The department that turned firing into a growth opportunity.
A glorious pause in work where you briefly escape your desk, inbox, or responsibilities—or a physical rupture in something, depending on whether you're refreshed or clumsy.
The period when an employee is fully paid but has no assigned project, secretly the best part of consulting life.
A psychological evaluation tool measuring personality traits, work style, and behavioral tendencies of job candidates or employees. HR's attempt to predict future behavior using standardized questionnaires, despite personality being way more complex than a 30-minute assessment.
The annual period where employees frantically read health plan documents they don't understand while HR assures them everyone will eventually understand the deductibles.
A compensation system where jobs are grouped into salary ranges or 'bands,' theoretically ensuring fairness but often creating pay inequality disputes.
Excessive headcount, redundant processes, or bureaucratic fat that makes an organization slower than a three-toed sloth on sedatives. Usually discovered right after hiring sprees.
Employee monitoring software tracking productivity, keystrokes, screen activity, and sometimes location data during remote work. It's productivity theater that assumes workers are fundamentally untrustworthy and need constant surveillance.
Experienced employees who are temporarily without a project assignment, sitting on the bench like substitute players waiting to get back in the game.
When a colleague pretends to be your friend while actively undermining your projects to leadership. The knife wound comes with a smile.
Beginning of Year—the period for setting annual goals, budgets, and strategic priorities. A time of optimism quickly replaced by reality.
A narrow legal exception under Title VII that allows an employer to consider a protected characteristic when it is genuinely necessary to the job. Courts read it very narrowly, so 'we've always done it this way' does not qualify.
A recruiting search method that uses operators like AND, OR, and NOT to build precise candidate queries. It is logic applied to hiring, named after the mathematician who never imagined LinkedIn.
An absence-scoring formula that squares the number of separate absence spells and multiplies by total days absent, so frequent short absences score worse than one long one. It is a mathematical way of saying 'you've been off a lot, and we noticed'.