HR Vent

[shanendoah]

Okay, I need to vent, and I need to vent to people I don't work with, because venting to the staff around me would be unprofessional.

There's a really long explanation to this, but you don't need to hear the whole situation to understand my vent, or at least I don't think you do.

I am in the process of creating a new position. We expect to pay the person we hire into this position around $4k/month. Based on the pay and the job title we felt was most likely, I chose pay grade 6. 
Pay grade 6 has a minimum pay of $2800/month and a maximum pay of $5900/month. $4000/month is just over 1/3 into the pay grade, so seems like a logical fit.

In talking with HR (about this and MANY other things) I was told that $4k/month was too high for anyone with that job title in that pay grade. And that no one in that job title in pay grade 6 in the ENTIRE university (we have 47,000 employees) was making that much money. So if I want that person to make that much money, I need to put them in pay grade 7 (which goes from $3450/month to $7200/month).


REALLY! You're telling me that $4k/month is TOO much money to pay someone in a pay grade that goes to $6k/month (and starts at $3k) Basically you're saying the entire university pretends the upper 2/3 of an entire pay grade doesn't exist? That if your job is rated pay grade 6, but you're working well enough to be paid $4k/month, you obviously need to be at pay grade 7? Even though there's still 2/3 of a pay grade of room for you to grow salary wise?
How does this make any sense?


And to clarify, for professional staff positions, which this would be, we have very few payroll job titles, and they are all pretty generic. So it makes it really hard for me to believe that no one, in the entire university, with this job title and pay grade, makes enough to put them in the upper 2/3 of their pay grade.




Also as a note, the pay grade stuff isn't really an issue. I'll happily list the job code for grade 7 instead of 6. Whatever. It's just the ridiculousness of pretending that 2/3 of a pay grade doesn't exist.

[zibazinski]

Academia, among other professions, isn't known for common sense.

[The Captain]

Ugg.  I hate administrative nonsense.

[NomoreDramaQ1015]

Yep that's academia. My job ranges anywhere from $30-$47k

But you can't pay your technician the top amount. In order for me to get to that my boss would have to "fire" me and change the job title for whatever the next tier is. I would have to be re-interviewed again and rehired.

It's insane.

[ken a.k.a OMK]

Once I was making less then my title and paygrade. I had a talk with the department head and got no where. I left the meeting telling him he had to change my title or pay me a salary in the paygrade. I knew he couldn't change my title or lower my paygrade. Well I got an 18% pay increase and many people who found out (not from me) wondered how.

[quince]

Once we were acquired, the new company's pay bands had people working under me starting 10K higher than me. My pay grade started 30K higher than my pay. 

It was annoying.  I know they won't ever level the pay: I don't think the acquisition will make money if they do. I didn't mind what I made, but having that presented to me every time I did something administrative was irritating. Also, we worked with people in the  company that acquired us, and got to see job postings, so when job postings came up for jobs that looked MUCH EASIER than ours but paid more, I got to deal with irate people reporting to me.

PITA.

[ArchietheDragon]

HR is a waste. 

[The Walk of the Penguin Mich]

I kind of understand where your HR is coming from, as I went through the wringer in order to get my job reclassified.  It took 18 months, and more hands had to touch it (from my boss through the dean of the dental school, to a couple of VPs and HR) than you can imagine - which is why the process probably took so flippin' long.  As Drama said, I had to be 'fired' from my position, they had to reestablish a new position and I had to apply for it like I was a new employee.  All because I went from supervising no one to 2 other people.

So I think that HR prefers that you hire from the bottom of the pay scale rather than the middle, rather than to deal with the utter mass of paperwork like my position had to go through.

[flamingo]

I'm going through this right now in my department. Almost exactly the same thing. And it is so frustrating! I agree, it's not the pay grade itself that matters, I don't care if you are an S4 or S5, but I do know what I want to pay for the position. I think it's so frustrating because everything else about the job posting is SO frustrating. ACK!

[shanendoah]

I'm totally in a spot now where I am creating a position that is meant to be a promotion for one of my staff. However, because she is moving from a union position to a professional staff position, I have to create the job, have her apply for it, and interview at least 2 other people besides her. Once I give her the new job, I then get to eliminate her old job, and create another new position to fill her old role because I am currently splitting up some of the duties she has been handling.

In the case I'm complaining about, I am creating a position for a candidate. We interviewed him for a different role in a brand new lab. We had two great candidates. We hired one and now the PI of that lab is creating a brand new job in one of his other labs for this person. I'm having tons of back and forth with college HR about it, and many things are frustrating (like their inability to answer my questions the first time I ask them), but hiring only 1/3 into a pay grade should NOT be an issue.

Again, this really isn't a big deal. The same job title can be placed in 4 different pay grades, so I just put it in the higher up pay grade, but honestly, they let me hire the person for the brand new lab at the very top step of the union pay scale for her job title, but won't let me hire a pro-staff in a pay grade where there's still 2/3 of the pay scale to grow. (Also, this is for a position that can only guarantee 8 months.)


I'll be honest, about 75% of my job right now is HR. And college HR and campus HR aren't always agreeing on things, and I am over all frustrated. I am having to go back to my working for an electrical engineer roots and realizing that the college HR people are micro managers, and that I have to communicate with them in a very specific way. I can't just throw questions out in the middle of a block of text in an email. I need to write an email that says "these are the questions I have for you" and number them, and explain that I do want an answer to them BEFORE talking to my PI, so that I can advise my PI appropriately.

