'HR Is Not Your Friend': Employees Share How They Learned This Lesson The Hard Way (40 Pics)

u/ceowin said the idea to ask the Internet this question popped into their head right after a job interview where the HR rep was asking the usual uninteresting and generic questions, like 'why do you want to apply for this job?' and 'what is an instance where you handled a situation well?' I've been to countless job interviews, and it's always the same repetitive and bland formalities that I'm fairly certain they only do because 'it's what they've always done,'" the Redditor told Bored Panda.

"Additionally, in my time of being employed for ten years now, HR generally just... exists. I've never encountered an HR rep who looks out for what's best for the company; they only care about the company being compliant with what upper management wants and legal stuff. All of these [things have contributed] to me writing the post," u/ceowin explained.

Liz Ryan, who had been a Fortune 500 HR specialist, agrees that in many organizations the main task of HR is to keep the company out of court. "The role of HR is to keep the company from getting sued -- by its own employees!" Ryan wrote in Forbes. "Can you imagine a sadder or less inspiring reason to come to work? Does your CFO stand up at the executives' meeting and say, 'It was a good month -- none of our customers or vendors sued us!' Of course not."

Ryan, however, didn't like to work like that. "I never spent two seconds during my eons in HR worrying about getting sued by my fellow employees. We were having too much fun to think about suing one another. If somebody was unhappy, a manager or another employee or an HR person would hear about it. Then we could figure it out and get past it. Waves of good and bad energy circulate in every organization."

u/ceowin said they also have had some negative HR experiences. "In my first job at a London-based electronics company, I started working with the engineering team under my post-graduate work permit (for foreign students). After 4 years, it was time to apply for a proper work visa, and the HR rep of the company couldn't be bothered with the details, so she instead told me flat out that I'm 'not a real engineer' and that my role can be easily filled by a local employee anyways. So instead of working on my work visa, she basically gave up on it, which meant that I would be jobless in a few months time. 4 years of contribution down the drain," they recalled.

Needless to say, Ryan wouldn't have liked to hear that -- the specialist thinks HR departments have to remain honest and engaged. "Waves of good and bad energy circulate in every organization. All we have to do is pay attention to them. It's easy to do that -- we almost can't help it! We are humans. Humans are animals. We know when the energy around is positive and when it's negative. We need to start telling the truth about that."

Talking from her experience, Ryan thinks these are some of the reasons why people hate HR: 1) HR people seem to take the company's side in any interaction, never the employee's side. 2) HR people seem to want to get employees in trouble for tiny infractions. 3) HR people are not viewed as trustworthy, even though they say, 'Tell me what's on your mind!' 4) HR people stand idly by while incompetent and abusive supervisors get promoted and mistreat employees. 5) HR people often "know HR" but don't know anything about the business they work for. 6) HR people often spout policy instead of actively getting involved to remove roadblocks their employees face. 7) HR people are seen as political and more concerned with their own place in the company's pecking order than with the welfare of the team. 8) HR people talk more about policies, benefits, and other announcements than they talk about culture, fear, trust, conflict, or any of the million human issues that arise in every organization. 9) HR people often have trouble seeing the "human side" of any issue, from a time-off request to a variation in a pay-grade or a hiring issue, focusing instead on keeping every process uniform and exception-free. 10) HR people, who can be Ministers of Culture in their organizations, are too often seen as culture-killers instead!

Ryan said these problems may arise because "too many executives lead HR, if they lead it at all, through fear rather than trust." According to her, they focus on keeping payroll costs down and keeping "employee issues" to a minimum, instead of setting ambitious goals and then hiring brilliant people to help achieve them -- and letting those brilliant people do their jobs.

u/ceowin believes that not every business needs an HR department but that it's pretty much unavoidable. "If a company is small or a start-up, the founders/original team members can usually deal with the regulations themselves," they said. "I guess when the company reaches a certain growth rate or has a larger number of staff, they would need to have an HR department dedicated to adhering to governmental regulations. So in a way, it seems to me that having an HR department is an unfortunate necessity given that the founders are way too busy to be bothered with HR stuff."

The Redditor said they aren't very surprised with the replies. They saw it coming. "HR really isn't there to be your friend; they're just there to 'check-off' stuff on their to-do list and to protect the company. It just sucks that sometimes thousands of people around the world realize this in the harshest way possible. And it's even worse if the HR folks think they're doing the company a huge favor if they manage to help the company cut costs by low-balling employees' raise," u/ceowin said.

"The nice thing about my post is that there are some HR folks there that gave some cool advice. For anyone who's starting off or a career veteran, they may find some helpful tips and I recommend they have a look!"