The HR Monster

Once upon a time, most employers had a department called "Personnel", the function of which was to manage the records and paychecks of employees.  Hiring and firing was left to the people actually supervising the work.  During the 70s, possibly as a result of workplace discrimination, "Personnel" evolved into "Human Resources" and a monster was unleashed by corporate America.

The United States government, out of necessity, has long had its own monster known as the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.  It is a big bureaucracy which manages to fill thousands of job vacancies every week either by outside hires or promoting from within.  As big and as impersonal as it is, OPM pretty much leaves the hiring decisions to managers as long as the candidates pass the Civil Service Test and meet posted job criteria.  OPM is much too big to concern itself with the details of hiring decisions.  In the private sector, however, personnel directors often insinuate themselves into organizations in ways that could suggest arrogance.  Over time, the HR Monster has grown into a gate-keeping function with power that challenges the highest echelons of top management.  In the trenches, hiring managers and job seekers both must surmount the HR Monster's formidable obstacles and traps at every step before they can schedule the initial interview.


One of the ways the HR Monster wields its power is by turning a two-week hiring process into something that stretches across months.  When it finally announces an open position, existing employees in most organizations have the first opportunity to apply for the job.  Once the carefully-screened internal applicants have been processed and rejected by the hiring manager, the HR Monster, in its own time, will begin the more costly process of opening the job the public at large.  This is where the hiring manager's political skills are truly tested, because the HR Monster needs to feel loved and feared, but mostly revered. 

For job applicants, the HR Monster requires a trial by fire known as the on-line job application.  In the pre-HR era, an applicant submitted a résumé along with a cover letter and the hiring manager contacted the applicant directly to set up the interview.  This led to many "misunderstandings" and bad hires and so eventually, the HR Monster created a way to apply a bit of science to candidate screening that would improve the quality of job applicants and facilitate decision-making.  Filling out a job application on paper was bad enough because it meant digging through boxes of files and piles of old records in order to fill in the dates of employment and education, as well as compensation, as accurately as possible.  Once the process went on the internet, it became a form of torture.  HR data entry screens require very precise answers ($24,095 as opposed to $24K; mm/dd/yy as opposed to mm/yy or simply yyyy) and certification that the responses submitted are 100% accurate.  Another soul-killing problem is session time-outs.  If the applicant takes too long to answer a question (because she is looking in the attic for employment records from the dark ages) the session will time-out and delete everything she has entered thus far.  And, forget about including volunteer work (such as serving on an officially sanctioned citizen committee) for which there was no compensation because the salary must be greater than zero and the answer must be truthful!

Résumés allow job applicants to circumvent de facto age-discrimination because one can eliminate dates altogether.  On-line job applications, on the other hand, shout one's age out loud and clear.  So, if an applicant is 60 and looking for five or six years of employment to finish his or her career, the job will be offered to a younger, less qualified person because the fully qualified older worker would be "bored".  The euphemism coined by the HR Monster for rejecting older applicants is that they are "over-qualified".  

So what's an over-qualified older worker supposed to do?  Flip burgers, I guess.