When I started work back in the 70’s I was interviewed by the manager of the department with the vacancy. When he told me I had the job I was then added to the company’s staff by the payroll office. There was no such thing as an HR department. It was no small company at that time, it was the biggest housebuilder in the UK. It went from strength to strength because it had great people working for it. It also had a reputation of firing workers who were not up to the job. Let me reiterate that. It had no HR department.
Between then and now, the workplace has become silly! Somewhere along the line, the Personnel and Payroll office morphed into the HR department. The Payroll office was a part of the finance department but HR is a new department all on its own and so needed a separate manager who has now elevated themselves to the ‘C’ level in most companies.
In most organisations you have the people who do the work (Operations), the people who sell the product (Sales), and the people who sort out the money (Finance). That is all you really need and it seems the world is waking up to this fact.
Just recently Ryan Breslaw, the CEO of Bolt Financial, sacked his entire HR department. He accused them of creating problems that didn’t exist and that these problems disappeared when he let them go.
And this comes hot on the heels of a report from the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, which claims that HR – meant to be the protective shield around the interests of a business – has become bloated and over-encumbered.
Human resources departments are, it claims, more concerned with pushing ‘radical’ equality, diversity and inclusion policies and protecting corporate interests rather than looking after staff – and they’re costing firms billions of dollars each year.
As HR departments are often staffed with university graduates with degrees in sociology and philosophy, they impart their prejudiced and elitist viewpoints onto the hiring process. Who would you rather employ? A 23-year-old wet behind the ears graduate who has never done a day’s work in their life or a 23-year-old who has been working for five years, has experience and a proven track record? Well, you’re having the graduate because your HR department threw the other CV in the bin as soon as they read the education section.
Frequently the HR manager is someone who started off as the boss’s secretary, they have no real knowledge of how the business works but suddenly they are interviewing electrical and chemical engineers.
Then there is the thorny issue of firing unsuitable employees. HR intervenes and throws a whole load of made-up procedures to be followed which in many cases means the employee stays in place and your company is throwing good money after bad.
It’s not difficult, if you need to recruit someone, then get the manager of the department that needs them to read the CVs, perform the interviews and make the decision. If you need to fire someone, give them the written warning and if they do not pull up their socks then Marsalama.
Jackie@JBeedie.com
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