Some time ago, doubtless coming in large part from light-weight bureaucrats in Brussels, we began increasing 'workers rights', such as the 48 hour maximum working week, 20 days holiday, temporary rights the same as full time etc etc.
All very laudable and not thought through. Heh! Bureaucrats don't get big salaries and generous pensions to actually do any work! So someone had to be responsible for overseeing all this raft of new legislation and that meant HR. It meant giving more power to HR too. Because now they could sit in a board meeting, listening to all the solid logic of how the company was going to move forward, expand, recover from a crisis, whatever, and at the end the HR harpie (it has traditionally been a female industry, but not exclusively) pipes up 'you can't do that'.
Like some Fifth-Columnist, or communist commissar watching over the generals and their adherence to ideology, HR wield power for their own aggrandisement. Due to this new, high-powered existence, the recruitment of staff, a key function of HR even after they morphed from being 'Personnel' has been deemed beneath them and unimportant.
Indeed many companies have taken to hiring people from recruitment agencies to operate this function (which was good news for recruiters as, due to the changes coming through from HR, many agencies were going to the wall). They had to operate to strict rules, set by HR though.
The internet has added to the problem as well. HR talk now about direct access to candidates, because they can put their vacancies online. Usually, this means using a 'job board' such as Monster, Jobsite or Indeed, which is much cheaper than the old days of paper ads in specialist magazines.
But even then, particularly for large or specialist companies, the cost wasn't the main issue. It was the volume of responses such an ad generated that was the problem. Now it seems, the volume can be handled. How? Well, the process is basically automated.
If the hiring Manager has given HR a set of skills that he (gender non-specific) is looking for then that is the entire basis of the search. No latitude, no initiative, no actual interest in the role. (Or doing the best for the Manager and the company by getting the best and right candidate).
The objective is to move a piece of paper from one side of the desk to the other. From the In-tray to the Out-tray. In many of the highly specialised roles I recruited for, the skill set was often the starting point, a marker. I had a client who got really excited when I presented him with a CV of a robotics person. The company made emissions sensors - figure that one out, but apparently there was a crossover where this robotics knowledge mattered.
If I hadn't been allowed to talk to the Managers (and in this case the MD) I would have been skills matching and so, quite often wasting their and my time. But HR won't let you talk to hiring Managers, because it undermines their power base. And this attitude has led to companies not getting the talent they need, retarded development of skills across industry and less productivity.
But it has also led to unnecessary unemployment (HR also actively pursue policies such as age-discrimination, but packaged as a rational decision based on future-proofing and the belief that understanding technology is the preserve of the young - all ideology, not fact).
It has led to a 37 year old PA with years of experience being unable to get a job and as a consequence, killing herself. Collateral damage of the need for HR to wield power.
Many years ago, a retired and frustrated HR Director told me that, whilst recruiters refer to HR as 'recruitment prevention officers', he felt a more appropriate epithet was 'the contraceptive on the prick of progress'. Quite.
Showing posts with label HR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HR. Show all posts
Monday, 25 September 2017
Monday, 21 January 2013
Character
A successful head teacher says that character is the defining element of a child's upbringing. With a good character a child will do better than merely his IQ suggests and I agree. The two things that come out of a proper university education is learning how to learn and character. Most students go to university to doss around though. It is why Tony Blair wanted more poorly educated people to go there; it wouldn't make any difference but it sounded good.
The problem is this though; the people who run the country don't respect good character. Tony Blair as Prime Minister? Ian Blair as Met police commissioner? Any number of bank executives? Virtually every HR person?
These days, companies hire based on tick boxes. I know of a case where an employee was asked to stand in for a manager in a branch of a big company. He did well; the unit made more money, had more clients, the staff got a bonus for the first time ever. His boss was very pleased and asked for him to be confirmed in the position. HR however, checked his personal file and said he couldn't possibly do the job, he hadn't been on the relevant training course. Oh dear, a box un-ticked.
In fact, the HR department is like a fifth column, forcing decisions on employment and company direction that has no bearing on the well being and performance of the company (or the employees) but on maintaining and increasing their power and enacting the ever increasing raft of rules and regulations. They are dependent on Political Correctness for their power and so are an unwitting Left wing invasion of business.
