Death to Human Resources

Well they had to make jobs up for millions of useless twits with a BA, so they invented the "HR" Department.

Now they sit around nice clean offices and try to act like gods without a brain in their heads. It’s unbelievable how much power corporations have granted these inbred nobodies.

"The Short List, or The Principles of Selection", in C.N. Parkinson's Parkinson's Law (1957) has a much more effective hiring scheme.

(quote)

"Wanted: an archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honour guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary Ls.2000 per year..."

"It is unnecessary to require that candidates must be mad on excavating tombs. Mad is what they certainly will be....The result is a single candidate. He is off his head but that does not matter. He is the man we want."

What El Capitan describes is but a more ham-handed way of achieving the same end.

You really hate educated people and women, don't you?

Knight 99

You got that right. You should see even in City jobs, the real leaders are sidelined for Degree knobs who mostly are nurotics or apartchiks. The work place becomes a political shell game.
Run by the people everyone hated in high school.
The bulliesor opertunist rats.
Fister sorry, but a few pieces of papers does not a leader make.
Especially when for thousands of years we never needed these prudish nobs.
They destroy moral, or any senority.
Ive watched happen over 27 years. Know what Most don't even know reallymuch anyway. Mickey mouse courses . No its not sour grapes. I could have a position any time. Who needs the headache working with weasels because thats what most of these Entitled finks think they are. Homo Superior.
JMO

Llyod,

Your a troll.

Yes, I hate educated women.

That's why I'm dating one.

Now go away and watch me no longer respond to you on account I refuse to feed you.

Employment should be outlawed. Only contracts for specific product or service between individuals.

Indiana's keys to dealing with women:(these are very broad generalizeations, anecdotal evidence from my life)

Preface: roll your eyes if you will, but I did pretty good when it came to 'clocking hoes'. Honestly, I've clocked more hoes that a female track coach.

Fortunatly, I was good friends with the suavest ladies man I ever did meet. I was fortunate to be schooled in the art of 'game' from this pro.

Women truely adore "sweet nothings", and can be easily manuevered with the right magic words(they like shiny things too, but a playa doesn't spend cash on chickens). This doesn't change too much from school to the work force.

Once you are hip to the game, it is easy to play the system because the HR bimbos are following a script; like TOTUS. Understanding this, you press the correct buttons and watch the HR bimbo get giddy because of her perceived ‘catch’ on the line.

For example, I just took the job offer of a lifetime for a company I love to work for; but, none of this would be possible without my superior interviewing skills. To make the Captains point, one of the questions I was asked was "how did you handle failure in a past job?".

Now, I was prepared for this question, because it’s the same question at every interview, but here's the kicker: it doesn't matter if your story is truthful, so long as you use the correct key words or phrases. So, I told a story about moving a building 22" North (in design) but didn't alert the other disciplines screwing things up. Now, the only item the bimbo was interested in was the fact I said "22" North" which in the HR world meant I was telling the truth. She didn’t care about my solution, or the results, just that I had a story that could be “verified” with a simple detail. What if I didn't say 22" North? Who knows.

I'm in mining so women haven't infiltrated our industry to the same extent as others, and because of this, you can bet that every other position (HR, Doc Control) and everything else not specifically "mining" goes only to women. This is the only way to keep a man to woman ratio in an industry women don't want to be in. Then, the women look at the pay scales (engineer verses secretary) and cry foul when it comes to pay equity.

My bottom line is this, and I've said it here too much chagrin before; and that's that we must raise our boys for today's reality, not the reality of the past. Boys need to be taught to protect themselves from predatory women in their personal lives, and need to prepare themselves to hide their masculinity from teachers, employers and anyone else that might have sway over your life. Call me an a$$hole, but I’m glad, and I’ve said it here, that I don’t have boys because the realities, and the outcomes for boys are not very favorable. I know more men (who aren’t happily married like me) who have some woman reaping havoc in their life than I can count on my fingers. Furthermore, the state insists on these women causing strain on these men as the state neither wishes to take care of these dead-beat women.

