HR – Page 5 – The Consulting Artist

Change : By Degrees

If you work in HR and recruitment you’d be hard pressed not to have seen the news this week, in which publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has confirmed that job applicants will no longer be required to have a university degree. PRH aren’t the first big firm to confirm this small and significant change in policy, but building on the success of their ‘The Scheme’ project, this feels like the first time the idea is getting mainstream exposure beyond the sometimes inward looking world of HR. Good stuff.

So what?

Lowering barriers to entry where it’s practical to do so is an important thing. I know because I don’t have a degree – I fell through the cracks of the formal education system in my late teens and and when Mum died shortly before I turned 19, I really lost any motivation to learn for a while. I subsequently struggled at times because people judged me on the length of the list of my qualifications. It’s an easy thing to measure.

I was also aware of this during my 12.5 years at BT – people using ‘you haven’t got a degree’ as a reason for not offering a job in my direction, despite the fact that I never did a job in BT which required one! I persisted and worked hard and eventually got to, and probably beyond where I wanted to. Yet too much effort was expended by me on navigating this ‘you haven’t got a degree’ barrier – when what I should have been doing, was the work itself. I hope that makes sense!

I’m fortunate. Along the way I rediscovered my love for learning and also my love for applying it too. I invest heavily in my own learning and development, I don’t regret not studying for a degree, and it’s good to see that finally – more people are getting to grips with the fact that not every role requires one. This is positive news, and I believe that what this small step does is afford these organisations which are willing to broaden their horizons, even more wonderful choices in future. It will be interesting to look back in a few years time and see what changes in the demographics of work emerge and stick as a result of this growing change in practice.

Q: When Is A Human Not A Human?

A: When it’s a resource.

This would be my early bid to take the crown for crap joke of the year, except in the current world of work, it is no joke. An overwhelming number of businesses choose to refer to people not as people, but as resources. Human Resources. According to the great God Google, resources is defined thusly.

Resources: Noun. A stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organisation in order to function effectively.

My curiosity about humans described as resources has been reawakened by a blog post on Forbes.com titled: Airbnb Chief Human Resource Officer Becomes Chief Employee Experience Officer (Warning! Like every article on Forbers.com this one is riddled with irritating adverts, making it exceptionally hard and unpleasant to read. Proceed with caution). I confess my initial reaction to the headline was not altogether positive, then I checked myself. Just because it’s easy to say/refer to Personnel as HR, doesn’t make it the right thing to say. The language we choose to position and describe things is important, and though we need words and actions working together, what we say about something, powerfully shapes the subsequent conversation.

I offered the headline and article up to Twitter and was generously responded to.

Gemma’s suggestion that the idea of framing the conversation about colleagues as resources is hideous, feels easy to agree with. Personnel, people, colleagues, employees, these are all surely preferable to the current, and most common option? I know resources is only a word, and if it’s our starting point then it sends the conversation off in an unhelpful direction.

To Paul’s point – if this move from HR to Employee Experience does represent a shift towards a more supportive environment, rather than the often held belief that Personnel (sorry I’m not using Human Resources any more) are the watchful eye of the employer, there to manage risk/make sure you don’t step out of line, then that too is a shift in a positive direction. I like Paul’s new question – where does the risk function end up? I’m not sure and I’m no expert, and when I’ve worked with and in Personnel departments a lot of risk management is discussed with and referred to lawyers, so maybe cut out the middle person and go straight to legal?

Ade sees this change of language as a good example of Personnel realigning with the business. Hard to argue with that, given so many of us believe and experience that high levels of understanding/integration between departments and functions is a good thing.

I like what all three correspondents have to say, they’ve helped stretch my thinking, and hopefully yours too. When you want to connect to these folks, click the pics above and you can link to their blog sites/twitter.

What do you think? Does it matter that we so frequently label people as resources? Should there be a shift to something less resource, more human? And if so, what? If the term Personnel, the P in CIPD, is good enough for the UK professional body, is it good enough for you too?

Not withstanding my slight disappointment that after hailing the move from HR to Employee Experience, the writer of the Forbes.com article reverts to the current norm in these follow up questions, I offer them to you by way of more food for thought.

Are we still functioning in a Human Resources silo? How can we broaden our vision and begin to partner with other functional groups such as Marketing, Facilities, Real Estate, Communications, and Sustainability to create as memorable an employee experience as we create a customer experience?
How can we use the tools we use for our customer experience such as: ongoing research into needs and perceptions, design thinking, and a marketing mindset to re-invent the Human Resource function?
How do we create and embrace an iterative development model so new Human Resource services are co-created with employees in much the same way new products are co-created by our company’s most passionate consumers?

Specifically Vague

The importance of cultural fit in recruitment

Google the words ‘hiring for cultural fit’ and you’ll be overwhelmed with results, about 1.18 million of them last time I checked. Recruiters and HR people talk about this stuff, a lot. I appreciate the desire to hire people who will ‘fit in around here’, and at the same time, the world of work needs its dissenting voices too, unless it is to become a whirlpool like hellhole of groupthink.

For cultural fit to have relevance, there needs to be clarity about the culture people are being hired to fit into. I stumbled upon this job vacancy yesterday, please take a minute to have a read through it…

“This is a great opportunity to partner with a demanding corporate audience of around 200 within an international head office environment. It’s a busy generalist role by nature, a key theme of it being the building of close relationships across a range of Directors and providing them with guidance and coaching through the full range of cyclical HR processes and in managing the subtleties of a range of performance and ER issues and any change agendas.

Candidates should possess really solid generalist HR experience developed within a sophisticated corporate environment where HR is used to partnering the business in an evolved HR model, ideally with exposure to matrix business structures. Above all you should possess the gravitas, maturity and resilience to work effectively with demanding senior business stakeholders, combined with a proactive and pragmatic approach that ensures effective, commercial on time delivery.”

Impressive huh? Demanding, international, close relationships, guidance, cyclical HR, change agendas, solid, sophisticated, matrix business structures, gravitas, maturity, resilience, demanding (again), proactive, pragmatic.

This job advert says everything and nothing. It is meaningfully meaningless, specifically vague, and people will be applying for this role. I posted the advert text onto Facebook yesterday; here are some of the excellent comments I received:

It means that once you accept the job they can make you do anything they want. It’s fuzzy logic.

It would read like the role is to dig the directors out of the hole they keep on digging…

1915. Please join us in the trenches. It is a complete clusterfuck over here. We require someone to run messages to and from the incompetents. You will need experience acting as a human shield and serving as cannon fodder.

And companies wonder why they have people issues when this is the best they can do.

I’m not a huge fan of wasting people’s time – yet I am tempted to craft an application for the role which reflects back all the specifically vague buzzword junk contained in the job advert. If I do – I will let you know the outcome. In the meantime, if you are fortunate to be involved in the hiring process, please, do better than this. Unless the cultural fit you are looking for is total befuddlement, in which case, pour yourself a fresh cup of gravitas and get proactively pragmatic.