Inhuman Resources

I recently spent four years in Vancouver looking for gainful employment. Vancouver is my home city, and it's not a job market I'm inexperienced with. I moved to Asia for a few years to broaden my skills and understanding of the world, and returned in 2011 with the assumption that finding work would be as easy as it had been in my younger days – perhaps easier, now that I was a more experienced, broadminded individual with a greater sense of Vancouver's place in the world.

What I discovered was a newly formed Human Resources culture that is surely the tenth circle of hell.

Let me go back a bit. My first job, in 1987, was at a video rental chain. I filled out an application at one of their stores and was called in for an interview with the district manager. No HR department was involved. The entire interview was conversational, talking about what movies I liked and how I'd make recommendations to customers.

I then pursued my interest in radio with random resume-drops to various stations in Vancouver. The program director of a talk-radio station called me in for a chat and hired me on the spot as a technical operator. In the two years I worked there, I was not aware of an HR department.

After graduating from BCIT in 1989, I dropped off an application at the reception desk at CBC Radio and a manager called me the next day. Again, purely conversational. My only contact with Human Resources – an open-plan office that welcomed interaction with employees – was to get enrolled in the proper benefits programs, and to answer my questions when I needed to utilize those benefits.

Even in 1997 when I went to work for the Canadian government (a body notorious for bureaucracy) I was interviewed by a woman in a small staffing office and I was assigned within days to Veterans Affairs, and later to Health Canada. I did not meet with HR until my first day of work, to complete the requisite paperwork for payroll and benefits.

Today, HR departments are massive and ubiquitous, yet more inaccessible than ever. During my time with the federal government in the 2000s, that local staffing department was closed down. Responsibility for interviewing and hiring went to the HR offices of individual departments. A few years later, our own HR at Health Canada was moved to a building several blocks away, behind a locked door, and only accessible with an appointment. The welcoming HR department on the second floor of CBC Vancouver (I will never forget the ever smiling, delightfully named Joy Cinnamon, who handled my timesheets) has been outsourced to Toronto and only reachable through a 1-800 number or a generic e-mail address. 

From anecdotal evidence heard from friends and from what I've witnessed in my job search, this is the norm in most organizations – Human Resources offices generally don't welcome interaction with humans anymore, be they employees or job seekers.

Amid this bureaucratization, HR departments have somehow flipped from being the last stage of employment to the first. No longer can managers find new hires and send them over to HR to go on payroll. HR has now convinced the corporate world (in Canada at least, but I'm assuming this is true in the Western world) that managers do not possess the skills and qualifications to do their own hiring.

Take my recent experiences with temp agencies, for example. In the late 1990s, when I used these agencies between the CBC layoff and the government job, I was given assignments to employers based solely on my tested skills and my interview with the recruiter. In 2011, there was a strange twist. In one of my first contacts with a temp agency, I was given an assignment at a government tourism office. The next day, the offer was withdrawn. The recruiter said, “The HR rep thinks you're over-qualified.” Whoa. Why is HR involved? If HR is reviewing resumes, then why are they using a temp agency and not doing their own hiring? Many government departments, I discovered, have signed exclusive contracts with temp agencies that are more costly than just hiring term or casual employees at union wage – this in a time when governments and large corporations are slashing budgets and staff.

Using an agency is an excessive cost, about double an employee's hourly wage for the life of the assignment. An agency charges about $30 an hour, for which the employee gets about $12, when a temp could be hired directly for that same $12. Or in the case of a unionized employer, even $25 an hour would be less of a cost commitment. 

The concept of temp hiring was originally to serve employers lacking in HR resources. But when agencies are utilized by HR departments themselves, the job-seeker suffers with a lower wage and elimination of benefits just to keep HR largesse within the family.

HR's involvement with temp agencies, I discovered over my subsequent encounters with agents, is now the norm. Even when I passed through the agency's interviews and technical tests, the client's HR rep still wanted to see my CV for approval, or meet with me for their own interview. 

