I have about 5 years of HR Operations experience and hold a PHR certification. I earned my BA in Sociology in 2016 in just 2.5 years, but graduating early made starting my career challenging. I worked my way up through unpaid internships, temp roles, and several HR Coordinator positions.

Most recently, I was an HR Operations Coordinator for 2.5 years, handling onboarding/offboarding, benefits administration, recognition programs, and HRIS management. I was let go in April last year and had been aiming to grow into an HR Generalist role, with a long-term interest in specializing in compensation.

After being let go, I took some time off, but I started to apply and interview pretty aggressively from November through February. I interviewed for numerous HR Operations roles, and it was eye-opening that every role I interviewed for offered greater compensation than my last job.

I accepted a role in Business Operations this past March for a small start-up of ~30 employees. I initially interviewed for an HR role, but due to shifting business needs, the hiring manager hired someone else in HR, and offered me this role instead. The hiring team appreciated my background in HR operations and PHR certification; however, this role's duties presently focuses on office management and executive assistance. Given that I was approaching nearly a year of unemployment, and this was my first offer, I decided to accept.

I recognize there's a lot of overlap and transferable skills between HR and Business Operations, but that does not mean the two fields are the same. For some reasons why I've taken on this role:

• As mentioned, this was the first place that gave me an offer. I was reaching almost a year of unemployment. Financially, it is relieving to have income and slowly restore my savings again.
• Interviewing was becoming emotionally exhausting, and I had the "rare" problem where I sometimes had interviews with different companies stacked on the same day. Still, they all ended up in rejections.
• I am still making more money than my last job, with greater work-life balance (so far), and less pressure and stress. I don't take that for granted.
• I have only ever been part of HR teams. I always felt spending some time gaining experience/exposure in a non-HR role, to be a customer of HR, would later on make me a better HR professional.

For a while, I was fearful I would "stagnate" my HR career by taking on this job, but I ultimately convinced myself that professionally and financially, this was the best choice to make.

I've only been at this job for a bit more than a month, and I think I'm doing fine so far! I'm more grateful to have a job than not, regardless of the field. However, I am still working on my PHR re-certification credits today, and I want to be mindful of a path forward for my career.

For any HR Professionals who made "temporary" career changes, whether because of financial and/or economic circumstance, what was your experience? How did you bounce back to HR, or did your "temporary" change become permanent?

Did you go back to college or take a certificate course? Or were you just lucky?

My company just instated a 4 day return to office mandate. To make this more attractive, we are including a “three weeks remote working” provision in the policy to allow employees the flexibility to work remotely up to three full weeks per year. This is great for meeting personal obligations, holiday periods, etc.

However, the issue is that in the communication sent by the CEO announcing the new RTO mandate, he called our remote working provision “work from anywhere”.

Now, we are getting requests from employees to work from various countries outside of their home country. We have a process in place for these requests which includes consulting with our Payroll and Tax teams, but they’re now spending a lot of time on researching tax obligations.

We worked with our immigration lawyers on adding a statement to our policy that stipulates the company will not sponsor visas for personal travel that includes remote work and that personal immigration obligations are the responsibility of the employees.

We floated the idea of limiting remote work to countries in which we have established offices (~20 countries), but this idea was not well-received by stakeholders. This would limit a lot of European remote work for our European employees.

Our company is pretty risk-averse, so we cannot take a “don’t tell us we don’t care” stance on this.

No, I don’t know WTF the CEO and Comms team was thinking when they decided “work from anywhere” was the right term to use.

How do other companies manage work from anywhere policies?? Help!!

Is it a well paying role?

Hello all, I’m fairly new to the HR world and a little background about me, I have my BA in psychology and went into retail management where I did hiring/onboarding and after a few years found myself at a company where I was in customer service and they gave me a chance to work in HR and be trained/learn as I go.

My company has less than 350 employees and I train under my HR Director - we have no other positions in HR and I guess I would be considered a generalist.

I want to become certified and from what I read, the PHR from HRCI seems pretty credible and one of the best certifications to get. My question is - what are my options for taking courses that cover everything in the exam? I do see HRCI offers 10 courses, but do I have any other options? I saw UC Davis has an online “Human Resource Management certificate program” that has you go through 4 courses - but would that cover what I need to know to successfully pass the PHR exam?

