What It’s Really Like to Work in Corporate HR
HR managers: They’re human, too! And they resent their reputation as office cops, even though that’s part of the job. Here, three current and former HR leaders share the worst workplace behavior they’ve seen, the secrets they’ve had to keep, and the reason why you’re not getting the raise you want. Why does everyone hate work so much right now? They know the answer — but they probably can’t do anything about it.
“The worst part of working in HR is telling people that they smell bad.”
Anya, executive coach and former corporate HR leader based in California
I spent 15 years as an HR executive at several organizations. Then I left a year ago to start my own consulting firm. Basically, I was tired of having the worst fucking job on the planet.
I am very good at helping people identify where their strengths are. I’m also very good at working with leaders in an organization to help get the best out of their people. But over the last 15 years, the role of HR has changed quite a bit, especially when you’re working for a publicly traded company. Our job is now to maximize shareholder return and do a lot with less people. I’m not here to say whether it’s right or wrong, but nobody’s job is promised to them just because they do it well.
Work is broken. Most people cannot count on having a job for more than three years. Businesses are built to extract value out of an individual. They hire you because you have a particular skill set that can help them grow to the next stage. That’s a two- to three-year cycle, and they have no fucking idea what they’re going to do with you after that.
If I were to categorize the types of concerns that people came to me with in corporate HR, the first would be compensation. Sixty to 70 percent of people’s concerns at work are related to their feeling unable to provide for the basic needs of themselves and their families with one job. I know a lot of people who are working multiple jobs and side hustles to try and make a living, and it sucks.
The next problem people typically come to HR with is that they want to be developed as a leader. And then the third problem is equity issues: They feel silenced or marginalized because they’re a woman or trans or gay or a person of color. Sometimes people just say stupid shit at work; they’ll misgender someone or roll their eyes when they hear inclusive language. It’s usually older, Gen-X or boomer white men who are struggling with the learning curve. That always required a conversation, but I never found it difficult. It was just, “Hey, get with the program. You are the problem; this new language isn’t the problem. So figure it out.”
The worst part of working in HR is telling people that they smell bad. I had to do it many times. Sometimes it’s because someone doesn’t have proper hygiene or maybe they don’t have regular access to a shower. That happened a few times — when we had warehouse employees, especially. But sometimes people just don’t wear deodorant. Telling people that they smell bad is awful because it just hurts their feelings. They’re incredibly embarrassed. I would ask if finances were an issue, and we would offer to give them a jump-start with some deodorant or let them come in early to use the washroom if they needed to. I worked in one environment where we provided showers, which was really helpful.
In other cases, people would wear really stinky perfume or cologne, and it gave everybody a headache. We would usually talk to them about reducing their use of the product. And ultimately, in some environments, we just had to create a scent-free policy.
Wherever I worked, I was essentially the assistant principal for grown-ups. That led to a lot of burnout, and I handled it by developing great tools. I have my own executive coach. I go to therapy. And I focus on my family and friends outside of work because you don’t really get to have friends at work when you’re an HR leader. This is true for me and everyone else: When you don’t get the space to live real life outside of work, you are more likely to bring your shit to work.
A lot of people think that HR people hear complaints all the time. But usually, we need more people coming to us if we’re going to build a case. One time, we had a senior leader who was micromanaging everyone on his team, and they were dropping like flies. But no one would give it to us straight why they were leaving. It started to impact the business, but it was hard for us to do anything about it because employees aren’t willing to speak up. Ultimately, we did cut ties with him, but it took much longer than it should have because we weren’t getting the information we needed to take action.
I got fired from a job once. I was working for a start-up, and I worked very closely with the CEO to build the team over the course of five years. Then I heard that a VP was having an affair with a young manager in their department, so I had to do an investigation because someone so high up having that kind of relationship was very much against policy. I was working with a lawyer to gather proof, but we were the only people who knew about it. Then I was suddenly fired. It turned out that the VP had gotten wind of the investigation and went above my head to spread lies and misinformation about me. And I was terminated so that she could hide her indiscretions — which were ultimately discovered anyway about six months later, when somebody walked in on her and the manager together. It was devastating. When you get fired super unexpectedly for doing your job, without severance, it makes you reconsider who you want to work for, how you want to operate, and how much of yourself you’re going to give to your employer. I had to liquidate my 401(k), and I took some time off to reevaluate who I was.
This is what most HR people can’t tell you, but it’s true, and it’s what I tell my friends when they ask for advice: If you don’t like your job and you don’t like your boss and you’re resentful and angry, go get another job. If you think they’re trying to fire you because they need a different skill set that you don’t have, they probably are; go find another job. If they are buying software that could replace your job, it probably is; go get a new job. These are businesses — they don’t owe you a job. The only exception is if you work in a union environment, in which case, go talk to your union.
That said, there are times when you absolutely should go to HR, like when you have a toxic manager or when someone is verbally abusive. Sexual misconduct, equity and inclusion issues, racism, gender bias — all of those are reasons that you would go to HR. If you’re struggling to get promoted or have a compensation concern, HR should be a resource to help you strategize your next step, but you can’t expect that they’re going to solve your problem for you. Most HR people are really trying to help people get what they need. If you’re getting a divorce and need extended time off, they’ll try to make that work, within reason.
