Britain’s HR sector has grown by 83pc since 2011, expanding more than five times as fast as overall employment over the same period.
It means 1.6pc of the workforce is now employed in human resources, far above America’s 1pc and double the EU’s 0.8pc. This translates into more than 200,000 workers, with incomes estimated at £10bn per year.
Fire them all…..It’s actually in one of the only three management books everyone should read, “Up the Organisation”. There shouldn;t be a personnel deaprt (as HR used to be called) at all. The hiring process is the assistant to the line manager looking to hire. If you don;t trust the line manager to make the right hiring decision then what in buggery are you doing employing them as a manager?
Who else is going to employ all those middle-aged power skirts with a degree in art?
Middle-aged? The younger ones are just as zealous, if not more, in their desire to feminise our society…
Why is the figure top left pulling his face off? Does AI think the elites are aliens wearing human skins; maybe adult versions of whatever the fuck is crawling at lower right?
The shit really hits the fan when shareholder pressure leads to the HR skirt, already drunk on power and possessing the absolute assurance that she alone has all the answers, being shunted upwards to CEO,
“shareholder pressure”?
Hardly. Most shareholders aren’t voting.
True enough, hedge fund pressure then.
Personnel Dept should just be a clever girl with a sharp pencil.
( Not me, by the way. I read it in the Speccie ).
The most important thing Personnel must do is learn the relevant employment laws.
Much employment law needs repealing first…
Much employment law falls under “the HR full employment act”. It’s intended to require more people to fulfill the requirements.
Which also has the effect of making it harder to start up a company, since you need to follow those laws from the start. The reduced competition is certainly appreciated in existing companies.
…and administer payroll, commission payments, employee records, temporary assignments of employees to remote locations… All the things more efficiently done once rather than by busy line managers individually.
Still don’t need an HR department.
The payroll is all outsourced these days. Employee records and commission payment calculations are better done by finance than personnel.
Temporary assignments, either contract it out to a relocation adviser, or if you do a lot of it have your own office. But it’s a relocation office with a restricted remit.
And when you need to get rid of an employee, you bring in an outside adviser to make sure the process is watertight.
Pretty much all of that is outsourced to dedicated companies.
Again, my last job all that stuff was *input* by HR (managers, of course, MADE the temporary assignments, and input them into the system) and it was all processed by a third party company that specializes in it.
The couple jobs before the last didn’t even have personnel departments.
There’s a huge difference on the power that HR can have on company culture when they’re inside the company and when they’re a contractor.
It can be a small, useful function. Manages the payroll, knows employment law, a bit about the disciplinary process, advise on how to handle a situation, knows where to advertise etc. I’ve worked in places where there’s 2 women doing all of this for over 300 staff.
The problem with government and with a lot of fat organisations is that the parasites descend on them. Senior management don’t care that much about waste as it has plenty of money. Someone in HR comes up with “we should do diversity” and they go for it as it sounds like a good idea.
My first job after leaving school, “Staff” department was two nice middle-aged ladies looking after twenty thousand workers.
And that’s the point. Satellite departments in UK engineering I worked in had a ratio of about 1:200 and were excellent.
In the central offices though it was more like 1:40, and obviously with so many they justify their existence by meddling, it was just horrendous. New (pointless) courses to the corporate curriculum every week, DEI events every day (at least one a week mandatory) and then preventing us from performance management of those who wouldn’t have even been invited for interview in the little offsite departments. Most junior managers there unionised – wanted to ensure they had some damned protection from them all.
It was a fond memory though when we did have a couple of powerskirts from corporate given very short shift by the 2 extremely competent ladies who managed the satellite site – quite brazenly told in a public forum to go away and come back when they’d read some employment law.
Our 100 + employee engineering firm ran fine with no personnel/ HR dept for years. Then the MD’s secretary (a jumped up typist) persuaded the boss to send her on an HR course. Having completed the course she morphed into an HR manager & had the life of Riley, until… New boss, makes her work for a living by firing people, then after the cull he fired her. She got what she deserved after lording over us, attending hiring interviews & interfering etc, & she wasn’t even a very good typist.
We need to do away with most of the employment, equality and other laws first, otherwise said manager and assistant could find themselves in jail or spending most of their time trying to figure out what they can and can’t do.
OT (but connected to HR, in that AI could well replace the entire HR dept), there’s an interesting thought experiment as to how the AI revolution might turn out here:
https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic?status=none&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=MORN%20%2020260224%20%20KILLIK%20%20KJ%2BCID_044d37669993566380503dfdb287971a
Perhaps our host would care to comment?
Personally I think the scenario is very plausible, but with one rather critical problem – LLM based AI doesn’t work well enough for people to put their lives (or businesses) in its hands. Once a few people end up on the street (and/or dead) because their AI agent f*cks their entire life over, demand for such services would crater.
Interesting Jim. I’m not sure I share your optimism that fucking people’s lives up will be the end of AI – the NHS is still going strong, as are many public and private institutions which fuck up people’s lives and don’t seem to pay much of a price.
Indeed Jim. Very interesting. From my point of view, whoo-hoo, bring it on. Can’t wait!
Never known an HR department to run payroll. In my experience payroll is always a function of the Finance department.
Or outsourced like my company did, the firm we used handled all calculations and submissions to HMRC faultlessly and remarkably cheaply as well.
The overriding purpose of HR is to protect the company from its employees. The more litigious our country becomes the easier it is for HR to argue that their team needs to grow to meet the threat.
Where do B Corps sit in all of this? Personally I go out of my way not to patronised them, if possible.
Is the B Corp actually named after the B Ark, or is it just a very appropriate coincidence?
I spent most of my career in universities and the remainder in manufacturing industries.
The notion that hiring engineers and scientists should be in the hands of bleedin’ amateurs has always seemed fantastical to me.
Come to that, the US method of having students admitted by bleedin’ amateurs seems likewise potty.
Well, you have to find somewhere to put all those wonderfully & usefully educated graduates. You want ’em flipping burgers?
A lot of personnel functions in US are computerized.
It’s grown so much, even the Beeb has noticed: it’s just been mentioned on the World At One.
And after you’ve got HR cleaned up, how ’bout doing something about all the social workers?
They can be useful when limited to managing benefits. It’s when they become involved in who actually gets hired or fired that they are an impediment.
My last job I was interviewed by the HR department and no one else. Weird.