For HR, finding the right candidate for a department head is tiresome and boring. They therefore require these Managers to fill out a standardised form, that they can then use as the basis of their tickbox recruitment effort. Any candidate failing to meet every aspect of the 'specification' is discarded. Good judgement and an understanding of the actual requirement is anathema to them.
You can see this in the breaking into two of HR and recruitment within many companies and when they hire the services of recruitment consultancies they require compliance. No more the passionate advance from a recruiter of substance who, understanding the real needs of the business and having taken the time to get to know the qualities a candidate can bring. HR will not accept the approach unless all the boxes are ticked/
And one of the boxes is a Degree. Often, it doesn't matter what the qualification is; a 2:2 in Social Work is fine to work in a bank, or an engineering plant. It reaffirms the 'hard work' put in by the HR person in their own development including the largely pointless CIPD 'qualification'. Here it is more appropriate to read that it should be a sign of 'qualified approval' rather than achievement.
It is part of a vogue for sham qualifications and 'standards'. When you see a company boasting that it has achieved 'Quality status' such as BS5750 (or EN29000 or ISO9000) it doesn't mean the firm or it's products are of a definable quality. It means their paperwork systems tracked what happens, checked every so often by people with a vested interest in making sure as many companies have the rating as possible, to encourage acceptance of the standard and hence more sales.
In days of yore, a help desk used to be good at its job or it wasn't. You could tell by the response of those with which it interacted. It isn't rocket science. But then came ITIL. Another pile of nonsense for someone to make money out of. So now a company can boast that all of the idiots you have to talk to, who have no idea or care what your problem is, are ITIL certified.
You want to inject some dynamism into our economy? Go back to letting department Managers hire the talent they need. It is out there and it probably cannot get a job if it doesn't meet the enforced criteria of HR.
The problem is this though; the people who run the country don't respect good character. Tony Blair as Prime Minister? Ian Blair as Met police commissioner? Any number of bank executives? Virtually every HR person?
These days, companies hire based on tick boxes. I know of a case where an employee was asked to stand in for a manager in a branch of a big company. He did well; the unit made more money, had more clients, the staff got a bonus for the first time ever. His boss was very pleased and asked for him to be confirmed in the position. HR however, checked his personal file and said he couldn't possibly do the job, he hadn't been on the relevant training course. Oh dear, a box un-ticked.
In fact, the HR department is like a fifth column, forcing decisions on employment and company direction that has no bearing on the well being and performance of the company (or the employees) but on maintaining and increasing their power and enacting the ever increasing raft of rules and regulations. They are dependent on Political Correctness for their power and so are an unwitting Left wing invasion of business.
For HR, finding the right candidate for a department head is tiresome and boring. They therefore require these Managers to fill out a standardised form, that they can then use as the basis of their tickbox recruitment effort. Any candidate failing to meet every aspect of the 'specification' is discarded. Good judgement and an understanding of the actual requirement is anathema to them.
You can see this in the breaking into two of HR and recruitment within many companies and when they hire the services of recruitment consultancies they require compliance. No more the passionate advance from a recruiter of substance who, understanding the real needs of the business and having taken the time to get to know the qualities a candidate can bring. HR will not accept the approach unless all the boxes are ticked/
And one of the boxes is a Degree. Often, it doesn't matter what the qualification is; a 2:2 in Social Work is fine to work in a bank, or an engineering plant. It reaffirms the 'hard work' put in by the HR person in their own development including the largely pointless CIPD 'qualification'. Here it is more appropriate to read that it should be a sign of 'qualified approval' rather than achievement.
It is part of a vogue for sham qualifications and 'standards'. When you see a company boasting that it has achieved 'Quality status' such as BS5750 (or EN29000 or ISO9000) it doesn't mean the firm or it's products are of a definable quality. It means their paperwork systems tracked what happens, checked every so often by people with a vested interest in making sure as many companies have the rating as possible, to encourage acceptance of the standard and hence more sales.
