Human resources

Once known as “personnel” then, in the heady days before investment banking become an embarrassing career choice “human capital management”, those sainted professionals now usually known as human resources are possibly the least resourceful group of humans to ever emerge from the dark ages of free enterprise.

Some have claimed human resources departments are some kind of extended phenotype — an adaptation that the rest of us depend upon for our own survival. The better view is that we are an extended phenotype of theirs (in the same way that wheat domesticated homo sapiens and not vice versa).

In any case, a good portion of the bullshittery and pretty much all of the tedious virtue-signalling that is now such a feature of modern corporate life can be laid at the security controlled access to the HR department. For they who spend hundreds of thousands on back-to-work schemes for those who took career breaks to have kids were the same who spent the same period systematically making redundant those who decided to stay on.

And who do you think is most (for which read “only”) enthusiastic proponent of the 360° performance appraisal? It, and the dives and constructive dismissal claims it so brazenly solicits, keeps scores of HR folk employed every year.

As a policy stance, HR will publicly deny but privately insist upon forced ranking. It will demand the hardest of disciplinary lines for those poor souls shunted into the bottom bucket — all of this in the interests of fairness and transparency and to minimise claims for constructive dismissal — but will then decline to permit the consequences (ie firing the poor sod) because of the risk of procedural unfairness in doing so.

Fears:

• constructive dismissal
• divers
• excuse pre-loaders (who are often divers)

Loves:

• performance appraisal
• nine-box talent charts

Dramatis personae: CEO | CFO | Client | Employees: Divers · Excuse pre-loaders · Survivors · Contractors · The Muppet Show | Middle management: COO · Consultant · MBA | Controllers: Financial reporting | Risk | Credit | Operations | IT | Legal: GC · Inhouse counsel · Docs unit · Litigator · Tax lawyer · US attorney Lawyer | Front office: Trading | Structuring | Sales |