WTF does HR do all day long?

I know it's agonizing waiting for a decision to come back, but like any profession, they have a ton of other responsibilities and other employees to keep track of at work. They may have a week in which they don't get much done, or some kind of emergency comes up that means everything else gets put on hold, or they may have to wait on management's approval before sending the final yes/no, even if they love you and want to extend you an offer right away.

Be patient and hang in there!

^ what he said.

I don't know what HR does, I've never had to deal with them. My impression is that they sit in the area for 'special people' all day playing with fingerpaints.

EDIT: let me be more clear, I've never had any productive interaction with HR until AFTER I got the job though someone else.

Quotation from a girl in HR: "I got into HR because I like knowing people's business."

good luck!

i work in an internal finance role and can tell you that before an offer goes out, it has to go through several rounds of approvals and sometimes they can get bottlenecked at one of these stages. as a part of my controllership duties, i approve/reject most offers that come through our BU based on budgetary constraints. most go through smoothly, but if an offer goes over budget substanially, i have to call up the hiring manager and find out how he/she plans on funding the difference. this usually involves setting up a meeting with the hiring manager to discuss their operating budget, which is a bitch especially if i have other time-sensitve deliverables.

so yeah, chill dude. shit takes time.

HR, though I have little good to say about them in general, has a tough job. I think Frieds said something similar not too long ago.

They have to manage current employees, internal events within or between divisions, incoming employees taking their return offers, recruiting new employees from every school they have a relationship with both undergrad and MBA, dealing with the cold emails of all xx-thousand non-target kids who fight tooth and nail for any chance they can get ... you get the picture. I wouldn't ever do it, and inevitably everyone's gonna gripe at them while they do it, but be glad they're at least handling it for you so you don't have the headache of going through the bureaucracy yourself, only the headache of waiting.

I was a little irritated when I wrote this but my question was earnest. I actually would like to know what is involved on HR's end in authorizing bringing on a new hire. I would be interested to hear about this in greater detail, sayandarula.

prnz:

A group that is trying to hire me has been waiting on HR to authorize adding a staffer for over a week. Why does it take HR so long to make a simple yes/no decision? Serious question.

also worth noting, in this economy with all sorts of hiring freezes, companies often have to look at existing open requisitions and choose which ones will continue to get funded and which ones will be put on hold. generally speaking, these decisions aren't being made by HR.

• Deal with Employee Relations (because some manager messed up a performance evaluation or did something incredibly bone-headed). Could mean investigations, gathering information etc. to protect company
  • Due dilligence on transcripts, references
  • Start the back office processes (ensuring facilities, IT, Payroll are all notified)
  • Documenting anything / starting employee file
  • Screening resumes (over 500 resumes for an admin role that was only posted for a week)
  • Generally scheduling the logistics for the interviews (potentially attending if manager is new, or it is company policy)
  • Preparing any required welcome package / orientation materials
  • Processing any recent terminations (ensuring all materials / confidentiality waivers etc. are done and up to internal audit's requirements)
  • Helping managers with job descriptions, performance management, and employee development (as required)

All of this before they generally have to do things that may actually be of higher value like: - helping build development paths for high performers (stars) - succession planning with those, and based on economic, demographic conditions - business oriented people metrics (employee productivity, workforce gaps) - teaching managers how to manage....and how to recruit (considering the cost of a bad hire...pretty big deal)

And this is assuming there are no unions to deal with and collective agreements. That makes a whole new world of pain with "classification" and how offers are done.

Are they the highest performing employees in an org? Dunno...how many people really are.

I've never understood this hatred of the back office people, they do what needs to be done so we can do what we want to do.

And, in reality, there are about 1.5 HR people per 100 employees. And, the biggest kicker is it is probably 2-3 of those employees taking up 80% of HR's time.

Quite frankly for the amount of money most IBers make, you're a big investment. It's worth doing it right the first time /shrug.