The second key to women, is being aware of the dastardly motives that are often at play. Personally, I thank people like Ice Cube, Dr,Dre and Eazy E for speaking the truth about women, the truth that women are NOT entitled to your respect UNLESS they reciprocate the respect. Without rap music, I'd likely have been one of those suckers my girlfriends 'play'd' on my behalf. You can bet that if some hottie comes up to you in the bar, and asks you to buy her a drink, then takes-off, she’s bringing that drink to someone like me. If she’s borrowing money, it’s to buy something for a guy like me.

"we don't love these hoes"-snoop dogg
"you can't make a hoe a housewife"-warren G

If you find a great woman, treat her like a queen, because like men, they are far and few between. That said, as men and boys, we must protect ourselves from the dastardly women who'd ruin us for the sake of a free ride$$. THEY are organized and out to get you, so be aware.

@Rev Dream, it's not necessarily about empty-headed MBAs. Management at my current office is a bunch of people with PhDs in engineering, but they'd rather protect the reputations and sinecures of their cronies than produce a functional product.

I think cronyism is the real root of the problem. When management starts acting more like frat brothers than executives, it's not going to end well.

I can honestly say I never saw any rhyme or reason why I succeeded in some job interviews and fell flat in others.

just today I had a discussion with a buddy on the dumbing down of the n. american workplace; it actually pays, truly, pays far better to act dumb than try to demostrate skills qualifications.

I got booted out of a training program the very very LAST time I tried to get an apprenticeshit started. the reason? the Q came up about typical earning over a lifetime.

34 years working life,
avg 25 grand per year in today's dollars.

out came the calculators.

self sees the shortcut; bump the 25 up by a factor of 4, lop 2 off the 34 to 32 then drop it by the same factor of 4.

yields 100,000 X 8 = 800,000. but wait, what about the 2 you lopped off the 34? well, how much is 2 X 25?

see how easy it is when you manipulate the numbers into ones easily calculated?

so moi pipes up "850,000" before the rest of the class get engage their fingers.

now the punchline. Gawd's honest truth. I GOT KICKED OUT OF THE COURSE FOR BEING A 'SHOWOFF'.

this is the state of affairs in the canuckistan edjukayshun cystem. booted out of a training course despite the fact I earnestly offered to explain to all what the trick was.

4 years later I still rememebr the exact numbers in the example. I even went back to the place a while later and gave them a really nasty earful what I thought of their organization.

and you people have the gall to accuse me of 'sucking on the public teat' when I admit opting for a disability pension to get by?

screw all of you.

Yup, HR screwed me once too. I was already working contract in the position at the company. I was short of being out of school 2 years.

And here's where HR policy nailed me: if I were to get a permanent job at this company I would be promptly whisked away for a 2 year company indoctrination, Care of HR. Had I over 2 years industry experience at the time, I would have gotten the job.

The group I was working for was told to hire someone to fill my contract position. Since they could not hire me without having to wait 2 years for my return, they hired someone else with “more” experience, who I trained up (the irony). And subsequently my contract terminated at it's due date.

HR - Almost as bad as safety departments.

"You really hate educated people and women, don't you?"

Hey, Brainiac, there's a difference between "educated" and "schooled".

I bet I know into which category you fall, Lloyd.

mhb23re

Lloyd Fister?

"Fister? I don't even know 'er!"

mhb, I've encountered Fister before, and am pretty certain he has neither education nor schooling. He does however have a nice set of stock parrot-head responses to trot out though, doesn't he?

Fister wanna cracker?

I would rather work in an organization registered to the ISO 14001, 18001, and 9000 standards (if well designed and implemented) than under the thumb of government regulatory agencies and professional right to practice legislation (real credentialism). Those standards are one of the best arguments for deregulation. The voluntary standards can be anal but at least not prone to rent seeking and politics.

As to HR personnel, they aren't called yappers for nothing. Their value is limited only by the intelligence and management ability of the organization that employs them. They range from valuable to worse than useless.