In days of yore, a help desk used to be good at its job or it wasn't. You could tell by the response of those with which it interacted. It isn't rocket science. But then came ITIL. Another pile of nonsense for someone to make money out of. So now a company can boast that all of the idiots you have to talk to, who have no idea or care what your problem is, are ITIL certified.
You want to inject some dynamism into our economy? Go back to letting department Managers hire the talent they need. It is out there and it probably cannot get a job if it doesn't meet the enforced criteria of HR.
Friday, 3 August 2012
Recruitment - The Waste
The economy is in a mess and it seems it is mainly the politicians who are struggling to cope, industry just gets on with it's job. Clearly the issue is between the pillocks in parliament and the hordes of useless and costly bureaucrats 13 years of Labour has saddled us with. Generally a Conservative government comes in to clear it up, but today we don't have that, we have a coalition and the Conservative bit is run by David Cameron! Disastrous.
But that is not quite the end of it, something has infected of workplace, in the private sector. Ultimately it's roots can be traced back to Left ideology but it has taken on something of a disguise and pretends to some respectability. It is a branch of Political Correctness I suppose and is an adjunct of the red tape that is strangling business.
What I speak of is the poor state of recruitment in this country. Recruitment agencies are a raw barometer of the way recruitment is carried out as it just reacts to circumstance. So, whilst not without blame it, as an industry is just doing what it has to, to survive.
The real problem lies in the power of Human Resources. This powerful political group in any company can be a friend or foe both to the economy and it's own employer. Originally the 'Personnel' department looked after the employee side of a business, making sure relations were handled within the law and maintaining records of disciplinary matters etc. The department was important but served the company and the hiring Managers.
But as legislation affecting employment increased, whether as a result of bored politicians looking for something to do or the meddling of the EU, so the nature of the beast changed. Personnel became Human Resources, the better to reflect their new found power within a company. No executive dared go against HR, nor seek to make changes without their approval. HR pushed a number of agendas, all legally based but ultimately damaging.
No HR person concerns themselves with the utility of any measure they insist upon, nor its impact. Instead it reflects their importance. And blunt the company they certainly do. I remember a chap who had been a HR Director with a large IT outsourcing company saying his view was that HR was the 'contraceptive on the prick of progress'. A little colourful perhaps, but true nonetheless. Recruiters called them 'recruitment prevention officers'.
This was in the Nineties when the rise of HR was only just starting. As this Left wing based industry undermined its paymasters, so it decided to further extol its importance. Clearly the hiring of staff was a job beneath their dignity, it was little more than a paper exercise, time consuming and of little interest. Worse it seemed to maintain the 'servant' status of their department; it was hived off. HR set up a separate recruitment arm to handle this mundane activity, hiring ex-agency staff.
The recruitment process for HR (whether they handle it themselves or instruct a recruitment section) became ever more bureaucratic. Either the person seeking a job had to fill out a fairly pointless and usually carelessly designed Application Form or a CV would be accepted on its own. These would be received against a published Job Specification that was either written by HR, to conform to their ideas of whom the company should employ, with a nod to any technical qualifications the role may require or they would instruct a hiring manager how to do his own.
The Spec usually contains some 'must haves' which aren't often essential but would be a good pointer. HR give a cursory glance to incoming CV's against these and any lack means it gets no further. The Application Form is worse as it rarely allows the candidate to explain how they are suitable for the job at all. For HR it is just an exercise in getting the paper from one side of the desk to the other.
A hiring Manager chooses his candidates to interview from a pile decided on by HR, who neither understand the job role nor the candidate. They have no interest in acquiring the best candidate, they just want to clear their desk (or Inbox these days).
If a hiring Manager gets to speak to the outside world an entirely different process takes place. Rarely does the actual needs of that Manager match what is published in a Job Spec (indeed good recruitment consultants get a better feel for what the company wants than even the Manager realises, because they talk to other companies with similar needs).
The recruitment of a new employee takes on a whole new dimension and often completely different people get interviewed. This is rare however. And it is the stranglehold that HR have insisted upon on the way people are recruited that has undermined the stength of many UK companies.
