agenda-which inevitably is to increase their power and minimize their effort.

After years of dealing with these folks, I think they are selected for sociopathic tendencies-in the words of Scott Adams: "like lawyers, but without the charm and verbal skills".

how f'ing crap they are.....

Though I've got to say get the interviewer to do most of the talking is one of my favourite manouevers.

As an HR Practitioner & Career Strategist, the truth may hurt...as a career coach first and foremost is, relationships and networking matter a lot...in most cases it is who you know...we are all connected...that's why companies pay employees for referrals...if you are good, they want to know others like you. HR staff has been slashed like everything else...going through 500 resumes for one job is grueling. It's like trying to find one missing period in code... but when you find it...it's celebration time. Yes, your resume has to stand out but not with colour but with substance...how closely do you match the criteria? In an interview, the more prepared you are the better. It's like an exam, the better prepared you are, the higher your score. Always impress the recruiter with what you know about their company, their problems and how you as the expert are the answer they have been looking for. Communication is key, in your resume, in your handshake, in your clothes and grooming appearance. It all matters! As for salary, always know your worth as a skilled professional,in your profession and in your industry. Chances are a programmer can request more in a technology industry than potentially in retail. As for the last bullet point..this HR comment comes from the company not having effective performance management and letting the slackers hang around and pull everyone down. This person hates their job..too bad for them...because true HR professionals don't allow this to happen and if they can't have impact on performance results they go somewhere where they can.

Lotte Struwing
President
Lasting Solutions HR Consulting & Coaching

Lotte, your comment was very helpful and encouraging! Thank you

I always knew HR was there to screen you out, but the honesty in this article is just unbelievable. There are laws against some of this stuff.

In the end, two can play at that game.

AV

But you see AV, laws won't really change this...people can obey the letter of the law while very nicely violating its spirit.

The only way to combat this as an individual job seeker is to simply be the best you can be and let the chips and rewards fall where they may. We are all up against the bad aspects of our human nature, that's why we need God's help to get through life.

Oh, and a little humor helps too: knowing what we know now, can you imagine what it must be like for an HR person seeking a position in HR????

HR usually has quick access to the Legal Department...

Many are the times that HR is looking for a long list of talents that are incompatible with each other. They look for a COBOL/Java person. A person with 20 years of COBOL will not have 5 years of Java experience. Or 10 years CICS and 5 years Unix experience. One time they asked me for 5+ years of Java Experience and Java had only been widely available for 4 years.

Actually, I was a CICS systems programmer for 10 years, and have been a Unix Systems Administrator for 7 years. Just sayin'...

Still, you're correct. In my experience, we try to avoid HR as much as possible when hiring. We certainly don't let them screen resumes if we can help it.

COBOL/JAVA possible, CICS/UNIX possible ... any combination within a job is possible. And programming skills especially are transferrable.

But there are all kinds of examples where they ask for two seperate incompatable jobs e.g. Director of PMO with 5 years hands on JAVA. ... sorry not going to happen. (at the time, PMOs had been around roughly 10 years, and Java roughly 5 years ... would have had to have been a director of PMO and then downgraded to programmer ... VP level to grunt level. And then hiring for Director of PMO.)

And all kinds of NBL positions ... (5 years of JE2 which was 2 years old at time).

Or the just plain duhh jobs ... 20 different programming languages with average 5 years experience each, 4 languages and willing to accept minimum wage. My favorite is PMP with 1-2 years experience (PMP requires either 3 or 5 years minimum experience).

If I am emailed by a HR company offering me a job way below my level of experience especially, I usually either delete it or write a short reply telling them to stop being such wankers. The market is good at the moment for IT and hiring generally here in Oz. I don't apply to jobs advertised by HR companies and have no trouble dealing directly with employers or IT professionals. I regard HR companies as parasitic timewasters, as do a lot of employers in IT.

I try to write sincere replies of appreciation, even if I'm not interested. I let them know what I am (generally) doing and ask them to keep me in mind for other opportunities. If I can point them to someone who may help, I do...

As a quiet and gentle person, this is one very easy way for me to practice "networking," and I've been in contact with some recruiters for years as a result. Someday there will be an opportunity at just the time I need one.

HR has to weed out the resume inflation and outright liars; that may have been a trick question (even if Joe HR was clueless at first, the first five people to catch that glitch taught him that factoid - & *how* they told him revealed their interpersonal WIS rating). I agree with your main point, though.

I have seen several ads that asked for at least one year of experience with Windows 7 while it was still in beta.