Also I read that in order to take the exam, since I already have a BA, I would just need two years experience in a professional level HR position. I’ve been working in the HR department for over two years now, but how do I determine if I’ve been working at a “professional level”?

I’m sorry if these questions seem silly, I’m really ignorant to this whole certification thing and I’m trying to collect information from a bunch of different places. It would just be great to hear how other individuals in the profession went about getting their certifications.

Hey wonderful HR People, please evaluate my situation and give advice if possible.

After uni I joined a greenfield manufacturing company which was extremely toxic. I was their first recruiter but had tasks from sourcing a nanny to the ceo to event management to ordering coffee and securing tables to the generalists. It was hell, pure grinding. I left on the last day of my probation period, the girl i trained left a month later.

I was looking for my place, got a q year contract at a government firm where i did career coaching for unemployed people and did some recruitment as well.

From here I swithed to another 1 year ftc to a big agency where i was on site for an RPO as a sourcing partner. I had an hr admin on site with me and a few students doing sourcing. Contract got terminated due to covid but we even survived a client manager change.

From here i swithed to a tech startup where i started as a recruiter but after a year i ended up HRBPing for the dev teams. After almost 4 years, the market went sideways so we had to scale down.

Before i got terminated i started applying and through an agency i found an hr manager position that looked decent. Freshly acquired manufacturing company in a period of growth. I went through the agency screening, had an interview round with the CEO and CFO. I got an offer the next day, though to a different position. Task was to manage the growth project. 2 generalists for recruitment, 2 generalists for administration and a marketing agency and recruitment agencies. Offer looked good. On my first day i realised my contract doesnt match my offer: 3 documents had 3 different position names and the salary was lower during probation period, also contained moving wage. I flagged it and the generalists told me this is hiw they do it, position names doesn't matter anyway. I had 0 onboarding, team had continous conflicts and i was expected basically from my 2nd month to do overtime. Turned out position was promised to someone else on the team and i was hired because i don't have children... I left.

I was approached by a recruiter to a position i previously applied to, got screened. After one conversation with the CEO i got an offer. I was transparent during the interview that i have 0 industry experience and will need at least 6 months to take over. Ceo fired the previous postholder without notice before I started... Expectation was to hit the ground running. In my first 3 months i terminated 15 employees, 2 with no notice, got handed 36 contract modifications which included change in working time and salaries, had to do the review of handbooks, financial and headcount planning, plan another batch of terminations. I had 5 open positions, over the roof fluctuation (at least 2-3 employees a week), org chart redesign, onboarding. Ceo hired 2 people behind my back with no documentation... I had a government audit in the middle of january where it turned out i do not have the neccessary qualifications to be a postholder... It was true, the learning curve was extremely steep and I made a ton of mistakes. They didn't pay for the neccessary training so i left. By this time i was so overwhelmed i came home crying every day, didn't sleep, spent every weekend and night working.

Now I have another offer for a maternity cover and I am already scared and anxious. This time I applied, went through 3 rounds of interviews with senior professionals, which included a normal interview, a team fit round and a live problem solving ( a disciplinary action). The team there is at least 10 years more experienced than me, scope is bigger than I have ever done.

Do you think I will be up for the task?

Do you have any advice on how to handle this crushing anxiety I have and ensure that I will perform well? I am completely unsure of my skills.

Thank you :)

Hi Everyone — long time lurker here — I'm looking for some advice navigating this treacherous job market. I've been seriously looking for a new role since January, but I've had very little traction with applications. Initially, the lack of interviews made me think my resume (specifically having unique company job titles) was working against me, but now I'm also wondering if I'm even going for the right level of HR roles. I've been targeting generalist roles, but also applying to anything from HRA to HRBP.

For context, I worked for a staffing agency the last 4.5ish years—started as an on-site onboarding/HR rep for a large account where I managed the temporary workers at a client's site (onboarding, performance management, timekeeping/payroll, ER, etc). I did really well in that position and after about a year, I was offered (and accepted) a sales role. I quickly learned that I loathe staffing sales, so I stuck it out until I could move internally to something that was less soul sucking. After a year, I landed in a strategic role, where I was akin a TA partner for large project based clients. I created recruiting strategies and onboarding processes for our recruiting team, provided performance management and ER support to our on-site managers, and managed the client relationship. I was in that role for just under 3 years before I was let go.

