HR - What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

Human Resources recruitment agencies are parasites sucking money out of both the public and private service. For years now I have been imploring CEO’s to pluck these bloodsuckers off the body corporate.

Many are simply management lackeys. As Woody Allen once said, they are “a sham of a mockery of a sham”. I should know. I run a HR business.

HR planning is like a ritual rain dance. It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. Moreover, much advice related to HR planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.

Australian National University recently carried out a large study of employers who were advertising on the Internet for entry-level hospitality, data entry and customer service jobs.

They sent out 4,000 fake job applications and changed only the racial origin of the supposed applicants’ names. How the researchers ever got their idea past an ethics committee is another matter. But it’s a great example of real world social research and they should be congratulated.

When they tallied the results, they found that those with a Chinese name had a one in five chance of getting a job interview compared to Anglo-Saxon names, who had a one in three chance. The resumes were identical apart from the ethnic origins of the names.

One of the ANU researchers, Dr Andrew Leigh, said in The Age recently that it was clear that employers discriminated on the basis of the racial origin of applicant’s names.

“There is no other reasonable interpretation of our results,” he said.

Dr Leigh and his team have reconfirmed a fact that we already know. It’s easier to get a job if you’re a true blue, dinky-die, Skippy-the-Kangaroo Aussie.

Why do we tolerate this blatant racism? HR boffins say that they are only doing the bidding of their bosses and that they have no power over the selection process. They are simply lickspittle administrators.

Get real. They took on the job knowing full well that when the going gets tough, it’s their job to smile as they hand out the redundancy notices. Citing the Nuremberg Defence only compounds their sins.

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his are the same - that’s why management hire HR people.

Why are people in their 40s, 50s and 60s finding it hard to get a job?

It’s because of HR people. They are Lord High Executioners running around in their personal Mikado chopping out CV’s of applicants who are past 40. They are employment gatekeepers with the conscience of Golem.

On AM (ABC radio) recently a 64-year old man, Noel Buchanan has spent the last three years looking for a job.

“It’s very debilitating to progressively realise despite one’s education and previous work history, that simply because you’re past 45, you’re past your used-by-date,” he said.

HR hacks fob off the old, the ethnic and over qualified with fatuous comments such as “you’re too experienced”, or “you’re wrong for the culture”.

They use the word “culture” a lot. It’s a slippery term and can be applied to just about anything from organic chemistry to organisational psychology. The term “organisational culture” sounds good in a textbook but it’s a pretty meaningless catch-all term coined by academics.

HR people use organisational culture in its pejorative sense. They implement psychometric testing (a fraud) to avoid hiring people who would create a bad organisational culture. I’ll tell you what’s bad. Seeing 10,000 jobs go offshore to India and China. That’s bad.

My stepfather flew 30 bomber missions in Western Europe in World War 11 with a group of people he met in a pub. They were looking for a captain and he needed a navigator and crew. The only thing they had in common was a love of beer but they worked together as a team because their lives depended on it. Not a focus group, CV, interview or psychometric test in sight.

HR people think we’re idiots. Their contempt for commonsense, for workplace justice, fairness, equanimity in the face of pernicious management decisions, is insulting.

Anyone who has worked in the public sector will recognise this next example.

Charlie X saw the perfect public sector job and spent most of a weekend going through the lengthy and often banal selection criteria. Only to find three weeks later that his dream job has been snapped up by an internal appointee.

This isn’t news. Many advertised jobs are unofficially earmarked for incumbents long before they reach the “position vacant” section of the newspaper. Indeed, both public and private HR hacks hire other “name” HR companies to do their short listing and when it comes to selection, they hire the person they’ve earmarked all along.

I’m no lawyer but doesn’t this make the HR agency complicit in a fraud? It possibly would if it was against the law.

Under this nefarious practice you can kiss any notion of merit under the Public Service Act (1999) goodbye. The notion of merit per se in a meritocracy such as we run in both the public and private sectors needs revising when HR enters the room.

HR has its own gravity and it drags people down to the lowest common denominator. It is the butterfly-killing jar for our best and brightest minds.

HR people say to me, Malcolm, why do you hate us so much? I don’t, but I take exception when young people come to me straight from school and say they can’t get a job because they don’t have any work experience, or when Mums can’t get back in to the workforce after looking after the kids for three or four years.

I take exception when I read position descriptions and selection criteria that are written by people who clearly have not been in touch with the client or a dictionary.

You’d think that HR would be on the ball regarding bullying, as it’s potentially a criminal act. The following is an old post on OLO from someone who has tangled with HR and paid the price:

To think People Management (that's what they're called in Education, Science and Training) is there to support 'workers' is wrong. They act as a buffer. They are totally pro-management. The union advocate was told that he had no voice.

Bullying public service management lie. And they lie in a language that carries authority because HR are mere stooges of management.

Many years ago I was an acting head of school at RMIT and I had a staff member who was being tormented by a student who had some behavioural issues. I called HR and they said, and I quote, “staff have to put up with the cut and thrust of student problems”.

To be fair, the university solicitor and the registrar weren’t much help either. They adopted the finger in the ears pose (singing “la, la, la”). One Friday afternoon (why do these things always happen on Fridays?) the student attacked the lecturer and had to be pulled off. I called HR and they said “can it wait until Monday?”

I called the police and had the student charged. I then called my lawyer and within 40 minutes had an appointment in his office and went through the OHS Act and charges for harassment and assault.

If in doubt, act.

Ask yourself, how did your nation, my nation, our nation, become like this? Where did we go so wrong that we allowed a profession to rise up like Goya’s painting of “Saturn devouring his son”; a profession that makes decisions based on a person’s ethnicity or age?

HR’s time has come, and gone.