Lloyd Fister wrote:

"You really hate educated people and women, don't you?"

Wait- I don't understand. You mean to say women aren't people?

I commented one time that I hated HR training. When asked why I replied most are retired teachers and talk to us like we are ten years old. We went to an anti- harassment seminar. It was run by two retired teachers and I was harassed in the first 3 minutes just to prove a point. My sin? I wouldn't write my name on the folded paper. I said I knew who I was. My boss was impressed and the seminar had a lesson in hypocrisy.

I'm a manager of an R&D department.

I would rather cut off my left arm than let human resources assist me with the hiring process. Next time some idiot suggests we run an ad seeking a "self-motivated team player with out-of-the-box thinking skills" I shall heave.

I have my best people help me with hiring, for they are far better at identifying true talent and pretentious bullshit than any HR department.

HR departments exist to ensure that the company is not sued for wrongful dismal or brought before a human rights tribunal. HR departments exist solely to protect the company/corporation assets period. Employees are trained, given benefits and otherwise pacified to lessen the likelihood of lawsuits. HR departments are not employee advocates, on the contrary.

Lucky Lori @9:35 - I think that must be true; they're too inefficient and counterproductive to survive in the private sector otherwise. So we can chalk this up to another marvelous government messing up of everything.

I've developed the killer interview over the years. I give an -outstanding- interview. Turns out this is a -bad- idea, because the HR idiot HIRES THE SUIT not the guy in it. What they get is not Mr. GQ they thought they interviewed, they get The Phantom. Who in person is a lot like he is on the web.

You'd think a company (or a hospital!) would want to hire smart people who like to solve problems and get the job done, but you would be wrong. They don't. I've never been able to figure out what the hell they do want, I packed in the whole employee concept and went self employed. More work but much less misery.

Best part, when I solve the problem and get the job done, -I- get the money. ~:D

And yes, working in a feminized environment is a hellish nightmare. Hospitals are all frigged up, management-heavy messes these days because too many idiot women in positions of authority with no men to keep them in line. Plus unions of course, another whole level of hellish.

Sorry girls. I'd rather scrape paint off an iron fence. In the sun.

Women in groups just aren't very good at getting things done. Plenty of individual women are great (and plenty of individual men are useless), but a gaggle of women - I swear, I think some sort of pheremone gets excreted. I'm not kidding. I call it estrogen poisoning. It is not, I think, an urban myth that groups of women who spend too much time together start menstruating in tandem. At any rate estrogen poisoning leads to sloth, back-biting, drama and endless time-wasting. Smart women seem to lose 25 IQ points and decent women a good chunk of their moral worth in these environments. Avoid like the plague any workplace/department/division/nunnery/whorehouse/what-have-you dominated by women.

(All-male environments no doubt have their downsides too, but no knitting-circle ever stormed the beaches on D-Day, so there is that.)

"self-motivated team player with out-of-the-box thinking skills"

Oh gawd rabbit, you're killing me. HR weenies would run a mile if they ever really met a guy like that.

My stock answer for the "are you a team player?" question is "I don't play around on company time. Do you have a job you want done here or not?" Cuts through the crap pretty quick, one way or another. As I said above, usually the "good" interview leads to at most six months of uncomfortable employment. Four months of which you spend wondering when they're going to fire you.

Scraping eaves is better.

Captain, you are 100% correct. I have re-entered the job-search arena and I have been telling people it is just like dating and they look at me cross-eyed. A person has to jump through hoops just to get a screening interview, and if one answer doesn't meet the pre-set checklist, you are in trouble. Thing is, here in Alberta the system is swinging back to too few workers and too many empty positions. Soon the HR's will be looking for workers that are just not there, and will have to settle. Sometimes though, settling is a boon to the company.

BTW, Lucky Lori is 100% correct; HR departments are not there for the worker at all. They are 100% there to protect the company. I thought that was obvious?