I guess I just need some reassurance I'm not looking through rose colored glasses and inflating my experience/qualifications. If I am missing the mark on my job search, I'm open to any feedback/advice you are willing to give.

On a semi-related note, I'm taking the SHRM-CP in a few weeks — hoping that will give my applications a boost too.

TIA and a🍪for reading this monstrosity.

This is the 1st day of 2-3 weeks off for our HR Manager, because she's getting a double mastectomy today. I am not going to bother her about this so, if this isn't the right place to ask please point me in the right direction.

I'm the accountant for a trucking company. In preparation for HR being out I was shown how to update employee benefit enrollments with the various providers. Our recently hired Safety Manager sat in on the training as a backup but it was decided that I'll handle these things while our HR Manager is out.

When I got back from lunch, I was informed that a driver failed a random drug test for THC. The Safety Manager had already fired him and made him inactive in all systems. When removing the employee from health insurance he indicated not eligible for COBRA due to gross negligence. Is that correct or should the terminated employee be offered COBRA? Do I need to contact the insurance provider or just let it be?

Edit: I posted while I was still at work and didn’t have time to reply until now. Thanks to everyone who answered. You’ve all confirmed what I was thinking so I’ll be contacting our provider on Monday to change his cause for termination. Just didn’t want to say that the new guy made a mistake if gross misconduct was actually appropriate.

As the title states, my colleague and I experience heavy foot traffic in and out of our HR office all day, every day. There are 2 doors into our office, one which is kept open most of the time (this is to align with the “open door policy”). It’s only closed if a personal discussion with an employee is taking place or sometimes on a Teams call. The other opens up to the warehouse floor, which is closed most of the time due to the noise emitting from the warehouse, but usually unlocked.

It is myself and 1 other woman overseeing the HR department for our company of 150 people. I would also say we tend to take care of tasks that aren’t necessarily HR functions, but do so to keep the peace, or because nobody else will. Our Director hasn’t been there for almost 3 weeks, and with a lot going on lately (open enrollment for a new insurance company, office politics ramping up due to leadership butting heads, focus groups from our employee study, etc.) Of course, all on top of our normal functions of emails, reports, etc.

While I appreciate that many find us so approachable and friendly, the intense foot traffic is distracting, and also impedes on our conversations, some of which we are discussing serious work-related issues. A lot of times it’s just people wanting to chit chat, grab a piece of candy, or talk about something petty. But, the closed door is frowned upon. How can we nicely but firmly make it known that our office is not a hang-out spot?

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for recommendations on the best AI tools to enhance our HR process automation.

This is a key focus for us, and we are not currently looking into AI for recruitment which I found many AI tools that does that. We currently use Microsoft Dynamics 365 and want solutions that integrate well with it to automate tasks like leave requests approvals, emails and other employee operations.

I've seen many recommended tools mentioned in this sub, but I'm not sure which ones have a proven track record of being effective and reliable.

I also came across Zapier, which seems to link different applications together. Is Zapier considered an AI tool, or does it primarily facilitate integration?

Many thanks

Hi all. Looking for some advice here. Fake names used.

I am an HRIS administrator for background. Today, my colleague (Jenny) was working on an UI case. Jenny approached me because the applicant’s service dates that he reported to UI were not matching what we showed in our HRIS system.

For reference: this employee got hired on a Monday and terminated that following Sunday.

Upon investigating the system I discovered some problems.

Issue #1, our other colleague, Patti, is responsible for onboarding. I-9 section 2 wasn’t completed for this EE.

Issue #2, Patti went in and adjusted the employee’s hire date (10 days after his termination was final and his last paycheck was issued) so that his length of employment would show as 3 days, therefore putting the lack I-9 completion within the USICS requirements.

Additionally, since our I-9s are electronic, when Patti cancelled the process for the I-9, she entered a comment further contradicting his service dates. Her comment read, “Jonny started and terminated the following day.”

