This is why your Head of H.R. is frustrated... and Tips for H.R. interviewees!

One of the biggest challenges that H.R. executives have today revolves around company resources.  This is occurring at precisely the same time when H.R. is being asked to do more for a company.  There are now so many new expectations around driving corporate culture, increasing employee retention, engaging potential employees and making meaningful strides in regard to diversity and equality.  This is a tremendous amount of content being added to an H.R. portfolio.  Some companies have given the green light to H.R. departments to expand their teams to shoulder some of this added workload, but many don’t or if they do, often the hires are too junior in nature to drive strategy and excellence which places more pressure on senior H.R. employees.

When I interview H.R. executives, these are the top three areas of concern/frustration. 

1.  Time Management

The issue is often the gap between what the H.R. executive wants to create and deliver versus the hours in the day they have to drive their entire mandate.  Recruiting the right talent, training that talent, creating and reinforcing the organization’s culture, overseeing company branding programs, creating policy, managing employee relations, etc... There is simply not enough time to do it all or at least to do it all in the way that they consider best in class.  When there are too many objectives and not enough time, progressive H.R. strategy is replaced by reactive execution which leads to frustrated human resource professionals.

2.  Lack of Investment

This can be an exercise of monotony when H.R. professionals are forced to continue to explain to leadership why it makes sense to invest into human resource endeavours.  Whether it is trying to convince leadership as to competitive salary rates, improving workplace benefits to engage and attract talent, investing in an HRIS system or investing in employee training, it can become mentally and emotionally exhausting.  Just because there isn’t a defined or identifiable ROI for an initiative on a community spending or a diversity initiative, it doesn’t mean that it should be shelved until the company has a better fiscal year.  If your C-Suite leaders still view HR departments in the same light as a cost centre that needs to be controlled, you are likely already losing the race and working at the wrong company. 

3. Talent Management

There is no question that the cost is getting higher to attract the best talent and many companies need to ask themselves whether they are truly targeting the best talent.  I was speaking with a Fortune 500 company last week and their US driven mandate for their Canadian business was to restructure the business and upgrade the performance but to do it by using existing employees.  This is an extreme example in poor human capital strategy but there are many other examples throughout all industries.  The most common example occurs when a company prematurely promotes someone internally.  It is often a high potential employee that they want to retain, but who in reality is a year away from having the proper skill set to excel at their new job.  Not only is there the lost productivity of having someone learning on the job, but it also forces human resources to lose even more of their time and resources by organizing training and coaching for these individuals to try to get them up to speed. 

In my business, I see this area firsthand when it comes to recruitment.  Slashed H.R. recruiting budgets often means having critical corporate positions filled by whomever has the best resume that applies to a company job posting.  Too often I see hiring managers complaining about the quality of candidates that H.R. puts forward to them for their team when in reality, H.R. has very little budget to use for trying to target high performing passive candidates. 

Tips

My biggest recommendation to any H.R. candidate who is contemplating a career change is to ask the hard questions during their interview process with a prospect employer.  These include:

1.  What are the most recent H.R. initiatives that were directed from the C-Suite level by someone WITHOUT H.R. experience.  If the answer is light in this area or there are just a few buzz words being used, this should be your first red flag. 

2.  Ask the C-Suite what are their top three H.R. initiatives that they would like to see delivered?  Then ask yourself if you are in agreement with these priorities?  Many candidates make the mistake in settling for an answer from management that the new hire will hold the keys and have the ability to make all H.R. decisions.  This is not a good enough answer because it is vague, and budgets will often get slashed.  If there is no defined attachment to H.R., holding the keys to H.R. no longer accounts for much.   

3.  Present the C-Suite with a list of all H.R. functions and then have them allocate where they believe the percentages of the budget should be spent.  This is a powerful exercise because it allows one to see how management perceives the H.R. functions, where they believe the company has issues and it will also tell you where you can make the most impact with the least amount of resistance. 

Asking these questions will really help determine if the C-suite is truly an ideal partner for H.R., or if they are just delivering a sales pitch in order to get you to sign in the dotted line. 

Farewell,

Mike