Mr. Bidwaik, you have been banned…..

There are different categories of HR professionals in India (may be in the world).

HR Professionals, who frequently visit different online HR forums & web sites and ask questions, raise queries. Based on answers & responses given by other professionals, they try to find out solutions. In totality the responses are confusing and you don’t get the concrete answers. There are people who post the basic queries. Other professionals are very eager to respond to such queries. Everything is ready made. You need not to apply your brain. I have seen the queries like, “What is the function of HR?” “What are the salary components?” etc etc. I surprise when the HR professional asks what the functions of HR is. What they learn in management institutes?   

Second category of HR professionals is those who have solutions for everything. They respond quickly on questions and queries. Their solutions are theoretical and even the person who has one year experience can comment on serious IR issue which seasoned IR person could not resolved. (Yes I know, a solution can be given by anybody and you don’t know it can be effective.)

Third category of HR professionals is professionals who just forward mails, joke, and post copyrighted e-books on the forums. Sometimes they just copy the article and post without giving the reference or without acknowledging the original author. I have seen my articles circulated without citing the source.           

Another category of HR professionals copy from these forums, sites and try to implement everything in their organization.

Off course, there are professionals who are true professionals and know what to post, where to respond and what to refer.   

You just have a look on the time spent (during office hours) by these HR professionals on these online forums and sites. Check their questions, queries and responses. These forums are really useful and the energy of the participants is amazing, but the question is where their energy goes when they work in the organization. Another question can be, “How they get the time for all these?” (I do this all after office hours or Saturday and Sunday.)    

One more category- these HR professionals build the library of everything on their laptop and apply the same whenever they go. In one company, the senior HR professional (the rank of top management), just copied the compensation revision letter from her earlier organization during compensation restructuring.  She forgot to delete the master head of her organization from header of world document.

Everything is available on the net. You just search on the Google; you get the material, format, draft. The question is then for doing these all why HR professionals are required. Any clerk can do the same.     

And if you raise the concern on this and if you are rebellious on some thought, you are banned by the moderator. The moderators (except few honourables) are chosen based on their seniority on the forum and not their skills and competencies. (This is my perception because these moderators are not visible in serious discussions. They are not effective while channelizing discussions.)

If you challenge the conventional HR practices, you are thrown out from the online forum. One such forum banned my membership on this reason. When I post anything on the forum, I give the source and reference. As a rule, when you post the article, instead of copying the whole article, you should give the link of the article with your summary. I do the same including posting about my blog.  The reason given to is “You have been banned for the following reason: He visits the community fundamentally to promote his blog. His HR Advice is biased and doesn’t help the readers other than raising some controversial issues with no solution in sight.” Is it so?????

Please note, I have full respect of these forums and HR community. I believe that these forums have the great source of information. These forums help community to grow and learn many aspect of the profession. But it is on HR professionals and moreover on moderators to make it effective.

The material on these forums should be used as reference. After all every organization is unique and any practices should be as per the context of that.