I would find my employment hopes quashed once HR got involved. In the case of the tourism office, I asked what was meant by over-qualified. “They're concerned you're not going to stay, that you'll just look for another job.” Which struck me as doubly odd. It was a 30-day assignment -- was I supposed to retire after 30 days? Were they concerned I would be doused with offers from other companies after seven days on the job? If the market had been that great, I wouldn't have been using a temp agency in the first place.

I heard “over-qualified” a lot. I was consistently told to “dumb down” my resume, which I did, but then it only left questions about certain gaps on my resume, or why, at my age, I hadn't achieved much.

There was a good reason I was applying at temp agencies for work beneath my qualifications. When I applied for jobs within my skillset – jobs in the areas of technical editing, publishing, communications – I could not meet the HR criteria of a perfect candidate, or beat the online systems used for sorting applications. The advice I'd get was to lower my expectations and take office work. When I did that, I'd then be deemed over-qualified, or lacking in self-esteem. These were judgments based on personality-profile characteristics that HR reps are trained to glean from applications – they are not conclusions based on an applicant's own wants and needs. Having lived in various spots in Asia, I came to accept that working in jobs beneath my qualifications was a trade-off I was happy to make for the opportunity to live in a city with civil liberties, an intellectually engaged population, and a healthy environment – and simply to be home. No employer gave me the opportunity to put that forward.

A bureaucracy that dehumanizes job hunters

I call the HR industry a bureaucracy because it has all the hallmarks of one. They are organizations that have grown into a monoculture of uniform rules, systems and procedures that serve their own needs and their own careers at the cost and detriment of the people they aim to serve.

The difficulty in defining or criticizing the HR industry is that you can't say who they serve. In reality, they serve the companies they are attached to. Their only obligation is to their employers. Does HR serve job-hunters? No, they have no legal obligations to us. But is there an ethical obligation? It's sadly ironic that a profession that was created to look after the welfare of people now treats humans like commodities, inanimate pieces on a chess board to be toyed with and knocked off at will.

Online job-application systems are the most obvious example of this dehumanization. They are cumbersome and full of redundancies, creating more work for a candidate (requiring new accounts, registrations, re-writing a resume each time in painstaking drop-down menus and data boxes, agreements to terms and conditions – try filling out one of those every day for a year and see if you stay sane). The software is then looking to eliminate candidates from a competition based on keywords. You might have called yourself a District Manager, for instance, but the system tosses your application because you called yourself an Area Manager.

HR departments will say these systems are necessary to deal with the hundreds of resumes and applications received for each job – there's no way the staff can deal with them all individually. But there's a simple solution. Post the job online, but don't give an option for online applications. State: “Interested applicants should deliver a resume and cover letter to our office at…” Only the most serious, best-qualified candidates will apply. HR would immediately eliminate the half-interested and the lookie-loos, those who would hesitate when he or she is required to address an envelope and buy a stamp.

Why must electronic applications be the only way to apply for jobs these days? Simply because the HR industry profits from multitudes of applications. The avalanche of resumes keeps HR professionals in business by increasing their budgets for software, equipment, and developers, it inflates their importance, and protects their jobs by creating work. Individual HR reps will surely disagree, but imagine how small and unsophisticated their offices would become – and how less stressful, less important, and redundant their jobs would seem – if they only received 10 or 20 serious applications (on paper) for each posting rather than 500 frivolous ones. HR reps would say they don't want to deter the “right candidate” from applying, but anyone who would turn down an opportunity because they don't want to take their hand off their mouse is not the “right candidate”. 

Simplifying the process would not only eliminate some HR jobs, it would also decimate their budgets. As we've all witnessed in those end-of-fiscal-year spending sprees, bureaucracies fight to the death to protect their budgets from being slashed, even when the surplus is unneeded.

