HR - What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

Why are people in their 40s, 50s and 60s finding it hard to get a job?

It’s because of HR people. They are Lord High Executioners running around in their personal Mikado chopping out CV’s of applicants who are past 40. They are employment gatekeepers with the conscience of Golem.

On AM (ABC radio) recently a 64-year old man, Noel Buchanan has spent the last three years looking for a job.

“It’s very debilitating to progressively realise despite one’s education and previous work history, that simply because you’re past 45, you’re past your used-by-date,” he said.

HR hacks fob off the old, the ethnic and over qualified with fatuous comments such as “you’re too experienced”, or “you’re wrong for the culture”.

They use the word “culture” a lot. It’s a slippery term and can be applied to just about anything from organic chemistry to organisational psychology. The term “organisational culture” sounds good in a textbook but it’s a pretty meaningless catch-all term coined by academics.

HR people use organisational culture in its pejorative sense. They implement psychometric testing (a fraud) to avoid hiring people who would create a bad organisational culture. I’ll tell you what’s bad. Seeing 10,000 jobs go offshore to India and China. That’s bad.

My stepfather flew 30 bomber missions in Western Europe in World War 11 with a group of people he met in a pub. They were looking for a captain and he needed a navigator and crew. The only thing they had in common was a love of beer but they worked together as a team because their lives depended on it. Not a focus group, CV, interview or psychometric test in sight.

HR people think we’re idiots. Their contempt for commonsense, for workplace justice, fairness, equanimity in the face of pernicious management decisions, is insulting.

Anyone who has worked in the public sector will recognise this next example.

Charlie X saw the perfect public sector job and spent most of a weekend going through the lengthy and often banal selection criteria. Only to find three weeks later that his dream job has been snapped up by an internal appointee.

This isn’t news. Many advertised jobs are unofficially earmarked for incumbents long before they reach the “position vacant” section of the newspaper. Indeed, both public and private HR hacks hire other “name” HR companies to do their short listing and when it comes to selection, they hire the person they’ve earmarked all along.