Agreed. For people who don't know, HR is't like "Internal Affairs" like you see in movies, they are employed by the company to do a few things:
1. Create benefit plans.
2. Keep the employer from getting sued.
#2 is particularly important. They are very risk averse, so they will take the quickest path to safety. Post something on social media that someone could take out of context or misinterpret? Fired. Shortest path. Criticize the company or your boss in some way? Fired. Shortest path. Say something overheard by someone else that might offend them? Fired. Shortest path. A potential hire says something odd to the HR manager during an interview? Denied, to risky.
Something funny, at a company I worked for years ago, HR created a questionnaire to gauge morale in the company compared to other software companies. Every department was well below the average (meaning low morale) except the HR department which was well above.
I couldn't agree more with your comment. I've seen too many people fall into the trap of believing that the HR department is there to protect them, only to find out much too late that the reality is as you described.
about 10 years ago i was assigned to a project to build some in-house HR software which required me to interact with quite a few on the HR Team (the dev team, both of us, even moved our desks into their area) for about four months.
aside from one or two benefits administrators, the rest were "HR generalists" and none of them had any discernible skills whatever. And lazy...not a single HR function that they hadn't outsourced. With almost no experience or skill requirement to limit the pool of applicants, the competition for HR jobs is clearly high and incumbents were terrified at doing anything which might jeopardize their job. As far as i could tell, this fear determined nearly all of their day-to-day interaction.
I wonder. Every internet resource states that HR is there to look out for the company, not for you (well, for themselves, to be precise). Maybe people coming in who act as if HR is working for them are actually playing more elaborate mindgames than we can understand?
1. Create benefit plans. 2. Keep the employer from getting sued.
#2 is particularly important. They are very risk averse, so they will take the quickest path to safety. Post something on social media that someone could take out of context or misinterpret? Fired. Shortest path. Criticize the company or your boss in some way? Fired. Shortest path. Say something overheard by someone else that might offend them? Fired. Shortest path. A potential hire says something odd to the HR manager during an interview? Denied, to risky.
Something funny, at a company I worked for years ago, HR created a questionnaire to gauge morale in the company compared to other software companies. Every department was well below the average (meaning low morale) except the HR department which was well above.
Beware.