HR Depts Suck - Page 2

For my current position, I emailed my resume straight to the hiring manager, had a mutual colleague email my resume straight to the director and give him a phone call, AND submitted my resume via the online system.

My resume never made it out of the online system. It was filtered as unqualified. Yet here I am. My director had to tell HR to give them my resume and include me in the process as I was very well qualified.

Most of my problems with HR revolve around automated resume filtering.

Ha, yeah, same here. I am working the best job I've ever had, and HR rejected me within hours of my applying online. LOL, I got an email saying they didn't consider me a qualified candidate and would not be pursuing me. I kept working the back channels and a month later the hiring manager called me and I started the interview process. Ended up beating out 100+ people. He never had seen that rejection or had any hand in it whatsoever.

Good article about HR resume systems:

http://www.biospace.com/news_story.a...rce=careertips

You either have very low expectations out of Human Resources or you are delusional or simply retarded.

huh? Check your mouth son

HR Departments are like any other departments. They can suck, or they can be good. That said, when run properly, they serve a very important administrative function and are absolutely necessary, even though many people who are myopic in their views think they are "not necessary." It's like anything else. At companies with effective management, the HR department, unsurprisingly, is effective and adds value. At companies with poor management (like the kind that would hire Jon), HR might not be so effective.

the majority of folks in HR = excellent but some folks use it a stream for watercooler gossip, its certainly happened to me. Confided a concern about a boss/co-worker... only to hear a few days later how he/she was really saddened that I didn't feel comfortable confronting them about my problem. Then receiving fewer and fewer scheduled hours. While I agree, they aren't the worst a lot of them do really suck. 6k

I am going to agree with the OP and most other posters. Heaven help the HR department if I ever rise in my dreams to CEO. In the first 100 days I would fire the whole department and replace the department with behavioural psychologists. The behavioural psychologist would have written in their contracts that coming up with initiatives without the backing of hard data would lead to instant dismissal. Likewise if they cannot create list of rising stars every 6 months then 'goodbye'.

If it is important for an employee to have a 'swiss ball' or a 'bean bag' over hardcash tied to performance then he or she have their priorities wrong. He or she along with the HR person who signed off on the 'swiss ball' can start packing........

'Who is John Galt?'

This is my main gripe with HR. They either use automated filtering systems or are so ignorant of the actual nature of the jobs they are recruiting for they cannot spot directly relevent, complimentary or transferable skills. My minor gripes are that they are incompetent and self serving - I've had 3 applications handled really badly by various HR departments in the last few years - worst example was turning up to an interview to be stumped by what I thought was an extremely long winded and complex first question. It turned out I was being asked in a gentle and round-a-bout way to give a presentation on a certain aspect of the role. The other candidates had received an e-mail from HR briefing them about this presentation (it was an afterthought) - I hadn't been sent the e-mail. I only discovered this on getting feedback after another candidate had been appointed.

I certainly appreciate the difficulty in the tasks that HR is assigned. For example, for obscure, extremely technical positions like mine, HR still often gets hundreds of resumes, if not more during the peak of the recession. Most of those people are in no way shape or form qualified.

So they need a way to filter it down quickly and easily. . .

But the false positive rate is HUGE. They flag far too many qualified applicants as unqualified.

A classmate from my MBA program told me that their company stopped doing relocation because of the economy. They filtered resumes by address first. If they couldn't find someone within 15 minutes of their location, they looked at 30 minutes, etc. Naturally, those positions stayed open for insanely long periods of time. They wouldn't even consider someone a few hours away that wanted the job but would pay for relocation out of pocket.

It seems HR is setting themselves up to fail with these hiring systems they have in place.

The biggest problem is when HR thinks they own something instead of being an internal servicing function that isn't in charge. For that matter, when they enforce rules by rote they do fine. When they think they are lawyers, that's when the problems start.

That's why I don't apply through HR if I can help it.

My experiences with HR, which thankfully has been very limited, was a joke. I have absolutely nothing good to say about them at all.