“
HR?'
'Human Resources.'
'In Brussels that kind of department is referred to as the Office for Personkind Enablement. Resources sounds like something you dig out of the ground.
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Peter F. Hamilton (Great North Road)
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Choosing to work in HR is like choosing to work in the complaint department of hell, except way more frustrating, because at least in hell you’d be able to agree that that Satan is a real dick-wagon without having to toe the company line.
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Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir)
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Gossip is an unavoidable evil at school, work, or wherever, but when the HR department gossips, it elevates into malice.
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($) (I Deal to Plunder - A ride through the boom town)
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The job of human resources is to make sure that resources come to work with their hearts and go back to their homes with happiness.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 (H.R. 2560) did not pass. So the Defense Department could be cloning now.
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Annie Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency)
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Diversity training doesn’t solve the problem of women being perceived as “pushy” and unlikable if they dare to seek power; our legal system isn’t equipped to deal with the fact that Americans still prefer male bosses (and politicians). Sexual harassment is still rampant in our modern workplaces, and often HR departments are all but powerless to do anything to stop it.
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Jessica Bennett (Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace)
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God could not be reached for comment. But let us at least agree that He is quite obviously attuned to the doings of politics and media. That is why so many would-be leaders say they are being “called upon” to run for president, and why eulogists lean so heavily on the trope that God runs an HR department that recruits people like Sunday hosts and yachtsmen into heaven.
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Mark Leibovich (This Town)
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Human resources is the place where people come to complain and/or shoot people when they just can’t take it anymore. Choosing to work in HR is like choosing to work in the complaint department of hell, except way more frustrating, because at least in hell you’d be able to agree that that Satan is a real dick-wagon without having to toe the company line. The HR department is the place where people stop by to say, “THIS IS TOTALLY FUCKED UP,” and the HR employees will nod thoughtfully and professionally as they think to themselves, “Wow. That is totally fucked up. I wish that this person would leave so I could tell everyone else in the office about it.
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Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir)
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this class of women currently has the mic. I suspect many will fight tooth and nail to keep it, using every form of overt and covert political street-fighting at their disposal. In pursuit of their class interests, they’ll use weight of numbers across education, NGOs and corporate HR departments to tip the scales in favour of the legal fiction that sex doesn’t need to exist.
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Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress)
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At the very least, it’s clear the decision to use sex-incongruent language of any sort should normally be a free choice. It’s not acceptable on the part of any organisation to coercively require this on pain of sanction. Trying to encourage social norms of politeness in a company or institution, including encouraging people to use preferred pronouns where sex isn’t relevant, is one thing; having HR departments threaten people with accusations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘hate speech’ if they don’t is quite another. As a trans person, having your preferred pronouns or other sex-incongruent terms used by others is a courtesy on their part and not a right on yours.
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Kathleen Stock (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism)
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Corvallis sometimes thought back on the day, three decades ago, when Richard Forthrast had reached down and plucked him out of his programming job at Corporation 9592 and given him a new position, reporting directly to Richard. Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard had answered, simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people,” was “weird stuff.” It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff.” As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. About then, he’d been interrupted by a spate of urgent text messages from one of the company’s novelists, who had run aground on some desolate narrative shore and needed moral support, and so the discussion had gone no further. Someone had intervened and written a sufficiently vague job description for Corvallis and made up a job title that would make it possible for him to get the level of compensation he was expecting. So it had all worked out fine. And it made for a fun story to tell on the increasingly rare occasions when people were reminiscing about Dodge back in the old days. But the story was inconclusive in the sense that Dodge had been interrupted before he could really get to the essence of what “weird stuff” actually was and why it was so important. As time went on, however, Corvallis understood that this very inconclusiveness was really a fitting and proper part of the story.
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Neal Stephenson (Fall; or, Dodge in Hell)
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We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.
Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.
Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity.
In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them.
Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.