Questioning the questions

If you're successful at getting an interview, then be prepared for a bureaucratic Groundhog Day. In every interview I went to in the past four years, HR reps would ask the same questions, or variations of such. “What is your greatest strength? What is your greatest weakness? Describe a situation of conflict and how you resolved it. How do you handle stress and pressure? What was one of your accomplishments?”, etcetera. The thing is, these questions have become so stock that you can find books and internet sources to help you formulate the answers HR advisors are looking for.

This means that HR reps are no longer hiring people who know how to give authentic, genuine answers to relevant questions, or who can hold their own in an interesting conversation about their profession. There have literally become “right answers” for job interviews, which don't allow recruiters to consider informative answers that tell you something real and true about the person up for consideration. What this does is weed out the most creative individuals and only let through those who have blandly studied the qualities HR is looking for. Creative people are necessary in a workplace to find new solutions to problems, develop new products, and find efficiencies where others haven't looked. But creative people are also more likely to not give pre-scripted answers.

In addition to discriminating against creative thinkers, introverted personality types are also overlooked in favour of extroverts, who do much better at “selling” themselves and appearing to be a “good fit on the team.” Introverts tend to be good listeners, well organized, and lean toward productivity rather than socializing at the water cooler, so they have inherent value to an employer. What introverts are not good at, like creative thinkers, is putting themselves forward in the disingenuous, formulated way that HR practices demand.

Certainly, there are stupid things that a candidate shouldn't say in a job interview, and there are positive ways to spin negative answers. But the list of “wrong things” to say in an interview has become so suffocating that candidates are being coached to present themselves as a facsimile of an impossibly wart-free employee. For instance, the question, "What is your greatest weakness?" demands something positive for the employer spun into a negative for the employee. "I'm too ambitious and sometimes I stay in the office too long to accomplish everything I want to do." Since there's no way to give an answer that contains any genuine honesty ("I have problems being punctual," "I'm lousy at giving presentations"), the candidate is being forced to please the interviewer with a lie or a half measure. It's a question that shouldn't be asked at all because the candidate will be penalized for the truth and rewarded for being insincere, when an employee with the opposite values will do much better at fostering ethics in the workplace. 

In my job search in the past four years, I have felt pressured against revealing my true values and work ethic. For instance, when asked to describe an instance of personal conflict at the workplace, I state the truth, that I avoid conflict by not engaging in it. In today's HR pop-psychology, avoiding conflict reflects poor judgment. Conflict must be dealt with and resolved. There is also a sense of disbelief that I never had an all-out blowout with a colleague. However, I stick to my guns. I explain that if a co-worker approaches me in a hostile manner, I try to respond to that person's concern rather than their tone. I listen to what they are trying to communicate. If I am offended by their approach, I might talk to that person about it later after the situation has calmed down. If the person continues to be a problem after all reasonable efforts, I speak with my manager.

Whether or not that's the best method of dealing with conflict, who's to say, but it's certainly not harmful or regressive. However, no matter how often I present my technique in job interviews, the HR advisor presses on. "What if that person doesn't respond to your approach? What if that person becomes physically abusive? What if the manager doesn't want to be involved?" The answer I've always wanted to give: "You hired these people. If you have a relentlessly abusive employee and a negligent manager, isn't this an HR responsibility? How does this become my problem to solve?" But if I ever gave such a response, the interview would be over. I've never been able to give a satisfactory response when HR questioning goes down the conflict rabbit hole. I believe that my approach is ethical and diplomatic, but it's not the one in the HR handbook.

The most absurd criterion I've been judged by is my handshake. I've been coached by recruiters that my handshake is too passive and that I should firm up. Well, I just don't do firm handshakes. I don't like receiving them, and I'm considerate of the fact that the person on the receiving end of mine might have a sprained wrist (or arthritis or such), and might only be extending a hand because in our culture you just have to. My inclination for soft handshakes, however, is judged as a form of weakness, rather than that of someone who is considerate or introverted (right there, they've eliminated the good listener and productive worker based on a weak grip). The handshake rule is the ultimate of the BS pseudo-psychology I've heard from the HR industry. The fact that someone doesn't give a strong grip indicates nothing about how well that person will function as a secretary, project manager, or an architect.

