The Ugly Truth About HR

And why it's no surprise everyone hates us.

HR was born out of industry, war, and control, so it makes sense that many of its systems are still organized around compliance, hierarchy, and risk avoidance. And it’s no wonder HR is often despised by the very people it’s supposed to support. For anyone who has felt dismissed, betrayed, or harmed by HR, that reaction isn’t just valid; it’s evidence of a system working exactly as it was designed to. These aren’t outlier experiences; they’re patterned outcomes of a legacy that prioritized productivity over people, and liability over care. You can’t redesign a system responsibly if you don’t understand what it was built to do in the first place.

Human Resources as an emerging concept began during the Industrial Revolution when men, women, and children were kept in cramped, dangerous workplaces where their value was measured in how long they could stand, how fast they could move, and how little they would complain. The very first version of HR wasn’t created to support workers; it was invented to enable compliance, head off unionization efforts, and ensure productivity wasn’t interrupted by the inconveniences of injury or death. These early HR roles, mostly held by women and referred to as “welfare secretaries,” were hired to keep workers in line and ensure the assembly line never stopped. They might have overseen things like injury tracking, absenteeism, housing arrangements, or factory meals. In some cases, religious instruction or home visits were used to assess a worker’s "fitness" and character. While it wasn’t called HR yet, the function had a clear mandate: control the labour that kept profits flowing.

Then came Frederick Taylor and the science of management. Taylorism championed the idea that there was one best way to do everything. His work, alongside that of psychologists like Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes, both known proponents of eugenics, helped introduce intelligence testing to the workplace. These tests were developed and normed almost exclusively on white, middle- and upper-class men, and then used as a baseline to evaluate everyone else, and the results were predictable: white, able-bodied men scored highest, while women, immigrants, Black and Indigenous people, and anyone who thought or moved differently consistently scored lower due to linguistic, cultural, and systemic barriers. These tools were structured around eugenic ideology, built to reward conformity to whiteness, masculinity, and obedience.

While the term “high potential” gained more common use in corporate HR during the 1980s and 1990s, its ideological roots can be traced back to this era.

As World War II escalated, the demand for labour surged, and the role of personnel departments expanded alongside it. With companies under pressure to staff rapidly and at scale, these departments became central to organizing the workforce. They led large-scale recruitment efforts, developed standardized onboarding and training programs, and introduced new processes to assign people efficiently across roles. The goal wasn’t just to fill jobs, it was to create order in a moment of national urgency, and to do so in ways that prioritized speed, compliance, and predictability over flexibility or care.

Work became systematized not just for efficiency, but for control, and the military’s influence was foundational. Performance appraisals were modelled on personnel evaluations used in the armed forces: top-down, rigid, and focused on discipline over development. Org. charts began to mirror military hierarchies, with power concentrated at the top and compliance expected below.

This era didn’t just expand HR’s influence; it cemented its identity as an administrative force built to scale, streamline, and suppress variability. Flexibility, individuality, and dissent weren’t just discouraged, they were designed out of the system. And while the world was fighting a war for freedom, the workplace was becoming a machine that rewarded conformity and punished diversity.

After the war, corporations expanded, and the function of “Personnel Management” took firmer shape. It sounded more official than “welfare secretary,” but the purpose remained largely unchanged: to protect the company, not the worker.

As the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism gained momentum, equal opportunity policies and grievance procedures emerged, not as tools for justice, but as legal shields. Affirmative action plans were introduced under pressure from courts and legislation, but many companies approached them as compliance strategies rather than commitments to equity.

Instead of dismantling exclusionary systems, organizations often implemented what sociologist Frank Dobbin calls “managerializing civil rights”—outsourcing change to personnel departments that focused on documentation and defensibility, which resulted in quotas without power shifts and representation without redistribution. Progress was measured by how well companies could protect themselves, not by whether people from historically excluded groups were hired, developed, or advanced in meaningful ways.

This era gave rise to the compliance mindset that continues to shape HR today. Job descriptions became more formalized, hiring processes more bureaucratic, and internal investigations more about procedural defence than resolution. Policy manuals evolved into epic tomes, but they didn’t offer any moral clarity.

By the 1980s and 90s, Personnel Management had officially rebranded as “Human Resources”, a name that reflected the era’s emphasis on efficiency, output, and the idea of people as assets to be managed. This wasn’t just a semantic shift; it was a philosophical one. The field moved away from its administrative roots and into the boardroom, guided by the influential work of Dave Ulrich, who introduced the now-famous model of HR as a “strategic partner.”

