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Get a job! Not with HR

By Malcolm King - posted Monday, 1 December 2008


Do you want to make tea at the BBC?
Career opportunities - the ones that never knock,
The Clash

There has never been a more incompetent profession working against corporate Australia and the man and woman in the street, than human resource management.

This parasitic bureaucratic force leeches capital and innovation out of companies, while camouflaging itself in audits and mission statements. It is run by airport bookshop intellects spouting psychobabble.

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Currently the unemployment and underemployment rate stands at 10 per cent. This is expected to rise as business confidence drops in the second and third quarters of the global economic correction.

The welfare of these Australians should not be dependent on the ineptitude of HR practitioners.

If the Australian HR industry was a candidate for a senior managerial position it would flunk out miserably. Here’s why.

Interview question to HR manager: “Tell us about the last time you advised management of a costed analysis, using the latest financial modeling of how HR could add value to the company.”

Silence. Finance? Costed analysis? Models?

Here the candidate HR Manager will fall back on qualitative mumbo jumbo about organisational culture. Wrong! They wanted a finance answer based on research and initiative. Thank you for wasting our time.

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All of the services of HR should be outsourced to people who know what they’re doing. Deliver us from:

  • Letting HR illiterates write and place job ads. Many are inaccurate, misleading, have information crevasses and lack clarity and brevity.
  • Useless performance management audits that never see the light of day.
  • Advertising positions at universities and the public service which will be filled by an inside candidate. The NT Government is infamous for this.
  • Allowing recruitment agencies to “shotgun” your resume far and wide, to all manner of people, and then not follow it up.
  • Running ridiculous team training workshops where people have to abseil down a cliff or build a flying fox from milk cartons.
  • Allowing Seek and CareerOne to post job ads that are potentially criminally misleading, where the client is asked to provide details of bank accounts, etc.

How do I know this stuff?

I run a business called Republic Resumes. A couple of years ago, I was under-employed as I was building up the business. I don’t recognise the blinkered view that a man or woman can only have one career. I’m on my fourth. I put myself on the job market in both Melbourne and Adelaide.

HR people interviewed me and I interviewed them. Mercifully the business took off. But in the spirit of the New Journalism, I kept on applying for positions, to see what happened.

I had read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bait and Switch, as she reported on the inside story of job hunting in corporate middle America. Her undercover reporting debunked a lot of the pop-psychology, self-help mantras and lonely networking events that unemployed or under employed white collar people are put through.

I met and talked to scores of people in HR as well as people who were coming to me for advice for job hunting strategies, revamping their resumes, co-writing cover letters - the works.

Over a six-month period I wrote 20 job applications and got three interviews. Many of my applications were screened out by Optical Character Recognition scanning technology that HR uses to hunt for key words.

This defeats the purpose of having humans working in recruitment departments. It takes the Human out of HR.

About half of my calls were not returned. More than half the letters I sent were not acknowledged. I had to fight against incorrect information supplied about the terms of employment and salary. If I wanted to make it harder to get a job, I would have employed a HR person.

Not so smart

People who enter HR say things like, “I want to work with people”. Why not be an ambulance driver? HR isn’t about being a do-gooder. It’s about possessing a critical and contemporary understanding of how to get the best and brightest people, how to train them, and keep them and raise the value of the company.

In the Financial Times recently, columnist Luke Johnson sent shockwaves throughout the personnel profession when he described HR as "a burden on the backs of the productive workers".

Johnson, who is also chairman of UK TV station Channel 4, warned that with a recession looming employers would be wise to "clear away a lot of pointless administration”.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, these are the people charged with administering the psychobabble tests.

Psychobabble

TS Eliot once wrote in The Wasteland that “these fragments I shore against my ruins”. HR people do this by resorting to quasi-scientific thinking. Their most common ruse is to parrot reams of statistics - which for the most part they don’t understand - to shore up a self-serving, dodgy proposition.

HR people have co-opted the worst methodological excesses of the social sciences to pigeon-hole candidates for positions.

The most common is the Myer Briggs Type Indicator test, created by Katharine Briggs. She wouldn’t have been the first to have her brain zapped by some of the theories of Carl Jung. Briggs devised a test to sort humanity into 16 distinct types, all of them fortunately benign. Isn’t it odd that these tests never pick the psychopath who comes to work one day with an automatic weapon?

The Myer Briggs Type Indicator has zero predicative value. In one study, only 47 per cent of people tested fell into the same category on a second administration of the test. Another study found 39 to 76 per cent of those tested assigned to a different “type” upon retesting weeks or years later.

The Myer Briggs Type Indicator is about as helpful as picking a person’s star sign. So you’re a Gemini? Excellent. We’ll make you director of communications. Get out of here.

The noses of many HR managers are well and truly super glued to the trough. It would be hard to find a less critical, less internally regulated industry than HR.

Conclusion

If the Australian HR industry was a soccer team, it would be struggling to win a game in the 4th division. If it has one fundamental, over-arching flaw, it is its galling lacks respect for its clients, whether they are individual job hunters, staff or corporate clients.

I have met the enemy and it is HR. I promise my clients at Republic that I’ll try get them a job despite HR. I’ll beat them at their game.

In a world where whole industries are disappearing due to globalism and the Internet is removing costs on the communication and supply chains, HR is a value subtract.

For individual job hunters, the secret to getting a job is cold calling and asking for an appointment to pitch your skills. It won’t work every time but remember, as Paul Keating once said, “If there’s a horse called ‘Self Interest’ running, I’d back him every time, because at least I know he’s trying.” Unlike HR.

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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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