From there, everything from eye contact to body language is analyzed to determine if you will "be a good fit on the team." One common trope I've come across in various Linkedin articles and other sources for refining interview skills: "The decision to hire is made in the first six seconds. Give a firm handshake, smile, and make good eye contact." Generally good advice – basically, don't enter the room like a schmuck. But if hiring decisions are being made based on the first six seconds, HR is defeating their own raison d'etre of neutralizing bias in the hiring process. Of course, folks will inform me, "The six-second rule is subconscious, it's just human psychology." But if HR professionals are writing about it and it's become common knowledge in their trade, it's not subconscious anymore. 

Body language should not be entirely ignored in a job interview, but far too rigid emphasis is placed on it. So what if you don't make eye contact well in an interview. This could mean you're shifty and not to be trusted, or it could mean you're from a culture where sustained eye contact is considered rude. And if you're applying for an accounting job, does it really matter if you're shy? 

Bias and hypocrisy within the HR industry

The rules and procedures created by the Human Resources industry, as with any bureaucracy, have their roots in honourable intentions – to eliminate favouritism, nepotism, intuitive decisions, and unconscious bias in hiring decisions. However, in my encounters with Human Resources departments in the past four years, I found that they continually violate many of the ethics that their rules are meant to uphold. Age bias, for instance. If I left the year of my college graduation off my resume, HR would phone and ask for it. If I didn't list experience going back more than 15 years in order to keep my age vague, I would be verbally asked to list any other experience – "And what did you do before that?" – until they got back to high-school graduation. When I would get the inevitable “over-qualified” or “you won't be happy with this job” remark, I often took it to mean "too old."

As for intuitive bias, the "first six seconds" and body-language matters discussed above shows that they are aware of such bias, making it the job-hunter's responsibility for countering. Also, I often found that after applying for jobs at certain organizations, my Linkedin profile would have been scanned by an "unnamed HR professional" at that employer. We're told by the HR industry that Linkedin is a must-have in today's job market, and we're counselled to keep our social media profiles clean. I know, it's common sense. But I have to wonder, if HR pros in Western countries strive so hard to adhere to human rights codes, saying they will shred applications that contain photos and personal info in order to protect themselves from accusations of bias, why would they violate the spirit of the law and go looking for prejudicial material from other sources? 

I was once asked flat out for my full date of birth (yes, including the year) by an agent at a global recruiting firm. I asked why it was important (surely that was noted as a sign of my belligerence), and I was told it was required by the client, a multinational insurance firm that was looking for a disability benefits advisor. So here we had two HR professionals violating HR 101. I gave her my birthdate because I wanted the job. The next day, the recruiter told me that the client had put staffing on hold. Whether that was the truth, or a way of eliminating me from the competition while mitigating their liability for age bias, I will never know.

In another instance, an HR department wanted me to sign a contract that contained an illegal clause – that I wouldn't work for their competition for two years upon completion of my assignment. Such clauses have been struck down by Canadian courts, because you cannot forbid a person from pursuing their livelihood. That type of clause can be tied to severance packages, but certainly not because a temp contract has expired. I pointed out the illegality of the clause and said I would sign the contract if it were removed -- after all, it was a four-month assignment, and if the company didn't see fit to extend me after that, I was going to make my living using every skill at my disposal. An hour later, I was told the company had a budget freeze on temp employees. I was stupid, I should have signed the contract regardless, since the clause couldn't be enforced.

But here's the thing: HR advisors are the ones who are trained to uphold employment laws. It's a fundamental pillar of their profession. In practice, however, HR professionals use their position not to uphold the law, but to find loopholes to subvert it. The clause in that contract for instance. HR likely knew the clause was illegal. They just threw it in there to intimidate the majority of employees who don't know any better.

All of the rules and systems the HR industry has put in place to protect themselves from bias have grown into a strangling bureaucracy for job seekers – a bureaucracy that allows HR to practice that bias under the radar.

