Have you noticed how busy HR departments are? Not so much in terms of workload, but because it’s so crowded in there.
Companies and organizations of some size typically have departments, such as Operations, Accounting and Finance, Sales & Marketing, Research and Development, Production, IT, HR, and sometimes Legal.
Now, I wouldn’t dream of telling Operations how to run the business, Accounting how to do a month-end closing, Marketing how to design a social media campaign, Production how to become more efficient, R&D how to innovate, or IT how to execute an upgrade. My interfering in the core business of these departments would be counterproductive, dangerous, and plain foolish, as I lack the required insight and skills.
However, even after 20 years in HR, I constantly receive unsolicited and often unwelcome and unwise input from people in other departments on how to recruit, how to write a job posting, how to create a policy, how to do a performance review, how to put together an offer of employment, and how to conduct reference checks.
A steady stream of emails enters the five inboxes that I monitor, imploring me not to forget this or that, to make sure that I do such-and-such, and to review their edits to documents I drafted. Why? Well, because everyone knows HR. And us HR folk need help beyond payroll and birthday cakes, apparently.
I once consulted for a company where the controller insisted on inserting a clause in offers of employment that entailed cutting off people’s LTD benefits the day the statutory notice period ran out. This would save money, right? During the back and forth, he would edit it in, and I would edit it back out. After the third round, I borrowed a line from the animated film Lilo & Stitch: “So far, you have been adrift in the sheltered harbour of my patience,” and added, “I’ve explained how this would expose the company. You can leave it in, but then it won’t be my signature on the offer – feel free to affix yours.” After that, the controller retreated to focus on budgetary matters. I think.
Much of it is ignorance, but I’ve always learned, if you don’t know, stay out of it. Most people in Operations, Accounting, and Sales, to pick a few, are certain that job postings and job descriptions are the same thing. Just look on Indeed – countless times, you can tell that some rando grabbed an old job description, replaced the header, added “email us if you’re interested,” and then uploaded it. Done. How hard can it be?
A few months ago, I drafted a job posting for a client who was looking for a new marketing associate. It was clean and to-the-point, just over a page-and-a-half, including a section with “What we offer” to signal that employment is a two-way street. The head of marketing asked to see it. Sure. The next day I received it back, and it had been blown up to a four-page boondoggle with clusters of bullet points in different fonts, obviously Frankensteined from other job postings, and riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. It took some time to salvage it.
Another client wanted to hire a digital manager. The recently onboarded marketing manager – presumably an expert writer – figured it would be cheaper if they took a first kick at the can with the job posting and then send it to me for “a cursory look.” Well, the product was a monument to incompetence. It consisted of 1049 words spread over four pages, and I spent over an hour editing and correcting 135 errors – including in the spelling of the company name and street address.
In yet another example, I drafted a job posting for a non-profit in the western GTA. In my trusty “What we offer” section, I included “We won’t let you sink or swim—we will provide thorough training” and “Tim Horton’s and McDonald’s within three minutes.” Nice, right? Well, the head of Legal somehow intercepted the posting in the intercompany mails and was aghast – this “stuff about sinking or swimming and Tim Horton’s” would make the organization “look unprofessional” and this could not stand.
A day later, I received the edited version – an unrecognizable manifesto, saturated with legalese and all the fun and flair beaten out of it. I also got a complimentary phone call explaining where I had gone off the rails and how I could redeem myself.
To which I said, “Funny you should flag this. About half the candidates I talk to during phone screens, when I ask them what prompted them to apply, mention that this is what attracted them to the posting – that the reference to training and orientation reassured them that the company was serious about their success in the role.”
The good news here was that the CEO intervened and encouraged the legal head to focus on the mission, rather than spending three precious hours on something well outside of their mandate.
Some people do get it, and they run successful companies. When recruiting with one of my clients in Aurora, Ont., we always include a line that reads “handcrafted coffee beverages and a freezer stocked with Kawartha Dairy ice cream.” One of the winning applicants, upon joining the company, said that she’d had multiple offers, but that this one line had made the difference for her.
There’s a lot of time being wasted by other departments on incursions into HR territory, and by HR fixing and responding to clumsily phrased nonsense. Yes, there’s something to say for synergy, but to thrive in the workplace, we need structure, hierarchy, and a division of labour. As a client once said, “Boundaries are our friends.”