Black Mamba, all-male environments are fine as long as you're "one of the lads". If you're The New Guy (or The Weird Guy), better have your knuckles all polished up and ready for action.

But that's the beauty of the all-male environment. Disagreements really can be settled by hard stares, head butting and taking it out to the parking lot after hours. Its expected, it works, and the job gets done.

How the hell is a guy supposed to take it out to the parking lot with some damn fool middle aged woman whose @ss is three ax handles wide? Doesn't work. Disagreements fester, guys stop giving a sh1t, job stops getting done.

See -any- Canadian hospital for real life example. People die from it every day. Helpless old people, usually. Hacks me off, I must say.

Wow, I guess I've been blessed. I've been in the work force since 1974, and never dealt with a human resources department. By the time they became popular, I was already self-employed. Maybe, before I take a dirt nap, I'll apply for a few jobs. I should be able to secretly video some interviews, and go for a viral youtube video.

Black Mamba

"Avoid like the plague any workplace/department/division/nunnery/whorehouse/what-have-you dominated by women."

I admit to learning that one the hard way. Between the paperclip meetings, team building exercises, focus groups and perpetual freakin drama, I was exhausted and demoralized.

The fact that I was working for an organization that purported to help the disenfranchised only made the experience all the more miserable.

The Captain makes some interesting observations about the HR apparatchicks. Heh.
He is doing it, not being a psychologist, cosmologist, astrologist or any of the ‘logists unless of course, he is.

Earlier this year, Statistics Canada had an add looking for people to do head count by visiting homes that find it difficult or are not inclined to fill out census forms.

Your agent phoned up and offered his services, thought to himself, self doing nothing, self might as well get paid for doing nothing.

Eventually got to do preliminary tests, as they are called in the federal bureaucracy.

Looking around the room, there was small and no chance to land a paycheck. It matters not.

It matters though, how the young uninterested apparatchicks coldly go about their pretend charade of going through the motions of their wholly unimportant “work”. There must have been ten of the apparatchicks, including their boss, under boss, team leader, under team leader and so on and so on. Men obviously did not qualify for the department.

Seemed from entering the room, that handsome old white guy has no chance in hell to get paid for wasting time. Heh.

There were more deserving, visible minorities and women, that was already decided.

It is also possible that your agent did not fit the profile.

My observation has been that many companies have bought into the accreditation falsehood as it relates to HR managers.

Most these days seem to be from community college HR programs that usually run from 16 to 20 weeks for a certificate.

It's about enough time to deliver a programmed learning model for cookie cutter results.

The profile seems to be a range of unemployables from failed carreers in sales or administration posessing either worthless accademic degress or no formal post secondary education at all. Often streamed into the HR management programs under government subsidized job retraining efforts. Incapable of understanding the practices they are taught to implement.

@Osumayashi at 9:20 - I think he must mean there aren't any educated women. Or shouldn't be anyway, according to Sharia law.

"Incapable of understanding the practices they are taught to implement."

And yet paid well anyway, with a handsome retirement package.

how timely, I live in a community with a preference for town employees that have a high school ed & additional "tickets". So, they let the one guy go, no grade 12, cut the foreman's wage - no grade 12, pay the underlings with grade 12 more than the foreman. Too bad the "grade 12'ers" move slower than a fence post til coffee time. It's truly sad, the hardest working guy earned his foremans position. The other 2 are paid on the basis of an unused education. Or has our edu system slipped so far into the abyss that grade is needed to lean on a shovel and watch other people work?

Black Mamba: "Women in groups just aren't very good at getting things done. Plenty of individual women are great (and plenty of individual men are useless), but a gaggle of women - I swear, I think some sort of pheremone gets excreted. I'm not kidding. I call it estrogen poisoning. It is not, I think, an urban myth that groups of women who spend too much time together start menstruating in tandem. At any rate estrogen poisoning leads to sloth, back-biting, drama and endless time-wasting. Smart women seem to lose 25 IQ points and decent women a good chunk of their moral worth in these environments. Avoid like the plague any workplace/department/division/nunnery/whorehouse/what-have-you dominated by women.