Recruitment agencies now rarely bother with the quality of a candidate or suitability, they just box tick (to the delight of HR, who supply the boxes to tick) and send off volumes; something should stick. Needless to say, HR feel this lack of 'targeted' quality in incoming CV's is due to the low quality of recruiters (fast becoming true, due to their actions) and improves their facetious opinion of their own superiority.
It doesn't need to be like this and it is damaging Britain. When you come across a dedicated HR professional, who sees the job very much as supporting the company, it is an absolute delight.
But that is not quite the end of it, something has infected of workplace, in the private sector. Ultimately it's roots can be traced back to Left ideology but it has taken on something of a disguise and pretends to some respectability. It is a branch of Political Correctness I suppose and is an adjunct of the red tape that is strangling business.
What I speak of is the poor state of recruitment in this country. Recruitment agencies are a raw barometer of the way recruitment is carried out as it just reacts to circumstance. So, whilst not without blame it, as an industry is just doing what it has to, to survive.
The real problem lies in the power of Human Resources. This powerful political group in any company can be a friend or foe both to the economy and it's own employer. Originally the 'Personnel' department looked after the employee side of a business, making sure relations were handled within the law and maintaining records of disciplinary matters etc. The department was important but served the company and the hiring Managers.
But as legislation affecting employment increased, whether as a result of bored politicians looking for something to do or the meddling of the EU, so the nature of the beast changed. Personnel became Human Resources, the better to reflect their new found power within a company. No executive dared go against HR, nor seek to make changes without their approval. HR pushed a number of agendas, all legally based but ultimately damaging.
No HR person concerns themselves with the utility of any measure they insist upon, nor its impact. Instead it reflects their importance. And blunt the company they certainly do. I remember a chap who had been a HR Director with a large IT outsourcing company saying his view was that HR was the 'contraceptive on the prick of progress'. A little colourful perhaps, but true nonetheless. Recruiters called them 'recruitment prevention officers'.
This was in the Nineties when the rise of HR was only just starting. As this Left wing based industry undermined its paymasters, so it decided to further extol its importance. Clearly the hiring of staff was a job beneath their dignity, it was little more than a paper exercise, time consuming and of little interest. Worse it seemed to maintain the 'servant' status of their department; it was hived off. HR set up a separate recruitment arm to handle this mundane activity, hiring ex-agency staff.
The recruitment process for HR (whether they handle it themselves or instruct a recruitment section) became ever more bureaucratic. Either the person seeking a job had to fill out a fairly pointless and usually carelessly designed Application Form or a CV would be accepted on its own. These would be received against a published Job Specification that was either written by HR, to conform to their ideas of whom the company should employ, with a nod to any technical qualifications the role may require or they would instruct a hiring manager how to do his own.
The Spec usually contains some 'must haves' which aren't often essential but would be a good pointer. HR give a cursory glance to incoming CV's against these and any lack means it gets no further. The Application Form is worse as it rarely allows the candidate to explain how they are suitable for the job at all. For HR it is just an exercise in getting the paper from one side of the desk to the other.
A hiring Manager chooses his candidates to interview from a pile decided on by HR, who neither understand the job role nor the candidate. They have no interest in acquiring the best candidate, they just want to clear their desk (or Inbox these days).
If a hiring Manager gets to speak to the outside world an entirely different process takes place. Rarely does the actual needs of that Manager match what is published in a Job Spec (indeed good recruitment consultants get a better feel for what the company wants than even the Manager realises, because they talk to other companies with similar needs).
The recruitment of a new employee takes on a whole new dimension and often completely different people get interviewed. This is rare however. And it is the stranglehold that HR have insisted upon on the way people are recruited that has undermined the stength of many UK companies.
Recruitment agencies now rarely bother with the quality of a candidate or suitability, they just box tick (to the delight of HR, who supply the boxes to tick) and send off volumes; something should stick. Needless to say, HR feel this lack of 'targeted' quality in incoming CV's is due to the low quality of recruiters (fast becoming true, due to their actions) and improves their facetious opinion of their own superiority.
It doesn't need to be like this and it is damaging Britain. When you come across a dedicated HR professional, who sees the job very much as supporting the company, it is an absolute delight.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)