Friday, December 13, 2013

Part time to Full time... I've been there before

Once upon a time, I worked as a part time HRIS person for a small company near my house the "IS" portion of that title is Information Systems. The other part is HR.

I'm not an HR kind of person. I have a lot of issues with using "humans" as "resources." I have a lot of issues with secret keeping, with obfuscation, and with laying people off while looking them in the eye and telling them everything is going to be okay and not to worry. I find the vast majority of HR people to be phony, liars, deceivers, and not really interested in the "human" portion of the equation.

The "IS" portion of that thing, I liked. I love building webpages and tools. I had great experiences building things with one company as the HRIS portal manager, and was looking forward to another job in that vein to build my skill set, even if it was a part time job.

The job wasn't panning out the way it was supposed to, for a number of reasons. I ended up doing a lot more employee care, direct counseling, worker's comp paperwork, and other things to fill in the gaps of the director and assistant director's lives.

They decided they were going to hire a full time HR person, and never once asked me if I wanted the job. When they did their first round of interviews I said something to the assistant director about how it would be nice to have a full time job, and I wished that she'd asked me if I wanted it. She looked surprised and said "oh, I thought you liked working part time. It never crossed my mind to ask you." Her head tilted to the side like a Golden Retriever waiting for the ball to be thrown or wondering "where did you hide that cookie?"

Duh?

I'm trained, I know the job, I'm already doing it? Ask me first at least and at least give me right of first refusal? Yeah, I liked working full time but when I interviewed we had talked about the possibilities of a full time job, and now is the time, and now you're not even asking me if I want it.

She said something about wanting a "certified HR professional" in the position. Whatever. Long and the short of it is I knew that she was very much one of those HR people I don't like. And I was not an HR type of person, so she didn't like me very much.

Turns out that they interviewed a really good friend of mine for the job, and I was stoked that she could possibly be hired. I told them that I was friends with this girl and they terminated me. Because I'd been talking to her about the likelihood of her working there. They told me it was because "the higher ups decided that a part time person was not needed if a full time person was being brought in" but I knew that was a pile of crap.

Whatever, I'm happy to go.

4 comments:

  1. I'm totally confused. is this something that just happened?

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  2. No, that was after I got laid off from a job in 2002, and got picked up and assigned to a part time job by a temp agency in i think 2004. worked there for about a year.

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  3. hence the "once upon a time" opening.

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  4. oh the present tense threw me

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