Its been a long time I wrote something and the usual excuse applies to me, just been too swamped with work.
During all this hectic time, I ended up meeting a lot of young, bright, exciting people and interview them for a new team that we were setting up.
My favorite question in the interview used to be so why do you want to join HR or why did you choose HR as your calling. I guess I do this to get some sadistic pleasure out of their responses and my own experiences of being HR as well as of getting services from HR.
Most of the time the first response is "I love people hence HR". I always wondered do these guys even know what they are getting into, HR is not about loving people at all in the way its delivered in todays day and world.
Would you do the following if you really loved these people unless you were one of the animal lovers who say "I love animals, they are tasty" -
- Fire people to improve the profitability of the company
- Force managers to reduce the ratings of people to meet the bell curve even if they have done a good job
- Make policies to stop 2% of the population from doing wrong things inconveniencing all others
- Make life miserable for anybody who quits
- Get people to work harder even if they do not like it (without paying overtime)
I can go on and on on this and I guess you get the drift.
I also assume that most people who joined HR did so because they love people. If the state of affairs on HR is as pathetic as it is today, I sometimes wonder how it would be if HR did not love people.
One just needs to go and ask the people HR folks love about how much they love HR in return and I am sure that if it was not illegal they would love to throw the HR folks out of the 20th storey window.
So my simple advice to anybody joining HR because they love people is to just become a social worker.
Else you may have to find some really good organisation, sorry I am not aware or any, where HR actually does things out of their love for people.
