If HR doesn’t screen resumes, then the managers will find themselves beseiged with resumes. I mean, I’ve seen this play out DOZENS of times. It doesn’t take a real genius to see the problems on the other side of the coin.
Again, you are complaining about a job you do not understand. People ignorant of a job never understand its value. That’s why people bitch so much about HR, but also IT, and pretty much any identifiable part of a company. It’s why people bitch about management until they get to be in management and find out how hard it is. It’s why every operations unit has whiners who says the other operations units are fuckups.
The auditors. Higher managers, directors, and VPs who will scream about the money they’re laying out that fucks up their budgets. Other employees who will lose their shit over it. Man, these problems are so easy to predict. Things are not as easy as they seem from your limited vantage point.
Disclaimer: I don’t work in HR, never have. But I’m also not stupid, and my job enables me to see how all the parts of a company work together.
In my experience as a civil litigator who does employment cases, HR departments are there to gather data on employees to justify their firing if they ever start to cause any trouble. I am always amused when a potential client tells me that the keep going to HR to try to get some problem solved because they think HR is there to help them. It isn’t. It is there to screw you.
I think people are ascribing too much power to HR departments. I have not love for HR people, but in my experience, they seem to mostly be a step above glorified admin assistants who take care of stuff like recruiting, payroll, benefits and all the other beurocracy around hiring, evaluating performance, dealing with internal issues, termination and all the other beurocracy and paperpushing having to do with keeping track of your people.
Really as a manager, I don’t want to deal with that crap. I want to focus on running my team/department/business.
That said, I have encountered a few halfwits in HR departments. Tech companies seem to be full of them. It’s like they always hire some idiot who wants to give the place a sort of Googly Facebooky startupy sort of cult vibe. One of the reasons I left my last job at a startup was because this new crazy HR bitch felt it was more important my team be able to dress up in costumes on Friday and play on trampolines than to deal with an employee who couldn’t perform his job.
I’ve never worked anyplace where the company analyzed or nickle and dimed your sick days. Heck, any place I’ve worked in the past decade, I could just up and work from home if I wanted.
Sometimes HR deliberately keeps the managers in the dark about how they are screening. The poor managers end up getting crappy resumes, and they have absolutely no control over it.
Another story; One of my students was “screened out” by an HR person, so the manager never saw the resume. This particular student was perfect for the job IMO. So I sent their resume directly to the manager (a big no no)
Turns out the student was screened out by HR because they did not have “SQL” on the resume. Instead, they had “Experience with Structured Query Language” The student had experience with “Microsoft products, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Project”. They did not have what the HR person was looking for: “MS Office”
The HR person had no domain knowledge at all.
ETA: When the manager talked to them, the HR person kept saying “the student had no squeel”. Took him a while to figure out they meant “SQL”
Having the same type of policy, it makes sense for an employer to limit days off whether they are sick or vacation time. If an employee has the flu and is out five days, than they have to settle for taking only another 15 days off rather than 20. Most of my employees tend to use as little as possible of their PTO because we pay them out at the end of the year. I’ve never had anyone work sick because they don’t want to waste their days.
Listen. I’m not stupid. I’m also not ignorant of how parts of a corporation work together. I just believe HR departments are overblown and not needed in the extended capacities they are constantly claiming to be necessary in. I know what IT does and I value their necessity. HR in its modern form is a duplication of many other groups who could do the same job better, and previously did. Some HR departments are valuable when their responsibilities are limited. You’re hearing additional horror stories about how much they can fuck up a process, so it’s not just me.
HR’s function cannot simply be done with a lawyer, a bulletin board, and a calendar. You’re wrong, because you don’t understand the job. That’s okay; like I said, people tend to underestimate the value and difficulty of jobs they don’t understand. A commonsense approach, though, should suggest to you that all these successful companies can’t ALL be run by people who have collectively, and inexplicably, failed to notice that they don’t need HR people.
That people can trot out anecdotes, including the old “40% of sick days on Mondays and Fridays” that seems to have become* remarkably *more common since it was the subject of a Dilbert cartoon in April 1996, is to be expected. I can find you many, many horrible anecdotes about inept teachers, cops, doctors, nurses, construction workers, surveyors, engineers, electricians, painters, actors, writers, IT consultants, and (insert any profession here) but it doesn’t mean those professions are useless.
Look, have you ever been on a conference call and, maybe 1/5 of the people on the call are so mindbogglingly stupid OR unwilling to help themselves that you wonder how they ever got dressed in the morning?
These people are on the phone to HR all the time. Or they’re fucking up their time sheets. Or they can’t navigate a simple screen. It’s the policy of having to cater to the lowest common denominator that causes the trouble. Some HR people are just bitches but most of them are just people, too, and frustrated by stupidity.
I’m not really defending HR policies. But I know that they are a necessity in large companies, even if we don’t like them.
Every HR department at every huge ass company can be easily slashed in half. And then slashed in half once more, and it’d still be too bloated and cumbersome. I swear to god, it took a whole effing committee to send out a letter when someone went on a leave of absence.