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Kristopher Jansma (Why We Came to the City)
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McMaster said he had been completely in the dark about this. The secretary of state had not consulted or even informed him in advance. He had learned from press reports! In a news conference in Qatar, Tillerson had said the agreement “represents weeks of intensive discussions” between the two governments so it had been in the works for a while. Porter said Tillerson had not gone through the policy process at the White House and had not involved the president either. Clearly Tillerson was going off on his own. “It is more loyal to the president,” McMaster said, “to try to persuade rather the circumvent.” He said he carried out direct orders when the president was clear, and felt duty bound to do so as an Army officer. Tillerson in particular did not. “He’s such a prick,” McMaster said. “He thinks he’s smarter than anyone. So he thinks he can do his own thing.” In his long quest to bring order to the chaos, Priebus arranged for each of the key cabinet members to regularly check in. Tillerson came to his office at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18. McMaster had not been invited but joined the meeting anyway. He took a seat at the conference table. The national security adviser’s silent presence was ominous and electric. Tell me, Priebus asked Tillerson, how are things going? Are you on track to achieve your primary objectives? How is the relationship between the State Department and the White House? Between you and the president? “You guys in the White House don’t have your act together,” Tillerson said, and the floodgates gushed open. “The president can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to make a decision. He won’t make a decision. He makes a decision and then changes his mind a couple of days later.” McMaster broke his silence and raged at the secretary of state. “You don’t work with the White House,” McMaster said. “You never consult me or anybody on the NSC staff. You blow us off constantly.” He cited examples when he tried to set up calls or meetings or breakfasts with Tillerson. “You are off doing your own thing” and communicate directly with the president, Mattis, Priebus or Porter. “But it’s never with the National Security Council,” and “that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he issued his most dramatic charge. “You’re affirmatively seeking to undermine the national security process.” “That’s not true,” Tillerson replied. “I’m available anytime. I talk to you all the time. We just had a conference call yesterday. We do these morning calls three times a week. What are you talking about, H.R.? I’ve worked with you. I’ll work with anybody.” Tillerson continued, “I’ve also got to be secretary of state. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m in a different time zone. I can’t always take your calls.” McMaster said he consulted with the relevant assistant secretaries of state if the positions were filled. “I don’t have assistant secretaries,” Tillerson said, coldly, “because I haven’t picked them, or the ones that I have, I don’t like and I don’t trust and I don’t work with. So you can check with whoever you want. That has no bearing on me.” The rest of the State Department didn’t matter; if you didn’t go through him, it didn’t count.
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Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
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You may be thinking that your company has a human resources person who will keep you out of trouble. This is a dangerous misconception. Whether your company has a massive Human Resources Department with hundreds of representatives or a small office with just a single representative, these HR reps are not your advocates. They work for the company, not for you.
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Johanna Harris (Use Protection: An Employee's Guide to Advancement in the Workplace)
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Despite all this you should try to get one internship under your belt. But do so according to the following rules: -The nanosecond you realize the majority of your work is merely to do filing, faxing, scanning, etc., leave. Don’t tell them, don’t inform them. Leave. Also, file a complaint with that company’s HR department and inform the career services center of your college about the false advertising of that firm. -Keep trying to find an internship that does give you experience. This may take three or four tries, but inevitably you will find one that is worthwhile. -Do not spend more than six months at an internship. Get it on your resume, establish a good rapport with your boss, but then cite college as your primary responsibility. Only if they offer you full-time employment after graduation should you stick around. -Only get one internship. Additional internships add nothing to your marketability. Spend your time instead drinking, chasing girls/boys and playing volleyball.
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Aaron Clarey (Worthless)
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the CTO is there to guide the board away from making decisive calls that are logical to people with a limited understanding of technology and the market conditions associated with it, but are clearly dangerous to somebody in the know. For example, buying a new proprietary HR and finance system on a five-year deal from a supplier that the department has already worked with for ten years might seem sensible to a non-technologist. The fact that the system is a complete pain to use (and ruinously expensive) may just about crop up on the leadership radar. What may not is the fact that systems like this are likely to become commoditised–which is to say, cheap and easily swapped with similar alternatives–in less than five years. Through a combination of ignorance and inertia, the department would be locking itself into the wrong deal, and constraining itself strategically as a result. A CTO stops this kind of mistake.
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Andrew Greenway (Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery (Perspectives))
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The HR department is like the soldiers in the movie 300, holding the line. They have no power to say ‘yes’ but enormous power to say ‘no.’ Their job is to prevent you from moving forward. Find a way to vault past them by getting introductions to people who can say ‘yes.
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Reid Hoffman (The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career)
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Girl, this office is living with demons in our desks and behind our backs. You have no idea how many of us have started taking antidepressants since signing our SPP offers. How many employees left because they couldn’t take medical leave. One even had to be hospitalized for dehydration, and what did SPP’s HR department do about it? Nothing.