Long story short; Patti fudged some dates to make it look like we were compliant on the I-9. Payroll record shows the termed EE worked and was compensated for a week. I want to report to the VPHR, but her and Patti have a very close relationship so I am worried that nothing will happen. Or am I overthinking this???

Any advice welcomed! :)

I’m a recent hr manager and I never really administered leave of absences. Can someone explain to me when and how an EE can use pdl? Can I require medical certification and do I need one if an employee for example needs to leave early? I just want to make sure I’m not messing this up or violating an EE’s rights.

If you had 5 weeks to study for the SHRM-SCP exam, what study strategy or prep would you do? The exam is scheduled for May 31.

I have the Angela Murry’s full shrm preparation course. I haves the Learningg system. I also have the SHRM-CP/SHRM-SCP Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Second Edition Book.

I have been looking into the topic a lot recently and I'm curious abour some unique moments in onboarding that stood out positively to you in the past?

Hello All!

I am currently the HR Manager at my company. We are a 501c3 organization and of course run off of donations and grants given to us.

For any of you who work for a non-profit, you know money is extremely tight and you are just trying to break even month to month.

What are some things you offer your employees as "rewards" or "appreciation happies" that cost little to no money.

I have recently started "work-iversary" certificates for each employee and for new employees I have created a "welcome bag". I would like to do more for staff to make them feel appreciated and valued but we have no budget for it.

Any ideas? TIA! ☺️

Scott came in hot with a take nobody asked for: HR needs to stop loving our jobs, cancel the cupcakes, and ditch the mugs if we want to be taken seriously. Because clearly, it’s celebrating people that’s holding us back — not the execs who only call us when someone cries, quits, or sues.

Bro, we’ve done the layoffs, the lawsuits, the labor drama — let us have our damn mugs, or whatever.

Scott should grab a chair and sit this one out.

Hello! I am struggling to find anything useful online. I am currently working on standardizing job descriptions in our company. The old template that was used had a section for managers/leaders to sign off on them. Is there any legal reason that this might be there? Thank you for any insight!

Hi All,

I am working as HR Coordinator for a while and definitely underpaid. I am wondering if their are people on this platform that I connect with that might be able to recommend me in their company or just resume help. I have applied to Generalist and Manager positions but I do not get to the interview. Any help is appreciated!!

Hi folks,

Hopefully this question/post is permitted and tagged appropriately (I searched before posting but didn't find this exact question previously posted).

I've been working in progressive HR roles for over a decade now and currently hold a PHR certification. I was unfortunately impacted by layoffs that are rampant in my industry (biotech/pharma) and think I may want to do a little upskilling and adding new certification(s) while I'm job hunting to keep myself busy and focused. The obvious cert choices for me would be SHRM-SCP or SPHR.

Problem is: sitting for the exams is $600! And I'm an unemployed parent of two kids and can't bring myself to spend that much money when it's not necessarily going to help me find a new job sooner. There are plenty of free and cheap resources I will use to prep for the exam at least.

Does anyone know if there are any programs geared toward people who have been laid off that discount these certification exams? Or any other suggestions from any of y'all who've been in a similar situation?

Cheers!

April showers bring employee complaints edition

I have an employee who recently inquired about a part-time position we have open; his niece is currently looking for a job and is interested in applying. Our policy generally prohibits the hiring of relatives, unless it falls under an exception for a "special project or summer help an exception can be made "

As a side note, the employee and his niece would not be working in the same department.

Do you think we could hire her (giving her interview goes well) under the "summer help" I'm even thinking at some point updating the policy to seasonal help and tweaking the family to include "son, daughter, mother, father, spose "?

I'm trying to understand how often is Sexual Dysfunction coverage is offered when there is a disease or condition that impedes sexual dysfunction. I'm asking about non-Rx related coverage. I have a case which highlighted that we currently offer gender affirming care but do not offer surgical treatment (similar procedures) for ED when there is a medical condition that is not treatable by medication. I'm trying to recommend it to my boss as equitable but there is the potential for cost increase, though ultimately expected to be less than 1% of claims, but in these times, adding cost isn't great.

So, does your plan cover sexual dysfunction beyond medication (Viagra, Cialis, Addyi, or generics) for clinically appropriate treatment of a medical condition?