And they certainly don't understand technicians of any level. Too often we are seen as glorified handymen who learned our "skill" or "trade" from some government training program. Few people not similarly employed grasp the complexities of this kind of work, and can rely on nothing more than a prepared list of irrelevant questions. Your answers may or may not be helpful, Most likely not. The interviewer is left with the standard questions he or she might ask a salesman.

As a recruiter, you are often asked to recruit for skills you don't understand, managers being unwilling or unavailable to recruit for those skills, and corporations often assign recruiters all types of positions. Use your best communication skills to help the recruiter understand what you do and how it relates to the position. It increases your chances of landing the job by at least 100% and you've probably made a good contact who will remember you. Help us help you!

I suspect that you missed the point of the comment.
I have seen postings for positions where you are to contact the company HR department to apply, asking for impossible to meet requirements.
[ most recent, 15 years AJAX experience, when it has barely been out for 5 ]

Sometimes it's the HR department's policy to require a certain number of year experience, and THEY change the requirements to fit the policy. That is the idiocy that proves that HR doesn't understand I.T.

When it's an outside recruiting company, you have to work with the requirements given to you. If the client HR department put impossible requirements to meet their policy, you get the problem of looking for the impossible.

I actually politely informed a recruiting company about one such, and got a really rude response back. [ I emailed them asking how someone could possibly have 10 years php experience when php had only been out for 4 years ] guess which recruiting company will never get me responding again?

It's an extra item for any recruiting firm to deal with, but if they check on how LONG a technology has been available before actively looking for people on a position, they can catch the impossible requirements and make themselves look better.

Problem is ...
1) most recruiters last less than six months.
2) more than a few recruiters are 22 year old girls who are afraid to admit they're in over their heads.
3) the organization for most recruiting companies ensures that they can't learn anything
4) the organization for most recruiting companies ensures that even if they do know something they'll never be able to train the person taking the order
5) most recruiters are too busy to care.

on the other hand when I've run into someone who was open (usually an independent and usually older and very experienced) it has worked out to both our advantages.

Once upon a time before people became "resources" like desks and computers HR were know as "personnel" which at least gave the impression that they treated you like a person rather than a stapler or piece of carbon paper. The best day I had was when the company I worked with realised that they didn't need two thirds of the HR staff, got them to write a "quality manual" which they put on the web and then sacked superfluous people.

Before "personnel" I can remember when they were called "Welfare" i.e. they were there to look after the welfare of the employees, and perhaps make them more content and productive. I have had a couple of sad occasions where I had to go to HR to try and get help for a member of my staff for personal reasons. They were unable to help and I had to go round them to the senior management and appeal to what was right, in both cases they did the right thing, despite HR.

and now they are still in that type of job except they need to leave their integrity (if they ever had any) in the parking lot.
They are useless.

nevermind!

An interesting read from Readers Digest. This TechRepublic blog would have been much better had Ms. Bowers also provided source for the original RD article.
Some of the comments are not surprising at all, unlike the comment about not hiring parents. Wonder what HR say about the long term unemployed seeking jobs?

You'll be telling us you read them all next.

I got a chnace to work in Kuwait the other day, double my salary, as long as I have 2-3 years in
Maintaining military vehicles...

In the main you are your own worst enemies.

One of the great disasters of American business in the last 30 or so years is the Human Resources Department. Generally noted as the home of business bureaucrat dolts who know nothing about managing anything productive. If I EVER created a company again that became large enough, it would have a Personnel Department. HR people destroy businesses. (File with Six Sigma idiots.)

Like any job, there are good people in HR and bad people in HR. Before I worked for myself, I stayed around 2 years in a job and when HR promises never came through, I moved on. Except for the last company where I stayed 10 years because HR bothered to find out what made me tick - new challenges - and made sure I had one every 2 years. As a result, they got the best out of me.
The job interview was interesting - the technical question was so obscure I could not answer on the spot (I asked the engineer afterwards why they hired me - apparently it was because I didn't try to make an answer up) and the psychologocial profiling showed a score close to 0 on one characteristic, but HR explained for that particular role, it meant that I was nor easily put off and was actually a reasonable match.
Generally speaking, the best companies I have worked for had good HR, and vice-versa. Since HR, as much as your technical expertise, will control your fate in a company, look at how HR treat you if you get to interview, as it will give you a bit of an insight into how you will get on in the company.

Couldn't agree more, they (HR) think they own the company and its resources, which themselves too are resources of the organization to which they hire people to work for.

