To ask what HR actually is?

[SummerDays95]

So I'm looking for a complete career change from teaching, been doing it for 7 years since I left uni. I've been looking at jobs in companies that I like the sound of as a starting point, as I have absolutely no clue! HR admin assistant has come up quite a lot, and I like the sound of it and I think it would suit my skillset. I don't know much about it and don't think I'm in a position to apply just yet, but would like to learn. Day to day, what does it involve, and what sort of qualifications would I need? I've never worked in admin before!

I’m afraid I have to agree with posters who say they are there to protect the business. Our HR dept is very much for us managers in helping us to apply policies to the letter and to using our managerial discretion to the benefit of the organisation not the staff. I tend to use them for recruitment, dealing with challenging staff and support with our online HR systems but for everything else I i

HR is Human Resources. It means managing a resource in a way that makes the company the most money. Think of it as akin to an office manager who goes to great length to secure the cheapest stationery and cuts cleaning down to a bare minumum to reduce costs as much as possible whilst providing an acceptable level of service.

That's what HR does, it's just that the "resource" for HR happens to be human beings. Efficient HR staff are able to avoid thinking of workers as human beings though, they are just another resource for the company like raw materials are a resource in manufacturing. HR need to ensure that the company spends as little as possible on staff, minimizing pay rises, not replacing leavers if the work can be transferred to other employees, and trimming headcount to the lowest possible number.

HR professionals need a special mindset. It's too easy to think of the human cost when deciding to do away with jobs with the stroke of a pen. HR people can compartmentalise this, not worry about making people redundant for example and taking away their livelihood.

So accurate. Some of the worst people I've ever met work in HR.

Touched a nerve, eh? No, I’m not bitter, don’t worry. I am very honest about my experiences of HR though, and you’re not doing much to contradict them.

I'm very sorry you've had some bad experiences. As I said, there are good and bad in all industries and it's very dependent on the organisation you are in. I'm not ashamed to say you did touch a nerve, yes. Because my colleagues and I are all normal women, working hard and trying to get the balance right for our organisation and our employees. If you were an ordinary employee in our organisation you would have no idea of the work we do every day because it's behind the scenes and if all is going well, that work is invisible to you. Why on earth would we want to make people's lives more difficult? Having the right people in the right jobs and ensuring the company acts legally and treats its employees well gets the best out of everyone. I guess maybe I'm lucky to work for a decent and progressive company doing good work.

You're totally entitled to your opinion but you're the one calling us spiteful and that we have no value. I personally think that makes you sound bitter and unpleasant. We're all entitled to our opinions after all!

Why on earth would we want to make people's lives more difficult?

I’ll tell you. Based on experience:

• wishing to seem important, and key to the business, HR decides to design a lavish training programme in e.g. gender. Everybody in the business is required to do this training, which takes several hours, when a short ‘click through’ online presentation would have done the job just as well. HR can’t congratulate themselves about that, though, can they? So they make everyone’s life difficult for their own selfish ends.
• HR make a mistake with something (examples from my experience include making an incorrect offer to a candidate, losing a candidate’s passport, failing to check whether a new starter has passed probation until two months after probation has been passed by which time it’s too late to do anything, failing to take up references, failing to adjust the payroll file when explicitly asked to do so, forgetting to file employment returns with HMRC and overseas tax authorities etc etc). Unwilling to take responsibility for their own mistakes, they turn spiteful and passive aggressive and try to assign blame to somebody else. Including organising calls and meetings where their sole aim is declaring that it wasn’t their fault, and to which they invite senior people, whose time would be better spent elsewhere. Making colleagues’ lives difficult.
• Having been exposed as incompetent by reason of mistakes including the sample described above, HR become passive aggressive and work to rule, e.g. deliberately dragging their feet when onboarding new members of staff, being secretive about processes and SLAs. Thus making everyone’s lives difficult and damaging the business.
• insisting on unwieldy and not fit for purpose processes being followed. The processes don’t work for the business, nor do they mitigate risk. HR can’t even explain what risks they are supposed to mitigate. Nevertheless HR designed them and want to force everyone to use them, so that they can wield a pathetic bit of power over the colleagues doing the real work. Making their colleagues’ lives difficult.
• HR forget to end date a leaver, such that we end up paying the person for months after they leave. Then whine that it’s too difficult to get the money back from the leaver, and doing so is making them anxious because the person with all the free money is crying and pleading poverty. Requiring somebody else, with a spine, to take over and making everyone else’s life difficult.

I could go on. Would you like me to? These are my real experiences. I’m a 50 year old finance director. I’ve worked in senior finance for many years, in nine different organisations. I can genuinely say that I have only ever worked with three good HR people in all that time. Getting precious and calling your critics ‘bitter’ isn’t helping your cause of rehabilitating the reputation of HR.

Agree!

Bonus points if the training is over lunch time and about mental health 🤣

I forgot: as soon as their actions are questioned, the default response is, “I don’t like your tone”!

I agree with @Iamthewombat - although to be fair, it's not true in every case.
One place I worked had a ridiculous (HR) policy of demanding to see driving licences, insurance, MOT etc even though no car allowance was paid and driving was not in any way part of the job. They cited the possibility that the company could be held liable if someone was driving without everything being properly legal. Such legal action has never happened.

