The department that turned firing into a growth opportunity.
The number of employees in an organization, reduced to a single dehumanizing number that makes layoffs sound like inventory management. When someone says "we need to reduce headcount," they mean real humans with mortgages, but the phrasing helps everyone sleep at night.
A term that manages to sound both dignified and dehumanizing simultaneously, reducing employees to assets on a balance sheet. It's the corporate way of saying "people are resources" without the self-awareness to realize how that sounds.
A feedback technique where criticism is sandwiched between two compliments, creating a positivity-negativity-positivity structure. It's the culinary approach to telling someone they're failing, though most employees can smell the BS from a mile away.
Human Resources Information System—software that manages employee data, payroll, benefits, and basically every detail of your employment life. The database that knows more about you than you remember about yourself.
The corporate ritual of exchanging money for human labor, dressed up with multiple interview rounds and culture-fit assessments. In HR and recruitment, hiring is the art of finding someone qualified who'll accept your salary range and tolerate your company culture. It's what happens after weeks of ghosting candidates and making them complete unpaid 'projects' to prove their worth.
A flat organizational structure minimizing management layers and hierarchical levels, theoretically empowering employees and speeding decisions. In reality, it often just means unclear accountability and decision paralysis.
A worker identified as having the capability, aspiration, and engagement to rise to senior leadership roles. Commonly abbreviated as HiPo, because HR loves acronyms almost as much as favoritism.
A corporate proclamation that no new positions will be filled, typically announced right after three people quit and everyone else is drowning in work. It's management's way of saying 'do more with less' without actually saying it out loud.