(All-male environments no doubt have their downsides too, but no knitting-circle ever stormed the beaches on D-Day, so there is that.)"

Wow, but I agree. Glad it was you sayin' it, not me.

OTOH, testosterone overload causes problems too! But I'd hate to think what we'd be facing with our military, police, protective forces gaily frolicking in the parks...Oh, wait!

Phantom @10:34....truer words have not been spoken. One reason why I left hosptial. Ditto for the federal government...

Am one of the few females who hates working for a female boss??? Or in an all female environment? Drives me stark raving mad. Maybe that's why I loved intensive care.

As for hiring, our department never went through HR. I think HR tried to do the screening but we told them they could not assess professional expertise/experience, so get lost. And forget about HR drafting an ad for new hires. Hopeless.

BTW, I found out Adobe does not have an HR department.

I was much encouraged when I heard that

"Avoid like the plague any workplace/department/division/nunnery/whorehouse/what-have-you dominated by women."

Much worse is anything dominated by women and pussified men.

BTW: Didn't nunnery mean whorehouse in Shakespeare speak?

Phantom, like you I've gone the self-employed route and it's so nice not having to worry about applying for jobs. Even better, I work in an under-doctored area where it seems the only qualifications for getting hospital privileges are having an MD and a pulse. If you're good at medicine it can be a problem as you end up with all of the complicated patients who won't see quacks but then for me problem solving is the rush I get from medicine and the more complicated the problem the greater the rush.

It's been years since I've had to apply for jobs, but when I was a programmer experience counted, not formal qualifications and it's strange to think with my 40+ years of programming experience I could never get a job in the field now as I was totally self taught.

I also do hospital work as well as run a subspecialty clinic and it's nice being in the situation that there's no-one else who can do the work so I can set my own terms. The only problem we have where I work is that the docs are so good that a doctor who's only experience has been walkin clinics in a large city is out of their depth when they come here as they actually have to do something besides refill prescriptions and refer patients to specialists (often a 1 year wait where I work).

That situation results in some truly idiosyncratic doctors who would never survive in a large city because of their political incorrectness. It's nice being in a situation of far greater demand than supply.

When I hire people to work at my clinic, I don't look at resumes, I just let my right hemisphere tell me whether the person is OK or not. What I don't want is conformist staff who are afraid to think for themselves. If one of my potential medical office assistants shows the ability to creatively solve problems or talks back to me they're hired -- I want to know if there are problems in the office and I don't like yes-women. The only thing I haven't figured out how to deal with is how to deal with the interpersonal problems that gaggles of women have among themselves. Seems that groups of men are far better at having it out over a dispute and then getting on with the job.

I have had a bunch of job interviews in the past few years, and after getting zero response to my resumes, I asked someone for advice. She told me "Don't put your MBA on your resume". Worked like a charm; I was hired in a few days.

I'm proud of my MBA; it was awarded with honours, and I felt a learned a lot about business that I hadn't picked up in the twenty years I worked before taking the course. I would have thought businesses would be glad to have someone with my kind of education and experience. Wrong. Weak managers perceive you as a threat, while stronger ones believe either 1) you'll be difficult to work with (too many of your own ideas), or 2) you'll leave for greener pastures "as soon as the economy picks up".

Well I'm somewhat shocked at the ignorance shown above. Most of you commenters are normally thoughtful and intelligent.

My hard-working wife is an HR manager at a company of over 500 people. Her main responsibility is to separate the 'bad back' artists from actual workers when hiring. The level of compliance issues demanded by innumerable levels of government and their spawn would drive most people to an early grave. Also to keep the company from bankruptcy from workman's comp. claims from previous 'bad back' direct hires - generally direct hires done by the 'smarter' engineers and supervisors in the past. All of you here know the calibre of the entitlement generation.

Good luck with your company without a skilled HR pro.

The belittlement and generalization by the commenters above opens a window to your personalities better left closed.