The futility of reference checks

References have been a staple of the hiring process for time immemorial. But, in recent years, HR has elevated this to a wasteful art. One of my references was reportedly kept on the phone for 15 minutes, subjected to a relentless list of meticulous questions. He told me, "Sorry, but I had to end the call. I couldn't answer all of her questions. Hope this didn't hurt your chances." What it did hurt was my relationship with that particular reference. I sensed that he was implying, “Please don't give my name out again.” And in a broader way, it made me thereafter hesitant to even list my references on employers' paperwork. My references had been “bothered” too many times by agencies that would do such checks and then not offer work. I asked one agency, "Did I get a bad reference?" No, they were all glowing, but the HR people whom they forwarded my resume to kept saying "no" for various reasons. So as I kept applying at agencies in search of that elusive job, my references kept getting calls even when I was not being put forward for a particular job. Which, at a certain point, probably became a nuisance to them. 

In the most extreme example, one employer wanted me to sign my rights over to a private company, in an unspecified foreign country, that specializes in reference checks – another layer of the self-serving HR bureaucracy. The form (click the image to read it) was very heavy on legalese, and the fine print authorized every employer I've had, whether listed on my resume or discovered in their own "background check," to hand over pretty much everything on my HR files. It was too invasive, especially since I had no way of knowing to which country or to which parties my vital details would be going. I called the HR rep and said I would be willing to sign it upon getting an offer – in other words, if I'm the successful candidate, "you can make a job offer contingent on my reference check being positive." Upon hearing that, the HR rep said, “We've actually offered the job to another candidate.” I think she made that decision about five seconds into my phone call. This is an example of how the HR industry has the power to impose unjust practices upon job hunters, who have no bargaining power in such situations, and are eliminated from gainful employment for exercising reason and caution.

In another case, I asked for a reference from a manager for whom I did a three-month assignment. She passed my request to HR, who said they would not allow her to speak on behalf of the organization. HR said that only they could give a reference. However, HR had no record of my performance because they hired me through an agency, who was officially my employer. The agency would not give me a reference because, alas, the person requesting it was from a competing agency.

Companies on the receiving end of reference requests are increasingly refusing to participate, partly because they don't want to exhaust their time and resources when there's nothing to gain. Another part of it is legal. Lawyers sometimes encourage candidates to sue former employers for vindictively untruthful bad references. Companies are more often protecting themselves by not responding to reference requests, or by only disclosing dates of employment, nothing more.

It's a defeating situation. Human Resources departments are asking for an increasing amount of information from former managers and HR reps, even when their own profession is telling them not to release that information themselves. HR plays whichever card suits them and punishes the candidate for the practices of the HR profession itself.

Pre-interviews

There have been many cases where an HR rep has called me to conduct a pre-interview in order to qualify for an actual in-person interview. Sometimes these calls have been unscheduled. Twice I was called on Sundays while I was socializing and completely unprepared. Another time during a scheduled pre-interview, the HR rep put me on speakerphone while she typed my answers. Her keyboard clattered in my ear while my own voice echoed back to me. It was so distracting that I got flummoxed in my answers and I flopped the pre-interview. Why couldn't I just be called in for a proper conversation? 

I'm sure the pre-interview is another example of HR creating another layer of bureaucracy for job-hunters to pass. The circumstances of most of the pre-interview phone calls I received were unprofessional and did not give me a chance to prepare or present myself in a professional manner.

Posting jobs that don't exist

When I did a practicum recently at an international shipping company, a job came open and I thought I'd be an ideal fit. When I approached the HR advisor, she said the job was filled. “Oh, I suppose it's a glitch that the job is still posted?” No, she said. "I keep all the jobs posted for an extra month." Why? “Oh, you never know.” You never know what? Really, is it just to look like your department is active? To torment job seekers who are going to spend half the afternoon drafting a good application for a job that doesn't exist?