Now I’m a leadership consultant, and I love it. I don’t have to lay people off or fire anyone anymore. I don’t write employee handbooks. I get to focus on the things that I’m best at and that I love.
“Day one, this person’s a racist.”
—Rachel, HR executive based in Colorado
I’ve spent more than a decade in start-ups. I typically will own HR, talent acquisition — anything that touches the employee experience and culture. At my last company, I helped them scale from 15 employees to over 300 globally. A lot of difficult stuff comes up when you grow that fast.
Whenever I’ve been hired, the founders always say, “Oh, there’s no problems here.” And then, the first day, it turns out there’s a lawsuit or a sexual-harassment issue. At one company, I arrived and people approached me about some guy who had said racist things a few months prior. Day one, this person’s a racist. So I had to do all these interviews to investigate this situation and exit this person over something that happened months before I was even there.
A lot of people don’t realize how much work goes into investigating HR complaints — hours and hours and hours. At another company, I had to investigate a situation where a trans employee was interviewing for a new internal role and literally everyone thought he should get it except for one guy, who was cis, straight, and white and also happened to be the most senior manager on that team. Everyone had given the trans person a thumbs-up except for the manager. Then the trans person accused the manager of not hiring him because he was trans. I had to interview everybody who was on the Zoom call when they interviewed this candidate. Then I had to talk to the manager, who is a very proud liberal who considers himself an ally. That was a disaster because he was deeply insulted. It got very messy. But ultimately, there was nothing to support the discrimination accusation. We had to do a mediation session between them. The result was, basically, “Y’all are so much more aligned than you think you are.”
A common problem at start-ups is that you have someone who’s problematic and more trouble than they’re worth, but they don’t pass the “bus test”: Like, if they get hit by a bus tomorrow, we’re screwed. We have to keep them around because they simply have too much institutional knowledge and they know where the bodies are buried. When that happens, you have to create a plan to get all the passwords, learn where everything lives. It can take months to fire someone.
Another problem at a fast-growing company is that huge pay discrepancies develop and it’s tricky to level them out. Often the founders, before they have an HR person, decide who they want to hire and then throw money at them to get them to come on board. And you wind up having people at the same level making wildly different paychecks. Whenever I get hired, I always do a big study to check for pay gaps, and there are often big ones. As much as I believe in transparency and being honest, you can’t go out and tell people that. You can’t say, “Hey, we just realized that this guy is making way more than you, so we’re going to top you up and give you a new title.” People get pissed when that happens. They’ll demand back pay, and it gets messy — you have both an HR problem and a PR problem. So we have to be delicate and work with their managers to try to even things out, usually by offering special projects with signing bonuses.
You’re not going to like everybody that you hire. But I think I have a pretty good intuition. If I get a bad feeling about someone, I will pay attention. In one case, there was a guy who seemed off right on the first day. He was very demanding, and it raised some flags. A few months later, he posted a meme in Slack and a couple of people came to me about it. He had deleted it quickly, but it was definitely racist, and it was meant to be funny, and it absolutely wasn’t. To me, that’s a one-strike situation; he was out. But it was a messy termination. He was very much like, “You’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”
HR leaders don’t have anybody to talk to when we’re going through things. You’re on an island. And that can make the job really hard, especially when you have to deal with everyone else’s petty bullshit. My partner got very sick, and his illness began while I was still at my last job. That’s the scenario where you start to think, “Fuck you all. You think you have a problem? Let me tell you about a real problem.” And I had no outlet. Ultimately, I had to leave that job because I didn’t want to feel that way at work all the time.
I think there’s pervasive unhappiness at work right now, across all industries. That’s why you’ll see a lot of chief people officers or HR leaders who have left their companies and are starting consultancies. We’re not cheating with our bosses — we’re burned out. We’re traumatized from COVID, and now we’re the bad guys on everything. It’s an impossible task.
“One guy was mad that his manager wouldn’t give him an extension on a deadline and said that he needed more time because he had ADHD.”
—Zara, former HR manager based in New York
I worked in corporate HR for a Fortune 500 company for over six years. A lot of it was monkey work like fielding emails from people who wanted a special lamp for their seasonal affective disorder or a certain chair because of their back problems. I did enjoy feeling like I was useful and could make people’s lives at work easier. But sometimes the accommodations got ridiculous, particularly from younger employees. One guy, a relatively new hire, was mad that his manager wouldn’t give him an extension on a deadline and said that he needed more time because he had ADHD. It was tricky to handle that because you don’t want to seem like you’re being insensitive towards neurodivergent people.
Right after the pandemic was the worst. A lot of our younger hires had never had to interact with their colleagues in person before. They’d never really had internships. They didn’t know how to conduct themselves in meetings; they would raise their hands to talk like they were in class. The only upside was that we had almost zero issues with workplace romances because they were all so awkward with each other, which was nice from an HR perspective, but sort of sad for them. Normally, all the kids in their 20s are hooking up with each other, which is obviously frowned upon and sticky from an HR perspective — no one wants to deal with a sexual-harassment accusation — but it’s also normal and part of what makes work fun. I met my own spouse at work when I was 25, before I worked in HR. Now I work for a software company doing customer relations. I don’t miss HR, especially the direction it’s been heading. It seems like people are more and more unhappy at work these days.
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