Like Herding Sheep

I'm the first one to admit that I don't have a lot of day-to-day experience in HR. Not directly, anyway. Never had an HR title at any job. But I still consider myself to have the equivalent of several years' experience in an HR role. At the very least, I gots me some mad HR skillz, yo. (Looking back on that sentence, I promise to not ever do that again. Moving on.)

I have experience as a frontline retail manager, acquired while I was still an undergrad. Running a retail outlet (two, actually, in my time) might not seem like much in the way of HR-related experience, but I have interviewed and hired staff, trained and fired staff, recruited, tried my best to create a schedule that would satisfy the needs and desires of a staff of 12, mostly female, ranging in age from 15-50, while ensuring proper coverage of a store open 80 hours a week and not going over budget on wage cost(16%of gross sales). All this for $12.00 an hour! The skills learned there are not significantly different on the larger scale, save that you probably have to spend a little less time convincing a sixteen year old that a fight with her BFF/boyfriend of the week/unfair parents is not the end of the world/a good enough reason to get the weekend off work. I have dealt with upper management who wouldn't let me give raises to the staff who had been with the company for more than two years and still earning $9.00 an hour, and had me hire new staff at $10.50, and would then wonder why turnover was so high, and remind me that wage information was confidential. I had to explain to a longtime employee who was a single mother that I had been approved to offer her a raise of $.25 an hour (gee whiz, two bucks a day, how generous!) when she came to me in tears because she didn't have enough for groceries and had seen a paystub showing that the 16 year old part-time cashier was making $1.50 an hour more. I had to discipline staff for texting on the sales floor, fighting with other employees, and showing up to work wearing LuLu Lemon yoga pants as "business casual" attire. I had to fire employees for theft, for poor performance, and, memorably, for masturbating loudly in the bathroom during a scheduled shift. Multiple times. The paperwork on that last one got interesting.

All of this is experience from before I knew anything about HR. It wasn't until after my undergrad, when I realized that I had no interest in pursuing a career in Anthropology and my BA on its own didn't really do much for me job-wise, that I started looking around at other programs. To be perfectly honest, I can't even remember exactly why I chose the HR Management program at my university- I know I wanted something business-related, and I think maybe I chose HR on the basis of a conversation with my mother-in-law. In any case, once I got into my courses, I discovered that I really enjoyed them. I also realized that I already had experience doing a lot of these things, and that the average retail manager (or assistant manager) was not being given anywhere near the amount of training required to do any of this properly.

I have since moved on from these jobs. My current role involves a lot more in the way of actual HR work, although my job title doesn't reflect that. I'm hoping that the next step will be to actually jump right into a position that has HR in the title, something that I can really sink my teeth into. To be perfectly honest, I don't really care what you call my position; I know I'm in HR.