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Iman Hariri-Kia (A Hundred Other Girls)
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The system needs to be managed, not the people. We don’t need to do more things or implement difficult frameworks, methods, or models; we need to learn how to allow people to give their best effort to the company by providing the correct structures. It’s a path of trial and error to find the best way for each company. The Agile principles and mindset can serve as a guide. The tools and practices work sometimes, but not every time. The only way to move forward is through continuous learning. The companies that learn faster than the others will be the winners. HR has the power to design the structures that either support people to perform or make it difficult to contribute in creative and innovative ways. If HR holds onto the old, traditional approach, the consequence will be rigid and fixed organizations chained to ineffective systems and processes. HR can either support or hinder the change toward a more Agile organization, which is why HR needs to go first! By providing different structures and focusing on customer value instead of rules, HR can lead companies through change that no other department is capable of.
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Pia-Maria Thoren (Agile People: A Radical Approach for HR & Managers (That Leads to Motivated Employees))
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We were discussing the performance-potential matrix that so many companies use for succession planning or “talent management.” McKinsey & Company originally developed it to help General Electric decide which businesses to invest in, and HR departments
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Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
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On March 28, 2013, President Barack Obama signed the short-term spending bill HR 933 into law to prevent the government from shutting down. Discreetly slipped inside the bill, however, was an additional rider—section 735, dubbed the Farmer Assurance Provision. Environmental activists had their own nickname for it: the “Monsanto Protection Act.” Outraged, they argued that the rider—which had been written by Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), in collaboration with Monsanto itself[1]—would provide big agribusiness with immunity from judicial oversight. In effect, it would allow the US Department of Agriculture to approve of the planting of genetically modified crops even if the judiciary had declared them unsafe.
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Jason Louv (Monsanto vs. the World: The Monsanto Protection Act, GMOs and Our Genetically Modified Future)
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Visit any damn company, small or large, in this Pune city, go to the HR department, and ask for Steven Chopade's resume, and you'll get it.
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Steven Chopade
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Here is what the HR department at Berkeley suggests for a plan of action: - Meet with your direct report to discuss their plan and goals - Provide feedback on their goals - Provide suggestions for activities that can help them reach their goals - Help them set realistic timelines for goal achievement - Help them troubleshoot potential obstacles - Schedule meetings to check in and see how they’re doing - Remain flexible and revise plan as needed
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Chad Halverson (People Management: Everything you need to know about managing and leading people at work)
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In The End of Jobs, Taylor Pearson calls this The Turkey Problem, inspired by a clever analogy found in Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan. Taleb writes: “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.” Bye-bye Mr. Turkey. The turkey thinks he’s safe, until he realizes at the last minute that he’s not. We tend to believe that working at big corporations keeps us safe. But in reality, it’s the job of the HR department to make you feel that way, even if it’s not true. Every day you work at a large corporation, you’re building up silent risk. One day, you might realize you’re a turkey. Do you remember a company called Lehman Brothers? I know it’s a distant memory for some, but before 2008 it was the 4th largest investment bank in the United States. Then it went bankrupt. Bye-bye.
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Jesse Tevelow (Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion)
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Remember that performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs, no matter what your HR department tells you. Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. They might be worth 50 percent more than your average people or fifty times more, but they are absolutely worth more. Make sure they feel it. Even if you don’t have the financial resources to provide huge differences in pay, providing greater differences will mean something.
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Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
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Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance. Employees hate it. Managers hate it. Even HR departments hate it.
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Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
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Everyone knew that the department was deserted on Sundays – the joke being that H.R. were such God-like figures that on the seventh day they rested – but that didn’t make it any easier to infiltrate.
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Mervyn S. Whyte ('No Plan B, Malcolm!')
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It’s Time to Split HR 500 words HBR article by Ram Charan, July–August Many CEOs are disappointed with their HR departments. Charan proposes a radical solution: Eliminate the position of chief human resources officer and split HR into two functions: HR-A (administration), which would manage compensation and benefits and report to the CFO, and HR-LO (leadership and organization), which would focus on improving people capabilities and report to the CEO. Here’s what our readers had to say:
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Anonymous
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Many organizations, oblivious that good work culture has the propensity to propel the organization to the next well, turn deaf ears and blind eyes to the cold culture that has inevitably developed within the structure due to lack of supervision and timely strategic advice and training. The higher management may view the work culture that has developed within the company as ancillary to business progress and lunge it across to the HR department to magically iron the creases of an involuntarily besmirched work culture or blunt work culture.
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Henrietta Newton Martin- Author Strategic Human Resource Management - A Primer
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Many organizations, oblivious that good work culture has the propensity to propel the organization to the next level, turn deaf ears and blind eyes to the cold culture that has inevitably developed within the structure due to lack of supervision and timely strategic advice and training. The higher management may view the work culture that has developed within the company as ancillary to business progress and lunge it across to the HR department to magically iron the creases of an involuntarily besmirched work culture or blunt work culture.