After "resources" they moved onto managing "human remains", and now they are working on "human residues"

In Sweden, an employee is call "a personel" (that's the singular), but then the police have done HR one better and call anyone they talk to other than another policeman "a general public" (also in the singular). It sounds just as strange in Swedish as it does in English and linguists say "It o.k. because you can't disallow anything generally used in a language by a native speaker - by definition it must be correct usage." Even linguists here have "loose morals". (Actually Swedes don't actually have loose morals - that's a big myth--but the linguists do!)

I recall having a frank conversation with a senior HR person who admitted that this role is "just a front for the management".

Great post as always Toni, great to hear some truthful opinions on the hiring process. I can relate to the majority of this having just spent two months searching my behind off for a job.
I also have a younger brother-in-law who is 17 and looking for work. Can anyone offer opinions on this- both my parents and my in-laws are of the generation where popping in to an employer and dropping off a CV is seen as bold and confident but I agree its kinda creepy/desperate. Should I encourage him to use LinkedIn and submit CVs electronically instead.
Thanks
Rob

Is that they're all different. That one HR IDIOT might think of dropping off your resume as 'creepy' (that HR person is obviously anti-social and a little 'off in the head', but his job is working with people?!?), but another may still see it as bold, confident, and shows that you're willing to do some legwork. It's the same with how you dress for interviews, spelling errors on resumes, how strong your handshake is... Unfortunately, your age DOES make a difference, in the HR person's (and everyone's) HEAD. "Just another young punk looking to laze around on our time..."

But you won't know that until AFTERWARDS. Sometimes, a lot about getting a job (where you don't have an inside track) is just luck.

Your brother's job search will be different than yours, but similar rules apply. Spread your resume/CV to a LOT of places. As many as you think of, and then 3x more than THAT. You'd be surprised how many openings aren't listed, but arise from someone 'hearing about your resume from a friend that knew I'd be looking for someone'. Dropping it off in person (make sure it's well-written and professional-looking) while looking professional (cotton pants, belt, deck shoes (semi-dressy) and a nice cotton shirt should do the trick, NOT blue-jeans and sneakers unless the job is blue-collar industrial) should do the trick. Ask to speak with the manager if you can. Having them put a face to a name rather than being 'just another resume in the file' can make all the difference in the world. The first impression is the most crucial.

In the interview, dress pants, dress shirt and tie is the rule unless you're EXPLICITLY TOLD OTHERWISE, and even then you usually won't go wrong (unless it's something like an Armani suit ). Then it's all about how you pass yourself off to the interviewers, how well you answer their questions...and luck.

Afterwards, follow-up once or twice, although in my experience noone will ever tell you why you WEREN'T hired, even though they're supposed to. I, personally, reapplied to a position a year later, and when I'd told them I had applied the year previous while the interviewer had his face screwed up over my resume he explained, "Why didn't they hire you THEN?!?" A friend of mine was having troubles finding a job, and was depressed after not hearing anything back even after a follow-up call. My advice to him was to go in person and ask to see the manager. While meeting with him, the manager pulled the resume from his files, looked it over, and said, "Fine. You're hired!" Which kick-started his now very-successful career.

You make your own luck, but it still plays a big part.

Have you heard this joke which may or may not be true:

One manager to his mentor, as he is screening resumes says: "Here's a very important thing about finding the right person for the job..." Then the manager divides the pile of resumes in half and tosses one entire pile into the trash, then says: "...You never want to hire un-lucky people!"

Lucky Indeed!!!

I disagree with wearing dress pants, dress shirt, and tie to an interview. I will *never* work anywhere that has such a dress code and would probably come across as uncomfortable in the interview if so attired (which would be accurate but due to the clothing rather than the interview).

I was told by an HR manager with 40 years experience that he would never accept any CV (or resume) if the first line said CV (or resume). He told me that he believed the sender of such a document thought he was stupid and didn't know what he was looking at. He also said that if his wife had declined his bedroom advances the night before, every CV or resume with a spelling mistake went in the bin...

Before HR discuss Salary Interviewer(Technical guy) talks to you on Salary. Interesting thing now is if you put down paper HR starts negotiating.

I think some people feel that HR is there to help the employee when in fact this is a facade and HR is there to enforce company policy and the law. As soon as you get a problem with your manager you will find out.

High Risk!!!!!!!!!

Back in the 'good old days' when they thought they were the Personnel Department (and everybody had some military connection) their name in the 'real' world was Anti-personnel Dept. (as in Anti-personnel Mine, not to be too subtle).

Big Deal, so's 99% of the rest of any organization (including most of IT). I can live with that. I DO wish though that they stopped sending people to compulsory "leadership training".........