Get a job! Not with HR

HR people interviewed me and I interviewed them. Mercifully the business took off. But in the spirit of the New Journalism, I kept on applying for positions, to see what happened.

I had read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bait and Switch, as she reported on the inside story of job hunting in corporate middle America. Her undercover reporting debunked a lot of the pop-psychology, self-help mantras and lonely networking events that unemployed or under employed white collar people are put through.

I met and talked to scores of people in HR as well as people who were coming to me for advice for job hunting strategies, revamping their resumes, co-writing cover letters - the works.

Over a six-month period I wrote 20 job applications and got three interviews. Many of my applications were screened out by Optical Character Recognition scanning technology that HR uses to hunt for key words.

This defeats the purpose of having humans working in recruitment departments. It takes the Human out of HR.

About half of my calls were not returned. More than half the letters I sent were not acknowledged. I had to fight against incorrect information supplied about the terms of employment and salary. If I wanted to make it harder to get a job, I would have employed a HR person.

Not so smart

People who enter HR say things like, “I want to work with people”. Why not be an ambulance driver? HR isn’t about being a do-gooder. It’s about possessing a critical and contemporary understanding of how to get the best and brightest people, how to train them, and keep them and raise the value of the company.

In the Financial Times recently, columnist Luke Johnson sent shockwaves throughout the personnel profession when he described HR as "a burden on the backs of the productive workers".

Johnson, who is also chairman of UK TV station Channel 4, warned that with a recession looming employers would be wise to "clear away a lot of pointless administration”.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, these are the people charged with administering the psychobabble tests.

Psychobabble

TS Eliot once wrote in The Wasteland that “these fragments I shore against my ruins”. HR people do this by resorting to quasi-scientific thinking. Their most common ruse is to parrot reams of statistics - which for the most part they don’t understand - to shore up a self-serving, dodgy proposition.

HR people have co-opted the worst methodological excesses of the social sciences to pigeon-hole candidates for positions.