That HR are useless in whatever setting they’re in?

[MiffyMiffed]

Bear in mind, that people don’t usually have to deal with HR as a new starter all that often, unless they’re serial job jumpers.

I started a new job for NHS 4 years ago and it took HR 6 weeks to process my paperwork. I had to actually ring them up and tell them I was starting on so and so date so send the paperwork to my new manager ASAP. They managed to do it in 5 mins after the phone call. 🙄.

Now I’ve got a new job, different setting, in a university. Again, absolutely useless. I’ve been emailed forms to fill out and send back. I emailed on the first day to confirm whether they wanted them back by email. No reply. So filled out forms online and sent them back. 3 weeks later I’m being told to post them. Then I’m told to scan a picture and send it. Next day I’m told everything has to be by hand. Tomorrow I’ll be told something else.

I’M SO FRUSTRATED.

Worked in companies with both brilliant and hopeless HR departments.
The problem is, unless you work in a place where the whole activity is essentially HR (say, recruiting etc), it is one of the support functions which, if done well, is totally invisible. You notice HR only if it is NOT done well. Similar to office cleaning in that respect, you never appreciate it - until you start sticking to your work desk.

In every job where I was a line manager, HR were the utter bane of my life. We used to call them Human Remains in some of the NHS organisations where I worked.

I think I've met maybe 4 competent HR managers in my lifetime (and I have had a LOT of jobs for various reasons, mainly geographical moves). Many of them were downright liars and most of them, especially in recent years, are so focused on mindfulness and "staff engagement" and whatever other stupid trendy new bright idea senior managers come up with on their away-days that they seem to forget about the actual staff and that it doesn't matter how much pink and fluffy niceness you toss about, if you haven't got enough staff for the job/the right staff for the job it's all utterly irrelevant.

I've been fortunate enough to experience great HR support in almost all of my 20 year working career. Done well it's a massive help. The bulk of supposed hr problems I have encountered were almost always due to incompetent line managers and nothing to do with actual hr staff.

All the hr depts I've worked with seem to have a couple of stars surrounded by incompetence. So frustrating!

it doesn't matter how much pink and fluffy niceness you toss about, if you haven't got enough staff for the job/the right staff for the job it's all utterly irrelevant.

I have a budget for wellbeing. The majority of it will be given to departments, particularly nursing, where staffing levels have been set without inflating to cover annual leave/sickness etc. There’s no point me telling staff they should be taking breaks/annual leave if there’s nobody to cover them when they do.

I think the main problem is that many people do not understand the role of HR. In the example given about a late invite to interview, it is the hiring managers responsibility to confirm who they want to interview, where it will be held, what format the interview will take. HR will just send out invites, book people in and send an interview schedule to the line manager. Then wait for the line manager to confirm who they want to hire. The line manager should also provide interview feedback as they are the expert in their field. As in all departments, I am sure there are excellent staff and under performers. However it is very easy to blame HR, as in "HR say we have to do this"

they seem to forget about the actual staff and that it doesn't matter how much pink and fluffy niceness you toss about, if you haven't got enough staff for the job/the right staff for the job it's all utterly irrelevant.

You think HR determine the budget for staff across a business? Very niave.

• naive

Yeah they’re generally poor I’m afraid. Bad attention to detail, don’t own up when they make mistakes and don’t deliver what they say they will. If I behaved like that in my job, I’d be on
Performance management measures.

@SilverySurfer

I think you've mixed me up with the OP: this is not my thread.

But then, I thought you were replying to me previously, when you were probably replying to the OP.

Let's call the whole thing off.

Yanbu

Hmmm. I’ve worked in the nhs, local government, and two universities. The nhs were ok. Local government was very slow with everything.
The universities have been some of the most incompetent practice I’ve ever experienced.
I regularly recruit, and yes, as manager, it’s my responsibility to let HR know the details, but - when I give them all the info, three weeks before the interview date, and get to the day before, and find out no-one has been invited, that’s poor; when it happens a second time, it’s incompetence. I’ve had no support during a bullying claim, and they lost a pile of my important, and largely irreplaceable, documents.

I am yet to be persuaded of their use.

YANBU!

I’m yet to come across an HR professional who understands the law around annual leave entitlement.

*HR exist to protect senior directors, the organisation etc.

took me a long time to realise that.*

This is simply not true in a decent industry. Strung HR professionals who chose more professional corporate environments than the NHS for example are generally legally trained and manage employee concerns very ethically.

Yes, every dealing I've ever had to have with HR I've found them to be either incompetent or deliberately unhelpful and intransigent.

This post has made me incredibly frustrated, as someone in a very senior HR role who has worked hard (exams, masters etc) to have a successful career in this field (and god forbid yes it is actually a professional field with a recognised professional body!)

What strikes me here is that people generally see HR as a glorified admin function, just there to arrange interviews or chase references or write notes about how awful people are.

What most people on here don’t seem to realise is that in most large organisations (and smaller ones), the examples you are giving, which are mostly recruitment related, are carried out by either a third party organisation or a specific part of the HR function that most other HR people wouldn’t have anything to do with as it’s a separate area of HR.

I didn’t want to rise to this but here I am! Other ‘back office’ functions like Finance, Legal, Audit etc would never get threads like this but that’s because most of you would never have to deal with them to experience how useless some can be (I do every day!)

HR covers a multitude of areas that keep the company safe and the people safe too:
Recruitment
Employee relations (discipline, appeals etc)
Pay and reward (pay reviews etc)
Business partnering (supporting directors on specific issues)
Talent
Learning and development
Diversity and inclusion (gender pay gap reporting?
Amongst others!

Not sure what my point is here but makes me very sad to see a 3 page thread of HR-bashing and ‘below average admin’ remarks when there are many highly qualified, intelligent and hard working people (mostly women!) who do a great job and work against all sorts of rubbish from others in their day to day jobs.

NHS HR are a bit of a joke in my experience. It's usually several months of chasing up and twatting around to get anyone hired. I know some hospitals have resorted to 3 month notice periods even for band 2s out of desperation because it takes so long for HR to process a new starter.

HR is only there to prevent the organisation being sued.

Avoiding them wherever possible is the best solution.

It seems abit of a made up job to me. Sometimes wish I’d gone into it for an easier life

@Watermelon5 now that's where I beg to differ, our finance team is diabolical!! No idea what it's like anywhere else but ours does not give a toss if you have a payment deadline, you have to beg the director if you want something to be paid sooner than a month if the transaction is too high for my company credit card. Nightmare when you're working with customers and suppliers.

Dh has an issue at work with the mad behaviour of s client he needed to guarantee his teams safety. He handed issue to HR much panic and cluelessness ensued...

@MsTSwift can I ask what you do?

@avalanching oh yes that sounds familiar - all I mean is that you probably wouldn’t get someone starting a thread saying that everyone who works in Finance is useless wherever they work and that it’s a ‘made up job’ etc.

@21daysofsummer I’d be interested to know what you mean by that, has your HR team been illegally denying minimum annual leave then?

@Watermelon5 no absolutely, for what it's worth I don't think it's a made up job! Now marketing, has anyone actually worked somewhere with a competent marketing department or have I just been really unlucky?!

Obviously the department I work in is pure perfection and everyone raves about the slickness to our service 😂