Many organizations stick all of their job postings up on their websites without indicating which ones are for internal or external applicants. The reason for this, I was told later by people in the know, is that they want to have extra applications ready in case the internal search doesn't pan out. But when you hear the common complaint from HR reps – “We don't have time to read all the applications, so we have to skim for key words” – why would they go out of their way to solicit work they can't handle? All this does is further exhaust the energy of job-seekers, who already undergo enough unnecessary anxiety as it is. It's one more phone call that doesn't come, furthering the sense of rejection and defeat.

Taking decision-making powers away from managers

At the top of this post, I recounted stories of my early job-hunting days, where my only contact was with managers, who also did my reference checks. When I speak about these issues with friends and acquaintances who hold management positions, they all talk about their own frustrations with HR. One problem that I've heard more than once relates to managers who have a position to fill on their team. They ask HR to see the resumes of applicants as they come in, but they are told no; HR will forward only the screened-in applications once the pre-interviews and background checks are done. The managers themselves want a greater role in the screening process but are denied. Hearing these stories has been upsetting to me as a job-hunter, as I know that there are managers who would like to hire me, but I'm being prevented from meeting them because I don't fit a bureaucratic personality profile. 

Postscript

The position I've taken in this article was influenced by David Graeber's new book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. I had been wanting to write an article about my hardships with Human Resources departments for a few years now. The awareness that something was different and wrong with current HR practices came about a year into my job search and snowballed as more time passed, but I found it difficult to articulate my experiences. Without any framework for understanding the kinds of walls I was hitting, my complaints sounded like a laundry list of self-pitying grievances.

A lightbulb went off when I watched an interview with Graeber on The Keiser Report (12:40 into the video linked here). An anthropologist and academic, Graeber describes our world as the most bureaucratic society in all of history, where the public and private sectors have become indistinguishable from each other, and capitalist economies have been built on enormous Soviet-style bureaucracies that have imposed unnecessary hardship, and sometimes poverty, on average citizens.

Graeber talks about this in terms of the global economy. For example, he cites how financial institutions have lobbied governments to impose rules and regulations on the banking industry, which allow them to increase their internal bureaucracies (and create more jobs for themselves) and in turn charge fees to customers. Yet, in front of the customer, the banks blame government regulations for all the “red tape” the customer must face -- red tape the banks themselves lobbied for. In another example, he mentions how the European Union, in response to the current recession, printed enough money to give every European about 760 euros a month for a year to every citizen in the union. He asks, why not just give every person in the EU 760 euros a month for a year?  Well, because the financial institutions wouldn't get to move the money through their systems and justify their bureaucracies and fees. The bureaucracy becomes the purpose unto itself, rather than serving a purpose outside of itself.

Graeber calls this the "Sovietization" of capitalism. During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union that was known for its Kafkaesque, punishing bureaucracies that looked for any reason to send citizens off to the gulag for not following rules that were opaque and unrealistic. Today we have capitalist systems that look to throw anyone under the bus if doing so creates wealth or expansion within those systems. One could cite the sub-prime mortgage scheme in 2008, in which the banks used the de-regulation they lobbied for to bankrupt some of America's most vulnerable citizens. Or the “debtor's prisons” that have popped up in America in recent years. These have trapped poor citizens who have paid fines or completed probation for municipal violations, but have been unable to pay the high fees charged by the private companies that were contracted to administer the collection of fines or monitor the offender. For non-payment of fees, these citizens end up with utilities cut off or, at worst, a prison term.

As Graeber and host Max Keiser dished about these issues, I couldn't help but see my own encounters with HR departments in the same light. The bureaucratization of the Human Resources industry is just part of a much larger, global trend towards bureaucratic expansions in all industries, in which a growth of red tape serves the administrators more than the purpose of the system.

As one academic whom I discussed this issue with told me by e-mail, "The problem [of HR] wouldn't exist if there were full employment, but since there aren't enough jobs, the system functions as a way of sending people off to the figurative gulag."