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Henrietta Newton Martin, Author - Strategic Human Resource Management -A Primer
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The Under-Informed…
I saw this continuously when I was a job seeker. I’d call a friend working for a great company and make the mistake of asking him,
“Do you know of any good job opportunities at your company?”
He responded, “Oh no, they’ve been eliminating jobs for years.”
After hanging up, I went to his employer’s career site and found page upon page of good jobs, many of which I could apply for.
When you worked for your last employer, did you know anything about open positions outside of your department?
Unless you worked in HR or were actively looking for a new position there, you knew nothing.
It’s easy to think, “They work there, and they’re closer to it than I am, so they should know.”
In reality, they rarely know more than you. If they do know more, it’s rarely a full picture of all of the opportunities.
TAKEAWAY
1. Don’t ask people who don’t know.
2. Don’t listen to people who don’t know.
Believe me, everyone and their brother, cousin, great aunt (you get the idea) will be only too happy to give you their opinions.
So, after you’ve read the resume section and created your resume, and one of these people tells you, “You’ve done it all wrong,” ask that person, “When was the last time you hired someone? When was the last time you interviewed someone?”
If you don’t feel inclined to pose these questions, make a beeline for the door or turn up the volume on your ear buds.
A few years ago when I was in between roles, I messaged a former co-worker and made the mistake of asking her about jobs in the Tampa Bay area.
She replied, “There are no jobs in Tampa Bay.”
She was obviously misinformed or at least under-informed, because I had a phone interview for a position in Tampa Bay the next day.
In short, don’t be quick to assume that the people you’re communicating with are the best source of information. Do you really want to make what could be life-impacting decisions based on people whose knowledge is limited?
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
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If you do not treat your departing employees fairly and respectfully, the engagement levels of the other employees go down significantly.
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Harjeet Khanduja (HR Mastermind)
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An important characteristic of a good HR department fo any organization is the department's ability to strike a balance between preserving employee confidentiality and divulging enough information to the management with the aim of being fair to every human as a resource serving the organization.
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Henrietta Newton Martin-Legal Advisor & Author
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Here’s what I reckon. In the olden days, there were institutional boundaries that kept us from getting overexcited. Our employers provided them, for instance. We worked a 9-to-5 day and weekends were off-limits. We didn’t take our phones home. We didn’t have home computers. We weren’t on call 24/7. We could whine if the boundaries were crossed and someone - a boss, the HR department or the Union - would fix the issue.
The church ordained days of rest each week and the shops were closed on Sundays. Plane trips were once-in-a-lifetime experiences. We communicated with letters, written slowly and mindfully. No one experienced one-hour-or-less response times.
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Sarah Wilson (First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety)
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For example, executives and HR departments should not offer the vice president of Enron a string of government jobs in the public-private international development and infrastructure industries after his company’s debacle.
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Sarah Chayes (On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake)
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In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department's open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then "you people" (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of "you people," was "weird stuff." As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain "weird stuff" to "you people" was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying.
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Neal Stephenson (Fall; or, Dodge in Hell)
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I can talk with HR in the morning.’ ‘HR?’ ‘Human Resources.’ ‘In Brussels that kind of department is referred to as the Office for Personkind Enablement. Resources sounds like something you dig out of the ground. It’s offensive to so many people given the historical rare earth mineral conflicts.
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Peter F. Hamilton (Great North Road)
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How much awareness does the HR department have about software systems? Does the group of department leaders deciding how to allocate budget across teams know of the likely effects of their choices on the viability of the software architecture? Given that there is increasing evidence for the homomorphism behind Conway’s law, it is very ineffective (perhaps irresponsible) for organizations that build software systems to decide on the shape, responsibilities, and boundaries of teams without input from technical leaders. Organization design and software design are, in practice, two sides of the same coin, and both need to be undertaken by the same informed group of people. Allan Kelly’s view of a software architect’s role expands further on this idea: More than ever I believe that someone who claims to be an Architect needs both technical and social skills, they need to understand people and work within the social framework. They also need a remit that is broader than
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Matthew Skelton (Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow)
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Another great source of intel came from contacting employees who had quit or been fired. I often thought of myself as Silicon Valley’s HR department, conducting exit interviews right as people were ready to spill. It was time-consuming, but the effort paid off over and over. Remember: People always like to tell their side of the story.
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Kara Swisher (Burn Book: A Tech Love Story)