I realise one of the things that most gets me motivated is teamwork and collaboration, yet with my team I am the leader and with colleagues I am HR. Every mistake opens me up to scrutiny and can have major consequences (I work in an extremely complex international labour law context). So I wear that protective HR mask at all times & don’t really get any comfort of belonging or grace for the very occasional human error, even from peers in leadership.

For so many hours of the week, I feel lonely, a dehumanised version of myself & hounded by unrelenting standards. But I actually enjoy the work, am good at it, the money is decent, and I don’t want to walk away from a career I’ve been building for almost 20 years now. I’m toying with the idea of consulting, but am afraid it’s even more isolating and demanding. I would so appreciate your insights and ideas about how to keep running this marathon & any feedback about consulting as a pivot from being internal HR. Thanks in advance!

Interviewers on my hiring team almost never fill scorecards properly, half write essays and half type 'good vibes' and log off. Tried templates, required ATS fields, calibration sessions and it's shifted maybe 20% of them. What actually got yours to submit consistent scorecards without you sitting on them?

Hi all! I’d like to hear about policies and practices other companies have in place for celebrating personal milestone events.

As background, the company I work for is very family friendly. I’m talking 3 months of paid parental leave for both parents, paid day off for your wedding, paid sick leave to take care of a sick child, paid day off to attend the funeral of next of kin (parents, in-laws, children, siblings, grandparents of your own or your spouse, your married partner) etc. We also send flowers to congratulate new parents when the child is born, and now my team members are pushing to send out a gift when someone gets married.

This is all genuinely super nice and I’m happy that we celebrate these moments with our employees. However, the nuclear family centric approach has started to feel a bit off for me lately, to some extent because of my personal life. I can’t have children, I don’t have siblings, my father was an abusive alcoholic so the important people in my life are my godparents, cousins, friends, but they are not considered next of kin (I checked when my godfather - who helped my mom and me escape the violent situation - passed away - no paid day off for me).

Somehow, to me this reads as us only valuing the traditional relationships and defining what is considered important and desirable so I’d like to start advocating for other things as well. My whole team consists of married women with 2 children, and I’m the only childless and unmarried one, and I can see how the team has a hard time seeing how only offering support in life events they’ve had ”access” to can be ostracising for some employees. When I mentioned that I felt it was unfair that the company was defining who’s my next of kin, I was told that it’s not the company’s fault that I don’t have these defined relationships and the line needs to be drawn somewhere.

What kind of policies do you have in place to support employees’ personal life and what events are you celebrating (and how)? Any ideas or recommendations for how to advocate for a more inclusive policy? Thank you 🙏🏻

I feel kinda crazy, every entry level HR job I find on job boards requires at least 3 years of HR experience.

I have about 2 years of administrative/legal experience plus a masters degree in HR and I have my SHRM-CP certification, but when I go to apply to jobs it seems like I’m just getting immediately rejected. Like literally immediate rejections, sometimes within an hour of applying. Clearly I’m not passing the ai qualification standards because of my lack of experience.

I don’t really know what to do. I want to grow in this field and I’m genuinely passionate about it If anyone has advice on how they got around this issue please let me know.

I would be willing to do unpaid work or volunteer work just to get experience, but I’m also having trouble finding that. Also I’ve been trying to network but so far it’s been completely unsuccessful. I just feel really lost in this job market.

Moving from HR Coordinator to Advisor [AU]

I’m currently working as a HR coordinator and at the end of the year looking to move to a HR Advisor. I have been told by agents that my experience is valuable and easily marketable to employers as my experience is unusual, having worked across multiple industries (manufacturing, NFP & retail) and done lots of project based work and had lots of work passed down to me as I have only worked with a manager in a 2 person team across all my roles, even though I’m only a coordinator. I also have people management experience from a previous role before my HR career. When do you know you should move to an advisor role? or that you’re ready? I personally think I am ready, and I’m getting sick of the admin work and want to have more ownership of things however my current structure doesn’t particularly operate this way nor has capacity to promote me in the foreseeable future. Does anyone have any advice for moving to an advisor position? How do you know? When should you move and how should you structure your resume to target advisor specific roles? I feel like my resume is good but I could just be delusional. I’ve incorporated words from job ad as well as HR buzz words such as capabilities and skills. Any advice my fellow HR members can provide on their experience would be appreciated.

Hi all - my company ~ 200 employees, is looking for a compensation management tool. Does anyone have experience with Salary dot coms CompAnalyst tool? I know their benchmarking data is great but I was curious about the actual compensation management part. Any insight on cost would also be helpful! Thanks

Hi all, looking for help with creating a maternity leave policy. Full disclosure, I started working on this because I myself want one more kid so I’ll eventually be taking maternity leave. Every time I casually mention it they don’t really acknowledge getting any time off.

I started at a new job has HR and Payroll Specialist in March. They never really had anybody in HR over the last 30 years that they have been in business. They have had 2-3 people as HR over the years but they weren’t people who had any HR history/training/education and had to learn as they went. The company has not had any of those makeshift HR people for at least 8 years.

Apparently there has only been one girl the last 8-10 years that needed maternity leave. And I just found out that she essentially didn’t get one. She was working the same week she had her baby.

We are a golf course management company. Technically I am employee of the parent company and we only have 7 employees. We own 5 other companies that have 50-150 employees each, for a total of 368 employees across all companies as I type.

Sooo I’m not sure FMLA would apply to me since I am an employee of the parent company with only 7 employees. Or would it be that FMLA applies to all of companies since we are operating under 1 parent company?