Love,
Former Drone in HR Hell at a Huge Ass Company Who Couldn’t Get Out of That Dept Fast Enough
In my (very large telecom) company, when we call HR we are referred back to our manager. Another employee and I have ongoing payroll issues that have been unresolved for MONTHS after the boss said she had to call Labor Relations. Both issues are pretty cut and dried, but I guess the boss figures if she stonewalls us long enough the problem might go away. Attempts to get HR involved are a waste of time, since they refuse to answer even the simplest, most direct questions. (“Are we entitled to 30 minutes of overtime if the company does not provide us relief for an uninterrupted lunch period?”)
This isn’t my area of expertise (I’m in HRIS), but I could swear that if you are non exempt you are legally required to have a 30 minute lunch. I don’t think it’s necessarily a question of overtime.
As I said, not my area of expertise, so take it with a grain of salt. From here:
My guess is that your boss is stonewalling, hoping the problem goes away and the HR department is probably trying to find a way to cover their butt.
When I started at xxxxxx University, the Security department had been on ‘probation’ with HR and were not allowed to issue any disciplinary measures to their people without HR approval.
After they got off this, our bosses tried to tell us that we were no longer allowed to contact HR without going through “the chain of command”. Why? Because as I was explicitly lectured in a disciplinary meeting, “On this Org chart, HR is at the same level as the Vice President of Facilities. Therefore you need his permission to speak to them.”
In other words (and yes, this exact path was rather forcefully explained to me);
Ask Supervisor for permission to speak to Assistant Director about the issue.
Ask Assistant Director for permission to speak to the Director.
Ask Director for permission to speak to the VP of Facilities (her boss).
Ask VPoF for permission to speak to HR.
HR was not amused when I informed them of these instructions. (Ignoring the ‘chain of command’ to do so, of course, which led to my rapid involuntary departure.)
We are non-exempt. The issue re: overtime for lunch is that the evening shift works an 8.5 hour shift which includes a non-paid 30 minute lunch. However, when one of the evening crew is off, there is nobody to cover them(answering phones and pager). Also, the boss has specifically said that the remaining person is NOT ALLOWED to leave the building unstaffed during the shift. According to California Labor Law,
*
“The employer must relieve the employee of all duty.” and “The employer must relinquish control over all activities of the employee.” and “If the employer requires the employee to remain at the work site or facility during the meal period, the meal period must be paid. This is true even where the employee is relieved of all work duties during the meal period.”*
I’ve been with the company for more than 30 years, and evening shift people have always worked a straight 8 hours and effectively gotten paid for their lunches. According to my reading of the labor laws (and company policy), an employee working 8.5 hours with no lunch relief is entitled to 30 minutes of OT.
So, HR screws up if they screen, and they are called lazy if they don’t screen. Thus the dilemma. By the way, who the hell ever spells out SQL? I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a resume with it spelled out. You need to teach your students how to write resumes for search tools. Sad, but true.
I’ve gone through raw resumes sent to our web site for a job, and they are an amazing range of a few gems and a lot of dross. The jobs I hire for are selective enough that I get only 100 or so at a bunch, and I can sort through them pretty quickly. Yes, I use keywords myself, but the set is much greater than any HR person without a degree in engineering could ever do. I have also worked with HR to develop a set of keywords for a particular job, and she was great. Almost all policies I have a problem with have been set from the top. The actual workers have been great.
I think your boss is in violation of the law - I’m not a lawyer and I don’t deal with this, but his decry that the remaining person can’t leave seems in violation. From the site I posted above, in CA, you HAVE to have a 30 minute break after 5 hours - otherwise your employer is breaking the law.
If you’ve read the labor laws for your state then obvious you are to be deferred to over the link I posted and the knowledge that I have. I wouldn’t necessarily go by ‘company policy’ though, since companies are often found in violation of labor laws.
When you contact HR, what do they say? Do they just not pick up/not answer emails?
I work for large companies, and all their HR departments have been slashed in half and half again already. And I hope you are not one of the people who complain when no one responds to a resume you’ve submitted.
Is archiving bad reviews somehow different from archiving good reviews, which might help an employee defend herself from an obnoxious manager before it gets to you?
BTW, how do you know what a competitive rate is? Do you have access to salary surveys for these positions in your area? Do you know what other people are making in similar positions in your company? Pretty much every time I see a salary number from HR these days it has been higher than I would have guessed. And the only time I haven’t been able to offer something reasonable it was my manager, not HR, in the way. He felt underpaid and he didn’t want to pay people anywhere close to what he was making.
But I’m sorry you seem to have worked for such crappy companies.
We have a department within HR that deals with this. If I recall correctly they use nationwide standards, local standards, and some other formulas to determine the low, mid, and high ranges of compensation.
That said, they aren’t the final arbiters of what someone gets paid. As an example, I got a promotion and a 10% pay increase - that was the limit of increases that managers were allowed to give out (based on the execs). That 10% was nice, but I’m underpaid by $8,000 (IIRC). In other words, the ‘low’ end of the range for my position is still 8k more than I make.
To your point, this was not determined by anyone in HR.