Just my thoughts.

sayandarula check PMs

sayandarula, with all due respect, you're wrong about HR being on the new hires' side - they're on their own side. HR has a specific set of guidelines to follow and are not allowed to deviate from it unless they want to be fired. I'm one of those people that never got past the HR wall and I was forced to network my way by directly contacting senior staff and recruiters who were connected to senior staff.

I don't hate HR, but I've never been what they're looking for. If it was up to HR, I'd be unemployed, and never have gotten a chance at all. So, I have no love of a group of people that have never experienced being on the recieving end of their own stupid judgement calls, nor do I particularly respect people that have no idea how to do what it is I do but will still try to make "qualified decisions" and give thier "opinion" on 'issues'.....they're like dealing with hippies who show up to an econ class and argue the meaning of the concept 'supply and demand'.

Let me illustrate with an analogy: Years ago in college, I had a restaurant manager who never bartended and didn't know how to. He was a great guy and was excellent with keeping other things running, but he single handedly killed the bar's side of the business with stupid opinions, ignorance, incompetence, and talking about "how things should be", and eventually was replaced by a guy who had worked up from bartending to management. I see HR in a similar light: they have their place, but they don't know what they're doing past a certain point, and if you can avoid them altogether you're better off.

HR is at their best when they're invisible: background checks, benefits initialization, payroll shit, that sort of thing. But whenever HR sticks their nose into our group to tell us what we 'need', the MD throws shit across the room.....they DON'T know, and we DON'T care what they have to say about how to run our business, so go back to filing the fucking fingerprints. If our group is over budget, we get a call from the c-level guys, but don't ever think that finance is making that decision any more than accounting is making the money:

WE DO

For the record, I understand the function of HR, just as much as I do compliance and legal, and I'm not contesting that they add value, but my personal experience is of them causing far more grief than utility.

HR is definitely not your friend. They're actually no ones friend. The only thing you are (and ever will be) to HR is a cost/source of revenue. Oh and I also would like to quote a chick looking to get into HR: " I like being in control of peoples lives."

fyi, I have had several bad encounters with HR so I'm biased.

I worked in many companies with many HR "managers" both as a high ranking manager (CTO, CEO) and as "regular" employee (senior principal something something) .. for e.g. a company (swedish) had 460 employees and a SINGLE HR MANAGER!!! was hiring non stop, ppl were coming, going, 460ppl were from all over the world, only few worked from "office", they were hired, paid etc in many different ways, sending them company stuff (laptops, bags, tshirts..) took a lot of effort (some in NZ, some in South Africa, some in Ukraine, China, Japan, Russia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Norway, USA ...) and it was done by a SINGLE PERSON!!! 1HR manager for 459 employees. Everything was ALWAYS on time, we had 2 times a year "all company meeting" where we all gathered in same place (she organized all tickets, hotels, transportations..) and once per year every team (we had 5 teams) had their own separate meeting (again she organized everything), she never complained and she said always she has plenty of free time in 8h day so she organized some other stuff for us privately (as lot of us worked for different open source groups without hr stuff)

Now I for e.g. work in a big company (many thousands) where every decision is slow as hell and where we have an HR manager on 20-30 employees. We have almost as much HR managers as we have technical personnel and we are IT company!!! Per every tech person you have 3-4 managers and 1-2 "something" .. there is office in Balkans where we have 8 employees, 1 technical, 2 sales and 1HR+1"facility manager"+"organisational manager", 1"office manager", 1secretary and a director ?! that's more then 50% waste... and NOTHING IS EVER ON TIME, simple stuff takes a week or two to be decided, and when from time to time there is a meeting they bring "important" stuff to the table "we need to organize more fruits in the kitchen", "we want to replace soda from kitchen with some bs" etc etc ... the fact that your plane ticket was not organized in time, that ....

HR are bunch of fingerpainters bluffing their road "in" and when they get "in" they stick together so finally you get companies with huge bureaucracy filled with slackers like 99% of HR are

Once had a HR person ding me because I wasnt able to build a rapport with her on the phone, whilst she asked to run through my resume. I bypass them as often as I can now.

.