The Unpalatable Inquisitiveness of the Human Resources Manager

I am independent, meaning I work for myself. This puts some obstacles in my way, like the strange and paradoxical view of banks everywhere that I am therefore a financial risk to them. Paradoxical because employees everywhere are apparently risk-free, yet they have placed all of their career eggs into one basket but if I lose a client, I pick up another one before the end of the week, so I always have my supply of work more or less guaranteed. This is their way of working, always making you unquestioningly open up your life to them so they can assess not just your finances, but get a pretty good idea of your behind-the-scenes life.

This is copied and enlarged by all types of people and organisations. But amongst the most staggeringly, breathtakingly intrusive groups of people lie the Human Resources Departments. They have ways that make it so easy for them to wheedle information from you without you knowing it. It lies in the type of answers to their questions that you give. This can be at the opening interviews, or at the yearly evaluation, both of which are, to some degree, the most degrading thing people have to suffer in the Western world. Here are some standard questions at interviews:

1. You will have experienced some changes in company policy in your career. How did you deal with them?
2. How do you avoid mistakes in your work?
3. Where do you want to be in five / ten years?
4. How do you prioritise when you have a heavy workload?
5. Have you ever done something different to usual because you thought it was more effective, even if it was not standard procedure?

Out of these questions above, the average HR professional can deduce a lot of things about you. Here are the keys to the above:

1. Your flexibility (what they really want to know is how malleable you are).
2. Your precision (in other words, your drudgery. They want to know how much of an automaton you are).
3. Your ambitions (here, they can deduce how you see yourself and whether you wish to work hard on your way up the ladder, or if you have dangerous ambitions to take over the department immediately).
4. Your logical thinking (or preparing you for the fact that this will happen, because the whole company is understaffed and they need you to understand that you will actually be doing 2 or maybe 3 people's jobs).
5. Your initiative (or your willingness to agree with your superiors, even if, as is often the case, they are less intelligent or less capable than you, and often want things done a specific way because they can't cope with some underling who may be more suitable for the position).

There are some things about the HR manager that are truly bewildering, such as their inexplicable ability to understand terminology and often whole documents that seem to have been written by the descendants of Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a European civil servant. They have a truly incomprehensible terminology of euphemisms that makes Newspeak seem perfectly rational. What do I mean? Well, take a look for yourself at some of the stuff they dream up:

1. Alternation Ranking Method: ranking employees on a particular trait or feature, e.g. flexibility or punctuality, from best to worst
2. Correlation Coefficients: a statistical procedure that compares an employee's job performance with his/her test score
3. Emotional Intelligence: the ability of an employee to be sensitive or understanding to the emotions of others, as well as his/her own impulses
4. Flexible Staffing: a policy to hire temporary or contractual employees on a short-term basis to fill vacancies usually occupied by permanent members of staff. This may help with this...
5. Attrition: not hiring new members of staff after permanent ones have died, resigned, been fired or joined another department.

These are just some of the words and phrases employed by HR departments everywhere, collecting information about you, comparing you to other colleagues, making notes about your suitability, your job longevity, your probability of being promoted, etc... Can you imagine what files those people must be keeping about you?

But here is the main point: a lot of this is just methodology and procedure thought up by a leading psychologist to give HR people everywhere something to follow, something to adhere to, in order to draw comparisons and conclusions using the same scales and statistics for all employees. These are of course flawed, for various reasons, as every human being is (still) different, in the same way that everyone's metabolism is different. Eating an salad every day for some is what they need to keep healthy, but for others it makes them constipated, or the opposite... And so HR methods are unwieldy, inaccurate and useless, but it makes them feel more in control of the situation, because little by little, people's characters, preferences, working habits and routines are slowly converging into the sheeple that those in control crave for. 

Take a look at people's daily routines:

Get up, wash/shower, quick breakfast, commute, arrive, badge in, work, lunch, work, badge out, travel home, eat, watch television, bed. Repeat five days a week, meet friends on Fridays, go shopping on Saturdays, do some housework on Sundays, and a hobby or two. That's how most people's lives go. At least those working in offices. People no longer have time to develop hobbies, see family and friends on a regular basis, cook proper food every evening, get involved in cultural activities, etc. Most people's ambition is having 2 weeks at the beach per year. And yet they have to regurgitate all the ridiculous New-agey stuff at their annual review, where the questions... oh you know the deal. But changing jobs brings out the most gibberish.

1. Why do you want this job?
2. Why do you want to leave the other job?
3. How many hours did you work?
4. What aims do you have for the future?
5. Where would you like to be in ... years?
6. Do you prefer to work independently or in a team?
7. If you know your superior is wrong, how do you handle it?

The list is endless. But quite frankly, the vast majority of people like me, who often require people for various roles, can tell in the first ten minutes if someone is right for the job or not, simply by having a basic chat. There is no need for such a lot of questions, because in the end, if you respect your employees, if you value their work, if you believe they have a right to privacy and to being their own person, you will simply ask for a certificate of good conduct from the police to make sure they're OK, and a few other documents for administration.

What you will not do is make a pseudo-psychological analysis and diagnose your potential employee with one or other potential category of performance. How dare you?

Finally, let me answer the seven questions above:

1. Why do you want this job? Because it pays the bills, but apart from that, why else would I want to shift paper from one pile to another day in-day out?
2. Why do you want to leave the other job? Because you pay more.
3. How many hours did you work? None of your business.
4. What aims do you have for the future? Ditto. But I can tell you it does include money.
5. Where would you like to be in ... years? See my previous answer. But ideally far away from here.
6. Do you prefer to work independently or in a team? Depends. Generally though, in a team my voice of logic and reason is drowned out by the dronings of the one with the loudest voice and the sharpest elbows. On my own, I find I get given targets that are unattainable and so I think I prefer to walk off from the interview now.
7. If you know your superior is wrong, how do you handle it? There are many ways, but one of my favourites is to shrug my shoulders, do it as he/she asks, then when the whole thing goes down the toilet, get fired for obeying instructions.

Quite frankly, I like being independent. I like being able to tell a client to go fly a kite when I get tired of the exaggerated demands. It's a lot like being a babysitter rather than a parent. At the end of the day, you can just hand the little brats back to their respective owners rather than having to take them home with you.