Is human resource management the dirty little secret of corporate social responsibility?

Everyone has seen it at some time or another:

"We apologise in advance, but only those selected for interview will be contacted".

"Due to the overwhelming quantity of applications we are unable to reply to everyone."

If you're at C-level of any organisation that has this at the end of their job postings then stop for a moment and consider what this says about you and your company. "We love receiving resumes but are just cherry-picking the ones we like." Or, how about, "We're only interested in those people who have resumes we like, everyone else can fuck off as far as we're concerned because they're somebody else's problem."

A year or two ago, corporate social responsibility was the latest fad in business and commerce. It's easy to tell fads from everything else that's going on. First, they'll be a bunch of books published on the topic that are typically described as the next big thing. Once a sufficient quantity of short-termist, silver bullet-seeking, piss-poor people managers have bought a sufficient quantity of one particular book then the nomenclature of that tome starts to infect the office. At the water cooler. On the conference call. In the meeting. At the corporate away day. People suddenly falling over themselves to square the circle from soup to nuts. Pushing the envelope whilst walking the talk. So busy seeking 'normalcy' that they wouldn't know normality if it uppercut them in the testicles with a hardcover copy of "The Service Profit Chain".

So, once it became apparent that CSR was to business as Buzz Lightyear, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Cabbage Patch Dolls, or the Nintendo Wii is or was to children, it started to have an impact on front-line management and the service industry sector alike. Management thought they needed CSR, and the service industry thought management, their actual and potential clients, wanted CSR. Overnight gurus cropped up, touting what essentially boils down to common sense and good manners. Charlatans held focus groups, sold checklists, and made a buck or two from reformatting what everyone learned at the same time they were learning to speak and take a shit in the toilet instead of their underwear. Account executives and assistants were suddenly even more busy and malnourished, kept in the office as the sun fell, repackaging and titling last years' MS PowerPoint files. Suddenly the most oft-used functionality in the Microsoft Office suite of products was "EDIT", "FIND", "REPLACE", "REPLACE ALL". Within a few weeks governing bodies were holding workshops and courses on it. Spokespeople came out of the woodwork to 'teach' people CSR.

Anyway, CSR is a natty little acronym that basically means, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" except for corporations rather than individuals. In other words, try not to pollute too many rivers, cut down trees, or have your sneakers made in sweat shops. Don't employ six-year-olds to run between the blades of a loom as it's working, or send them up chimneys. Don't drive your van over the border to Mexico so you can collect that day's workforce for your meat processing plant. Blindingly obvious stuff really, no pun intended.

So, if you want to, ahem, implement CSR throughout your organisation it's pretty easy in principle. First, a-la-change management, do a basic gap analysis. Ask what kind of organisation you'd like yours to be. If it were a celebrity, would it be Oprah Winfrey? If it were a car, would it be a Toyota Prius? Then ask what kind of organisation yours currently is. Chances are, you're talking about Paul Bernardo doing doughnuts in a Hum-Vee through a busy playground at lunchtime. Finally, analyse the difference between these two disparate states, personalities, vehicles or whatever metaphor you'd like to use. Hey presto, there's your basic change management strategy.

(If you're already playing Bullshit Bingo by this point, then your 'triple word score' word is "touchpoints").

Stage two? Figure out wherever and whenever your organisation meets the public: websites; customer service assistants; signage; direct mail and all the other bits of the marketing mix; bla bla bla. Some organisations even go as far as to incorporate public and investor relations. Some even write codes of conduct for their employees and spokespeople. However, the point I am making here is what use is all that if every time you need to recruit, your HR people don't even have the common courtesy to return calls?

Makes a bit of a mockery of things doesn't it? There's your CEO on the TV, talking about how greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced by five per cent, when your HR people are pissing scores of people off, left, right, and centre? I can't believe how old I feel even at the relatively young age of 37, when I say that I remember a time when it was taught to fresh BA and BSc graduates to ALWAYS seek feedback from organisations who'd turned them down. What was the shortfall? Lack of experience? Wrong experience? Bad skills match? What can you learn constructively from rejection? Does one need more schooling? Is it bad to send one's resume printed on a photocopy of one's arse?

This is the big problem. The reason for not getting the job could be anything under the sun. In fact, the quantity of reasons for not making it to the short list, interview, next flaming hoop are limited only by the boundaries of the applicants' imagination. That's a nice thing to inflict on somebody. Just to make matters worse, many recruitment processes are now automated. Suddenly, whether or not you get an interview has nothing to do with how right you might be for that organisation, it's just about whether you can perform a search-engine-optimisation lobotomy on your resume. It's easier to cheat than a lie detector if you can anticipate which search terms the HR people have set the software to filter for.

Already I can sense the HR people murmuring, protesting, wagging their fingers. "You don't know what it's like to be us! We get hundreds of applications!"

Well boo fucking hoo. Let me just pull on a g-string so so I can fart Mozart's "Requiem" for you.

First of all, these aren't "applications"...they're PEOPLE. Y'know? People? Isn't the profession called human resource management, not resume resource management? Each one of these pieces of paper is symbolic of a person struggling to get on in life, to escape another organisation that manages people right into the ground, to put bread on the table for their family.

Second of all, if the main issue here is time or the lack of it, then what the fuck are you doing instead of seizing the opportunity to reinforce whatever CSR pillars are within your organisation to a captive, hanging-on-your-every-word audience? Hello? These are people desperate to hear from you! And, ironically, all the while the HR people are groaning about how many resumes they received, there's a similar complaint going on in the marketing department about how they only get four actual, proactive, warm sales leads for every one hundred direct mail pieces they slam through mailboxes: "You don't know what it's like to be us! We have to distribute hundreds of leaflets!"

'Scuse me for calling the Emperor on the fact that his new clothes are non-existent, but isn't the potential solution stark staring obvious here? If you're talking about improving the perception of your brand and making people more likely to buy your product, then wouldn't treating people with dignity go a little way towards helping? Wouldn't giving people who AREN'T your current employees the same respect as those who ARE be something straight out of the Barack Obama school of politics and business?

See how I made that idea trendy there?

Rush to bookstores now to buy a copy of my new title for management, "Achieving Competitive Advantage and Multiple Orbasms without being Baracked by your Peers & Potential Employees - a 30,000ft Guide part 1.1".