Human resources is a growing business.  The messy work of dealing with the ever more complicated and intricate legal aspects relating to the workforce  - the ‘human capital’ – is best left to professionals who can navigate this system and its myriad rules.  Long gone is the time, if it ever existed, in which a boss can point a finger and say “You’re fired!” and have it mean anything other than a lawsuit or settlement of considerable size shortly down the road.  This means, however, that the tactics employed by HR become increasingly consternating, lacking in consideration, and legally questionable themselves. An article in the New York Times reports on the credit checks that are typically run on a potential employee – in a time when many have lost nearly everything, including savings, homes to foreclosure, and credit ratings due to bankruptcy.

Thus, the following conversation taking place on Tim Kastelle’s blog was food for thought. I will repost my comment here:

I came across this article in the NYTimes and thought of this entry. First of all, in thinking on the topic of HR there are two things I don’t have enough knowledge of:

- We seem to be talking about recruiting, and not the nuts and bolts of HR. Until now, I had thought they were pretty much entirely separate. Where I’ve worked where I had a peek inside, the recruiters and HR were quite separate. In fact, technical recruiters I’ve known and worked with (in Seattle and the Bay Area) were usually quite far removed from the duties of day-to-day HR – once the candidate was in, the process for them was over. At least it seemed; I’m speaking from a position of unawareness of the inner workings.
- How this structure has changed since the 1980s, or even how it has changed since the tech meltdown in 2001. From my readings of business publications, the impression I’d had was that outsourcing of both HR and recruiting duties – as two separate entities – has only increased.

I’m glad it has become an issue in this recession. In the last one, there were thousands of us former IT employees who couldn’t get a job because of our credit ratings. It’s heartening to see this being legally addressed:

“In Washington, which has perhaps the most stringent requirement, a candidate’s credit history must be substantially related to the job under a law that took effect in 2007.”

I would like to think that the suffering we went through back then wasn’t for nothing, then, and that it led directly to this law eventually being enacted. (Washington was particularly hard-hit; as was California, but the law was vetoed there.)

From the article:

“If I see too many negative things coming up on a credit check, it’s one of those things that raises a flag with me,” said Anita Orozco, director of human resources at Sonneborn, a petrochemical company based in Mahwah, N.J.

She added that while bad credit alone would not be a reason to deny someone a job, it might reveal poor judgment. “If you see a history of bad decision-making, you don’t want that decision-making overflowing into your organization,” she said.

From the comments:

May a just God strike Anita Orozco, the ruthless and pompous HR flak quoted in the article, to a layoff she can’t avoid and debts she can’t pay, and then a credit check she can’t pass to get the job that would allow her to pay off her debts. God in heaven, what a country this has become, what a fatal obstacle course for working people.

And then to see that Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a California law that would have protected workers from abusive pre-employment credit checks–showing his true colors, once again, as a stooge for business lobbyists. He’s been a huge disappointment.

It’s one of the most highly rated comments, despite the peculiar tone.

Apparently, a lot of people share a frustration with HR and their inhumanity – as well as finding just how far HR feels privileged to peek into a candidate’s private information that is of no relevance to the job to be inappropriate and unethical.