The theoretical goal of the shift to strategic HR was to make HR a key business player, someone who could help align workforce planning, talent development, and organizational design with company goals like growth, efficiency, or innovation. It sounded empowering: HR would finally have a seat at the table! Culture fit became the gold standard for hiring, performance management systems were formalized and expanded, succession planning and talent reviews emerged as key practices, but who got flagged as “high potential” still depended more on comfort than competence.

Diversity initiatives gained traction, but most efforts focused on optics, not transformation. Representation was tracked, but equity was not. And while some HR leaders pushed for deeper change, the dominant model rewarded alignment with business metrics over moral clarity. This was the era when HR became fluent in metrics, models, and business cases, but somewhere in the pursuit of strategy, it lost the thread of humanity.

By the 2000s, the rise of the tech industry brought a new vision for the workplace: open-concept offices, flat org. charts, and startup “cultures” that promised freedom and innovation, along with perks like free snacks, beer Fridays, and unlimited vacation. Human Resources was now often referred to as People & Culture or People Operations, hinting at modernity while still being tied to old dynamics. Startups disrupted the surface-level aesthetics of work, but left power and inequity firmly in place.

Despite the rebrand, the numbers told a different story. Women made up less than 20% of technical roles in most major tech companies, and the percentage was even lower for BIPOC representation. High-profile class-action lawsuits, like the one against Uber in 2017 following Susan Fowler’s explosive blog post, exposed cultures where harassment was tolerated, retaliation was common, and HR was complicit. Companies fronted innovation, but power still flowed through traditional channels.

HR became a department of many hats: therapist, coach, lawyer, parent, party planner, scapegoat. And while some people leaders tried to challenge the system from within, most were buried under unrealistic expectations and a never-ending to-do list.

The vibe was modern, but the mechanics were still built on compliance and control. At Pinterest, for example, two Black women in leadership roles raised concerns about racial and gender inequity, only to be pushed out of the company and then publicly discredited. So while Pinterest’s employer branding emphasized empowerment and inclusion, the system still said shut up or get out.

Then came the 2020s, and with it, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Suddenly, HR was tasked with doing the impossible. We managed mass layoffs and constant change, facilitated remote work transitions, and offered stability during collective trauma, all while many of us were living through the same stress and uncertainty ourselves!

When George Floyd was murdered and companies rushed to make statements about equity they didn’t practice, when the unmarked graves of Indigenous children were discovered on former residential school grounds in Canada, when Roe v. Wade fell, HR was asked to lead. But how do you lead systemic change from inside a system that was never built for what we were being asked to do? Many of us weren’t trained, weren’t resourced, and weren’t safe to do the work we were being asked to carry.

So no, HR’s history isn’t cute. But understanding where it came from helps explain why so many people mistrust it, and why those of us in this profession are exhausted, disillusioned, and left wondering if change is even possible.

HR wasn’t born to center care, fairness, or inclusion. It was built to protect capital, manage labour, and control the workforce. Every era, from the factory floor to the hybrid workplace, has layered on new language, new policies, and new promises, but the underlying logic has remained alarmingly consistent: keep things running, keep people in line, and keep the company safe.

For anyone trying to change the system from within, that legacy matters, because if we don’t understand what HR was actually designed to do, we’ll keep building new processes on top of old foundations, hoping for equity while reinforcing the same structures that caused harm in the first place.

If this all sounds like a major bummer, I promise you it’s not. If you’ve read this far, it means you care deeply about this profession and the potential it holds, and that you are willing to do the work it takes to finally change the broken system.

In the next Uncompliant post, we’ll spend some time reimagining what HR could be.

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References

Dobbin, Frank. 2009. Inventing Equal Opportunity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fowler, Susan. 2017. “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.” Susan J. Fowler Blog. February 19, 2017. https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber.

Kaufman, Bruce E. 2004. Theoretical Perspectives on Work and the Employment Relationship. Champaign, IL: Industrial Relations Research Association.

Kaufman, Bruce E. 2014. “The Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States.” ILR Review 66 (3): 3–41.

Murray, Philomena, and Jawad Syed. 2010. “Managerial Perspectives on Affirmative Action: A Study of the Australian Construction Industry.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 29 (3): 270–286.

Stone, Katherine V. W. 2004. From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Frederick Winslow. 1911. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Ulrich, Dave. 1997. Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books.

Tasker, John Paul. “Preliminary Findings from Survey of Former Kamloops Residential School Site Show Remains of 215 Children.” CBC News, May 27, 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/kamloops-bc-residential-school-1.6043778