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A lot of young people are being driven to entrepreneurship because of the piss poor job HR/Leadership teams do at corporations & how almost no ones willing to talk about it. My pet peeve, are un paid internships that are so wildly popular or the token payment internships
Lets dive a little deeper. If you start your career with working for or along side people who want you to hero worship them and thank them for the opportunity of a life time, 9/10 times when its your turn to hire folks you will be caught in the same death spiral...
HR is the singular most under developed professional area, run like most others in PK, a fraternity. A fraternity of (1) Old timers(xyz sahab woh HR kay puranay admi hain (2) Folks who have no real success to their name & opted to be trainers/external HR advisors & (3)Misfits
4)Admin & Skoority + HR. The old timers are guys who were at banks or pharma cos, they got some of the franchised HR presentations and global docs, had mildly successful careers and outlived their peers and went into consulting. Then we have trainers and consultants...
They patronize the old timers and co-brand their services, when you see one blood sucking leech at a firm you will likely find the other as well. Their patrons are also CEOS/Owners past their 60s who are still living in an era of discipline and Chairmansuckupmanship.
Next we have the Misfits, they are may Fav bunch. They are organizational parasites, who have moved from 1 place to an other,finally landing up in HR & being the gatekeepers-not in a good way, these are the folks that came up with the award winning ideas like dont pay interns etc
Again not original ideas, they are folks who aspire for life time employment and subscribe to using the old timers and trainers and building reports & metrics that people stopped caring about in the 80s. Since they cant use Google, their content hasn't refreshed.
The misfits are like the kids who used to say, if I had tried I could have also gotten a scholarship to xyz univ and if i tried, I could have... The core of the matter is, how ever hard they tried, their intellectual ceiling is known to all but them & the old guard hiring them
Finally we have the jack of all trades,retired from an honorable career from Pindi, but seeking to live a second life as an expert on all things Admin, Procurement, HR and besides drawing room politics they are typically spent bullets whose only utility is managing govt relations
So what does this have to do with Unpaid internships, heres a primer, if you work with an HR professional for your first gig and they are more interested in your verified paper work than speaking to you and understanding your aspirational target, choose to not choose them.
If their instructions include cc:in or bcc:ing them etc in all communications.Know that their insecurities run deeper than being married to their first cousin(typically phuppo ki baiti) and not their highschool sweetheart. If they emphasize on duration of work vs quality of work
Understand that they got where they are by being in the office and being seen and they will continue to be miserable and be in the office just so the boss can see them. Make sure you dont choose their miserable life because you are better and you arent looking for lifetime work.
If its unpaid, its ok to get laugh at them and walk out. Make sure you choose being an entrepreneur for the right reasons and not out of spite for how these half wits treat you. If you choose to work at a startup be sure you choose it because you can work in an unstructured setup
There is no where to hide at a startup. Your contribution (or lack thereof) will be felt immediately by the entire team unlike these HR guys who hide behind paperwork that they invented. Pakistan doesnt have a talent issue, we have an HR issue
FYI startups also suck at it because they try to hire these name brand MNC/types and get hammered. The best way to evaluate the next HR person is by asking them 1) What they do for fun 2)whats their aspirational target 3)describe their CEOs leadership style. If the responses are
1) I am always at work 2)I want to be like our CEO/Founder/Chair(wo)man and 3) Partner, CEO sahab to azeem hain ... run and never come back. Remember you have options, they don't. Choose wisely. @jehan_ara @rebootdude @raza_matin @Ash_Kalim @YusufJan @TalhaIzhar @ZMoosaPK