But some of those issues are also on me. I do need to adapt my style to deal with these folks, and I do need to remember the lessons I've learned from one interaction to another, so I try not to vent or complain about those. But some just seem silly.

[Sam_2.0]

Jan 16, 2015 14:55:18 GMT -5 quince said:

Once we were acquired, the new company's pay bands had people working under me starting 10K higher than me. My pay grade started 30K higher than my pay. 

It was annoying.  I know they won't ever level the pay: I don't think the acquisition will make money if they do. I didn't mind what I made, but having that presented to me every time I did something administrative was irritating. Also, we worked with people in the  company that acquired us, and got to see job postings, so when job postings came up for jobs that looked MUCH EASIER than ours but paid more, I got to deal with irate people reporting to me.

PITA.

This happened when the company I worked for was acquired several years ago. Like you, I thought they wouldn't do much about it. About two years into it, they actually did a pay review and raised us up if we were really far behind the rest of our peers doing the same work. I got a crazy raise that year!

[quince]

Jan 16, 2015 16:07:16 GMT -5 Sam_2.0 said:

Jan 16, 2015 14:55:18 GMT -5 quince said:

Once we were acquired, the new company's pay bands had people working under me starting 10K higher than me. My pay grade started 30K higher than my pay. 

It was annoying.  I know they won't ever level the pay: I don't think the acquisition will make money if they do. I didn't mind what I made, but having that presented to me every time I did something administrative was irritating. Also, we worked with people in the  company that acquired us, and got to see job postings, so when job postings came up for jobs that looked MUCH EASIER than ours but paid more, I got to deal with irate people reporting to me.

PITA.

This happened when the company I worked for was acquired several years ago. Like you, I thought they wouldn't do much about it. About two years into it, they actually did a pay review and raised us up if we were really far behind the rest of our peers doing the same work. I got a crazy raise that year!

By the time I left last year, it was about 4 years post acquisition, and no movement.  Starting this year, they are finally raising the 401K matching to match the acquiring company's contribution.  If they do ever raise pay across the board, it will be because of all the departures or inter company job hopping causing them too much trouble, but I think half a decade + is too little too late.  I'm sure at some point things will be leveled, but probably a long way down the line, and probably after they get on integrating things like data security. 

I used to tell my manager that the people she needed to hire were like me: intelligent, hard workers, but with low self-esteem. 

[emma1420]

Jan 16, 2015 16:06:25 GMT -5 shanendoah said:

I'm totally in a spot now where I am creating a position that is meant to be a promotion for one of my staff. However, because she is moving from a union position to a professional staff position, I have to create the job, have her apply for it, and interview at least 2 other people besides her. Once I give her the new job, I then get to eliminate her old job, and create another new position to fill her old role because I am currently splitting up some of the duties she has been handling.

And this is the part as an applicant that drives me absolutely nuts.   There is nothing worse than applying for a job that you have absolutely no chance in getting.   It's a waste of my time and the employers time, and it happens far too often.  Primarily because it's required by the institutions HR department.  There should be the ability to promote an existing employee without stringing along other applicants.

[Bob Ross]

Pay ranges are there to make candidates think they have a shot at something better.

It's the cookie at the end of the treadmill.

[zibazinski]

Amen. I once got into a potential employers face then Bad mouthed them all over town because it was apparent in my interview she was barely conscious and had to do this bullshit so she could hire the person she wanted. Companies like that ought to be "outed." Do you hear me, Wells Fargo Bank, you dickheads!

[movingforward]

Things like this make me really thankful that I work for a small company.  I have worked for large corporations that practiced this type of BS (never worked in academia though).  There are pros and cons at both large and small companies but I enjoy the freedom of working for a small organization. 

[shanendoah]

emma1420 & zibazinski - I am on your side, and I have argued with my college HR person, especially since campus HR says legally we only need to interview one person. But the theory is, what if the person you have in mind for the job doesn't want it, turns it down, then you have to start all over. And I can understand that, but in my case, the person knows, if she turns down the new job, she's out of a job.
I have also been the person that was interviewed just so they could say they interviewed more than one person. It does, in fact, suck.

[The Walk of the Penguin Mich]

Jan 16, 2015 17:06:22 GMT -5 emma1420 said:

Jan 16, 2015 16:06:25 GMT -5 shanendoah said:

I'm totally in a spot now where I am creating a position that is meant to be a promotion for one of my staff. However, because she is moving from a union position to a professional staff position, I have to create the job, have her apply for it, and interview at least 2 other people besides her. Once I give her the new job, I then get to eliminate her old job, and create another new position to fill her old role because I am currently splitting up some of the duties she has been handling.

And this is the part as an applicant that drives me absolutely nuts.   There is nothing worse than applying for a job that you have absolutely no chance in getting.   It's a waste of my time and the employers time, and it happens far too often.  Primarily because it's required by the institutions HR department.  There should be the ability to promote an existing employee without stringing along other applicants.

At my job, if there was an internal candidate for the job, it was listed in the job description.  That was a pretty decent signal to not even bother trying to submit an application for the job.  I know when I had to apply for my upgrade in position (where I was that internal candidate), no other applications other than mine was sent to the department.

[zibazinski]

Especially when you word the job description so precisely that one candidate fits.