Thanks all, some very helpful replies. I think I will look a bit further into it, maybe have a look at the course and take it from there. It sounds like the kind of thing I would be interested in, but it sounds like that does also depend on the organisation. It does sound exciting though! I'll probably have to do a bit of research into the kind of areas I would be interested in, as it's all completely new to me.

a high performing and effective HR Department would operate with no awareness from the average employee - we were the silent partners, the WD40 on the cogs.

holy cow, this sums up the egotism of every HR person i've worked with and met.

the level of self importance and worth in the (overly excessive) salaries commanded vs. their peers is astounding, and commonplace at every place i've ever worked with.

for example, i once worked with a brand new hire - a "senior" hire badged as an HR Business Partner. her profile and online branding talked about talent retention, business talent planning, staff retention, employee relations.. she looked amazing on paper. unforunately the reality was that she was little more than an admin pen pusher who didn't deserve to sit on the same boards as the extremely skilled and hard-working seniors in her rank.. it really did do women a disservice to see her pretending that she was of similar benefit/skill to the CFO, COO, CTO, etc.

as a women in a technical leadership position, i don't want female peers pretending they're a "woman in business" alongside me. HR is the biggest load of time wasting nonsense i've ever come across.

replace the contract and performance management stuff with a couple of mid-level legally-trained / union managing peers and shove all the HR folk underneath the COO, IMHO (not as a peer, UNDER them).

there'd be very little real difference to the actual business - no one would miss the WD40, trust me

These comments are actually very professionally offensive to many of us in senior HR positions.

The vast majority of my day is challenging leaders who want to take action that is not aligned with our company values, disciplining misconduct that damages our culture and impacts employees to whom we have a duty of care and dealing with sensitive employee issues with authentic empathy.

Luckily I work for a company that empowers me to that but please don't denigrate an entire profession because you may have had a poor experience.

What is interesting this from this thread is the realisation of how many people don’t know what “HR Business Partner” means. If you are expecting them to be board/partner/c-level then it is small wonder you are disappointed.

Wow, some wonderfully brutal views of HR here, good job we’re used to being the traffic wardens of the corporate world and have thick skins!

OP I think HR is a brilliant job, however it varies massively dependent on sector, workplace culture and individual team. I’ve done almost 20 years in a range of organisations and every single day is different. It can be hard and you can end up in situations where you feel compromised at times, but it can also be wonderful and rewarding when you’re involved in a success story. I wouldn’t do anything else other than generalist HR as I love the variety and challenge

I'm head of hr in a lovely, ethical company where I don't feel compromised. I work closely with the exec directors, sit on a Board committee and get asked my view on virtually anything people-linked so I must not be too loathed.

I've done cipd to level 7, have an operational and commercial background (which really helps) and spend a lot of time on organisation design - finding the best way to use the collective skills of our people to deliver our strategy and designing new/better jobs for them is massively rewarding.

I have to say that I sometimes find networking events with other hr folk hard work. Although it's my job, I do see what other posters are referring to. There are some amazing people in hr, and some I don't feel are in it for the right reasons. Knowing confidential information is a burden and a privilege and the responsibility should never be taken lightly.

One poster described somebody working at board level whose title was ‘HR business partner’. Whilst generally speaking, HRBPs are much more junior, it’s the prerogative of each business to assign job titles as they see fit.

On the strength of this single post about one organisation, you have decided that “many” posters “don’t understand” HR. This sort of petty behaviour does nothing to rehabilitate the reputation of HR and makes you sound vindictive. “Criticise HR, would you? Well, I’ll call you stupid to get you back!”

Sadly, this type of personality is rife in HR. Petulant and passive aggressive. Basically, you are administrators but you just can’t settle for that. Like children, you constantly seek attention and want to sit at the big table. You have to pretend to be ‘creating a culture’ and ‘designing an organisation’. The people doing the real jobs are perfectly capable of that. You just need to get the basics right which, as I note in previous posts, has not been my experience across nine different organisations.

Really? My experience of HR people is that they have the thinnest skins of any colleagues. That’s what makes them petty and passive aggressive.

Hr deal with the admin activities of managing staff, all the paperwork, payroll etc making sure processes have been followed properly and supporting the management team at all levels to manage their staff.

Are you ranting at me or just screaming into the void?

I don’t even work in HR, I just have a knowledge of and appreciation of the area because the work I do is related. If you want to insult me personally you’ll have to work a bit harder.

More than one person has mentioned HRBP.
I would suggest you RTFT, but honestly I think you might be better taking a step back.

And the way you misquote me is amusing. You seem to want to imply that I have an agenda “to rehabilitate the reputation of HR”. No, I literally just have an interest that people misconstrue the role of HRBP because of the title.

It is box ticking PC nonsense

You know how in teaching you get those parents where their little darlings can do no wrong and any marks they miss out on are due to you not doing your job properly?

Well in HR you get to deal with them as employees...

Forever forgetting to send stuff to payroll ie new starters/leavers etc and then demanding payroll sorts it out immediately.

I’m ticking off the cliches one by one.

Anybody who expresses an opinion you don’t like ‘doesn’t understand’ or ‘misconstrues’.

Anybody who wins an argument with you is ‘ranting’ or ‘screaming into the void’. I’d suggest that you take the step back: you clearly can’t cope with criticism, even when you work in a ‘related field’ rather than HR. Is your ‘related field’ even more pointless than HR, I wonder, and that’s why you’re so sensitive?

Wombat, you are the only one arguing 😂I’m just watching you run around in circles tripping over your own ill constructed arguments.