Terrible, Terrible HR

Bad recruiting practice drives me crazy.

It really does and there is ABSOLUTELY no reason for it other than the HR malaise. I’ve recently been chatting with 2 friends of mine at separate companies who are suffering almost exactly the same problem. One has had a member of staff leave and the other has had to replace someone on maternity leave with a temp.

Now in these days of fixed fee recruiting, online media etc etc, HR function should have a really good awareness of current recruiting practice, where they can source candidates and have an understanding of the specialist skills required in each area of their business. Apparently I’m wrong.

Something that used to drive me absolutely insane when visiting major businesses was the poor quality of people in HR functions, people that told me that booking online recruitment ads was a marketing job that they wouldn’t get involved with, people who had, believe it or not, ever met the marketing team. Something I used to take great joy in was introducing these teams to each other and helping them understand that what they were doing was not helping either the HR dept or the overall perception of their brand, the good ones got it, the bad ones went back to their office and shuffled paper.

So what does this have to do with the 2 examples I’m talking about?

Well, I was absolutely gobsmacked when one of my friends asked me for my help; they had been passed over 50 CVs by the HR dept which had just been sent in on spec by local recruitment agencies… The Agencies had made no effort at all to vet the resumes they were sending and some of them were shocking, I saw one that was over 10 pages long which listed every temp job ever done by the candidate. One was from an interior designer, another for an accountant with 12 years senior accounts experience, the range of people sent through was simply mind boggling. They were all for an admin job…

When my friend asked HR for some help in going through the candidates they were informed that it wasn’t their job to select candidates but, one of the HR ladies had a friend they really thought should get the job… The 55th CV arrived, from a woman who had run her own catering business for 5 years and had never worked in an office.

Eventually after sitting in the pub for several hours we whittled down the CVs to a shortlist of 8 and surprise surprise, 3 turned up with no explanation from the agencies as to why the others didn’t arrive (well apart from one agency who apparently got rather aggressive when it was pointed out that perhaps they should ensure their candidates turn up!).

So my first friend recruited….

The other, was not so lucky. Pretty much the same issues, volume of candidates, NO help from the HR dept other than when it came to hiring, which they got so spectacularly wrong I was actually speechless…..

They hired the wrong person. Sent an acceptance letter, put the candidate through the induction and gave them the job etc. They were so keen to be involved in what they considered the important part which was the actual hiring (oh and having a lovely lunch from the rec con who made the placement) that they neglected to check anything with my friend the line manager. Understandably livid, he kicked off at HR and it went nowhere (wife of one of the directors is the HR manager) He’s now had the new start for 5 weeks and is having to jump through hoops to get rid of the useless idiot he never wanted in the first place.. Guess what though, he has to check, recheck and double check all of his actions with HR and make every effort to keep this person in the company because HR is very concerned about retention….

The fate of the first hire was much the same, a temp hired to cover maternity leave, claimed to be an admin whiz, have loads of IT experience etc. Turns out she’s an idiot who fails to operate Excel properly, oversaved an entire department’s work costing 3 days of IT time to recover and then a whole department had to go through and check all the work to see if the info they got back was accurate. Deleting client files by accident etc. Fine, get rid of her, she’s a temp, I hear you cry… no, in their infinite wisdom the HR dept decided to put her on a fixed term contract and agreed to give her all the rights of a full employee, once again jumping through hoops is the order of the day.

This is a great example of 2 companies in quite desperate need of a complete recruitment process revamp. In neither case was this an isolated event, this seems to be the norm for both businesses. It’s not even like they are small companies who are struggling with limited resources!

Rant over, I was very bored last night and when I got to thinking about all this it really started to annoy me… I’ll now wiat for every consultant under the sun to contact me for the names of the companies!