Sure. When we make an offer we have some degree of flexibility depending on the candidate and need for the position. But it is within the bounds determined by the market, not what one person thinks is competitive. A company which let individual managers set salaries by themselves would soon find themselves in an awful mess. What happens when a person hired by a generous manager transfers into a more moderate department? He might be an average performer there making a lot more than anyone else.
I’ve done salary administration during times of salary compression (when starting salaries are rising faster than raises) and it is no fun. Why create a worse problem than already exists?
The HR department is there to protect the employer from lawsuits. It is not there to help employees with problems.
I don’t ever see the stuff that gets resolved correctly and completely before it gets to me. That is, you may correctly assume that my sampling method is utterly flawed for those instances where I don’t see it.
You may be subject to something of a selection bias here.
Is that you Captain Obvious?
And when they get slashed, then they just have scripts to run through all the resume submissions, and if you’re complaining that a HR person doesn’t know that “SQL” is “Structured Query Language,” I can assure you that the script will be worse.
Your sarcasm is noted, citizen. We are watching you, you know. Since you’re having so much fun making jokes at work, you won’t miss the vacation days you no longer have.
You may not have had that problem, but the ignorance of the HR department regarding the qualities of a good candidate have nothing to do with it. HR departments keeping applicants from ever being interviewed without having the faintest notion regarding the requirements of a position are found all across the country in every industry.
My friend the headhunter complains all the time about HR getting between a candidate and a hiring manager. But it depends on where the balance of power is. I’ve been in the computer design industry for over 30 years, and know people in companies all over Silicon Valley, and I’ve never heard even one person complain about this - either when looking for jobs or trying to hire.
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And when they get slashed, then they just have scripts to run through all the resume submissions, and if you’re complaining that a HR person doesn’t know that “SQL” is “Structured Query Language,” I can assure you that the script will be worse.
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I suspect even if a hiring manager looked over the filter, he’d see SQL on it and be satisfied.
Like I said, I worked with HR on refining a script, and it worked great. If anyone in a technical field lets HR (or PR for that matter) go off without monitoring, bad things will happen.
BTW I’ve been dealing with database more than I want to lately, and I’ve never heard anyone use anything but SQL. I don’t think the Oracle documentation does, except at the beginning, maybe. I certainly agree that there are things you can get mad at HR about (If I told you my current peeves I’d be in trouble) but this ain’t one.
Was he playing a banjo at the time?
I’m in HR and all I deal with is databases. I had to learn SQL as part of my job.
Are there bad people in HR? Sure. Are there poorly run HR departments? Of course.
That said, we have metrix to track how our hiring process is going. Are we hiring the right candidates? Are our managers seeing the right people? Up until recently, the managers would actually go through the hundreds of resumes to select who they viewed. We’ve now outsourced our recruiting. The manager for the position has to fill out a req to tell the recruiters what skills the candidate should have.
As you suggest, it’s not as though a manager says ‘we need some people’ and the HR recruiter simply makes up stuff and puts it out on the recruiting websites. The hiring manager is generally involved and, if not, that says something about how the company is run, not necessarily the HR department.
It’s not a policy in some banks, it’s US federal law for all banks. And it’s two weeks, not one. At least that’s what it was 20 years ago.
In a way, it’s awesome, because you know you’re getting that vacation no matter what. In another way, it sucks, because during your vacation you’re being audited, and you have no idea if you’ll have a job when you return.
Technically, it looks more like an FDIC recommendation than actual Federal law–but I assume that it’s unlikely that any banks are not going to be following the recommendation.
Yes, I understood you the first time.
Of course protecting the company from employee related lawsuits is part of HR’s job. As RickJay pointed out, as a lawyer that is most likely your primary interaction with them. But really that is only part of the larger role of HR which is to ensure employees are acting in a manner that is consistent with the interests of the company.
Why wouldn’t everyone hate HR? The whole point of HR is to serve as a beurocratic mechanism of institutional control for the company.
With the physically and emotionally hideous humans I’ve run into in HR departments, they should rename them SHR: Subhuman Resources. Ya know, for Morlocks.
Interesting! Thanks.
I can assure you that we in the trenches are damn glad we don’t have to do the record keeping that HR does. It’s disruptive, not much fun, and we’d never get around to it. And then the company would get its ass sued off by the government.
I was at one place where the manager kept the signed performance reviews for all employees. This was fine until one guy went a bit nuts and threw away all his records. We found this out when we decided to fire someone and didn’t have the negative review as backup. Not a lot of fun.
Silicon Valley might not have any companies old enough for HR to have grabbed that much power. Among old line manufacturing, financial (and insurance), and medical institutions, I know several IT managers who have complained about being denied access by HR to good candidates.
I would never claim that it is universal, but it does happen.
I am shocked to hear that not all HR departments are the same.
It’s not everyone in every bank, though - just people at a certain level with certain responsibilities. I used to work in the legal department of one of the biggest, and we had no such rule applicable to everyone. Of course, I didn’t manage anyone and had no control over any funds other than my own personal checking account, either.
I wonder if that recommendation applies to Savings & Loans. I wonder this because back in 1989, I worked for an S&L that got taken over by the RTC. One of the things that came out early on was that the woman who ran the travel department had been embezzling for some time, to the tune of a couple million dollars. (I worked in the brand-new HQ that they’d moved into about, oh, maybe 6 months before the RTC walked in and the feds walked the president out. Seriously.) The only reason they found out was because she had to be hospitalized for a short time for an operation, and she kept trying to get them to let her do her work from the hospital room.