Yeah, I’m in a similar situation. The way my organization works, each department gets assigned an HR rep, and is forced to go through that single rep for anything. And our rep is… Pretty awful?
She’ll randomly close job postings without notifying hiring managers, meaning they’re stuck waiting for applications that will never arrive. She’ll leave job postings open even after they have been filled, meaning managers continue to get bogged down by applicants who have no chance of getting hired. She’ll “forget” to forward PII to hiring managers for weeks, so they can’t reach out to applicants to schedule interviews. And she’ll literally deny doing all of this, even when proof (like screenshots of the job postings page) is provided.
The US Army’s “Simple Sabotage” handbook states that if you can’t overtly sabotage the enemy via things like bombs, you can try to covertly sabotage the enemy by getting a position in middle management and embodying the term “middle manglement”. Just be as useless as possible, all the time, to ensure projects get delayed.
We’re convinced that’s actually what she’s doing to us, simply because she hates our department. We’re an arts department in an otherwise non-artsy organization. Like three quarters of our department’s staff is openly trans, and we’re in the Deep South where that tends to be frowned upon; we used to joke that the one cishet white male part-timer was the diversity hire. She openly refuses to let our trans staff use preferred names on company-provided things (like email addresses and name tags) and her excuse is that IT requires legal names on everything like email addresses… Despite the fact that there is someone in HR who uses a preferred name for her email address.
We’re trying to get the organization to let us go around her or reassign us to a different HR rep, but gathering evidence is a sort of catch-22. How do you gather evidence against her when she’s the sole gatekeeper for basically everything that hiring managers would need to prove that she’s not doing her job? We’ve had a few applicants reach out directly to basically be like “hey uhh what the hell is going on” and those are the only real chances that hiring managers have had to bypass the HR rep.
raicon@lemmy.world 5 days ago
HR put the head of engineering on the CC, while we were exchanging my private documents and sending me personal information back.
I sent a reply all explaining how stupid it is and requested a GDPR claim to delete all my data.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
For what it’s worth, a case like yours was what I needed to get HR to clean up their act at my company.
I documented each candidate we lost, and I documented the increased job offer prices we needed as we ran low on qualified candidates.
Pretty soon, HR was on the same page, and this stuff stopped.
Anyway, who knows if their engineering manager will do the work to fix it, but at least you have them a chance.