Doowleb, what you're exhibiting is NAWALT. I'm supposed to take your one anecdote and believe it over all the others (and my own personal experiences?). My old man was an HR manager too. So was a good friend of mine. But those two anecdotes (three if we include your wife) do not overshadow decades of experience from hundreds of readers.

As a human resource person is normally present during all hiring (or lack thereof) and firing scenarios, it's not a surprise they are not generally welcome in a workers day.
Human resources, like machine maintenance are not glamorous, but are indispensible.
To cast a wide shadow over an entire class of workers is beneath the important work done on common sense sites like SDA.
Our three first hand examples are just as valid as the anecdotal negative examples you mentioned.
It may surprise you to know that many readers have no idea what NAWALT means.

Waste of time and a lie.

My first thought was: They HR departments were created to give BAer's a job, I see I'm not the only one who views that modern creation as a leftarded make work project. On the upside the HR departments seem infested with women who wear pantsuits, perhaps there's something addictive about elastic? The Big ole green machine was suppose to replace the HR departments as the next big leftwing job creation program.

Good post Captain. The Spearhead article was interesting. Being an old unemployed guy is tough in my area: plenty of newspaper routes and such. Our unemployment rate is over 10% and the U6 is closer to 25%. The Taleo / Brass Ring method drives me crazy: the time it takes and then no reply. I did work in a company where I had to work with HR doing job fairs and recruiting and interviewing. We tested for technical skills (math, writing) followed by a behavioral interview. Luckily, this part of the job was less than 10% of my responsibility. What I got a kick out of were the diversity training we were required to complete provided by HR that was run by a black guy and two women, one that was gay and the other one gave me the creeps: probably some sexual deviant. The people who most needed it were magically sick that day and allowed to complete the course by reading the propaganda that was being pushed. I got a kick out the circle we had to sit in and tell our personal stories with regards to not respecting diversity. My boss (ex-military) referred to it as a circle jerk. As it turned out, our full-time HR department was eliminated and replaced by sub-contractors who were routinely replaced yearly.

Doowleb, in my humble experience HR departments are where government regulations meet the private sector.

These are the people who make sure you have the "right ratio" of blacks to whites and gays to women, make sure the -highly trained- doctors, nurses, PTs etc. know about hand washing (I'm not lying, one place in Arizona I worked had a hand washing class for the doctors, full pay of course for a whole room full of them), they hang the damn fool notices and posters from Workmen's Comp at regulation height. They run, in short, the entire @ss-train of idiotic, intrusive, job killing, mind destroying liberal crackpot-itude that infests our lives.

If every one of them in every company in the nation were given a pair of shears and sent out to cut the grass instead doing what they do all day every day, the economy would see a boom like no other since 1946.

I'm sure your wife is a very nice, honest lady, I'm sure she works hard. But HR is where money goes to die in private business.

Maybe if private business started to push back hard on this crap instead of having whole departments to tell them how far to bend over and which way to grab their ankles, life would be better for everybody.

Hey Cappy! If more US manufacturers who passed ISO 9000 certification actually implemented it's systems, their product quality and customer satisfaction woes wouldn't have sent them off shore looking for a solution.

Unfortunately too many US manufactures payed only lip service to quality standards thinking an ISO label on their box was the same as running continuous quality improvement programs. Interestingly enough the manufacturers who adhere to ISO and other accredited quality systems survived the economic maelstrom.

Just another example that leads me to believe you've never stuck your nose through the doors of a manufacturing business.

No, Bill. You're right. I haven't.

now if you had a camera you could film me smoking a cigar, pouring myself a Rumpleminze and not give a flying f&ck, I'm sure the You Tube community would appreciate it.

Thanks for posting the link to my Spearhead "Employment Game" essays Capt.

In part III I will reveal the secret handshakes men need to know to extend their circle of influence.

Your granddaddies knew them. They were expunged from our culture and we have been forbidden to mention them.

I have been saying for years that the end of corporate culture began the day the Personnel Department (under Accounting) was renamed Human resources and given a seat at the table.