Is HR Without Adminstrative Headaches Possible?

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I am currently at university (in Sweden) and will have my degree from a program aiming at HR (including i/o psychology, some other behavioural sciences, economics and labor law). I am just about to start applying for "real" jobs. :) I have some experience from an HR administrative position during summer, and also a few years of experience doing other things. During summer, when I got to come up with a proposal for how a competencies module for a new HRIS to be implemented should be built and what it should include, that was a lot of fun. Interviewing a candidate for a position was also rewarding. Filing papers into folders, or typing data into a database, for hours and hours, decidedly less so.

I am an intelligent, responsible person, a fast learner and I feel confident that I could be great at organizational development and tangent areas. "Good enough" as I may be, I will never be a great administrator because I am so bored by doing work without thinking or being creative. I try to make it more interesting when doing that kind of work, but that only goes so far. I don't mind SOME administrative work, esp. not administrating "my own stuff", but I am truly afraid of ending up in a position doing predominantly that.

Do you have any advice for how I can try to, basically, avoid the boring stuff and work at and be great at the fun stuff? Especially considering I am just about to start my career.

Thank you for a great blog!

First, a disclaimer, I know nothing about Sweden, so I am answering this question from a US perspective. I did call Sweden once and when the woman answered the phone, in Swedish of course, I said, hesitantly, "Can I speak with [name]?" she immediately responded, "Yes, just one moment please. May I tell him who is calling?" And I thought, if someone called me and I answered in English and they responded in Swedish I could never just switch into Swedish with no problem. But, I digress and I shouldn't have taken Hebrew as my foreign language in college because it has NOT been helpful.

So, can you just do the fun stuff? No. Sorry. Especially not at the entry level.

You enjoy organizational development? Great. But, as you sit around thinking, eventually thoughts will have to get down on paper and into Power Point. Seminars will be scheduled and handouts printed. Even if you had an admin to do the "putting together" part, you'll still have a ton of administrative work along with it.

You enjoy employee relations? Great. You get to talk to people. Help them solve their problems. Make the world a better place. And then you have to fill out paperwork--document performance issues, conduct employee exits where you have to check off boxes that say you've collected a badge and they have 3 days of remaining vacation.

You enjoy staffing? That's an administrative nightmare here in the US. Better make sure you save the criteria you used for every Monster.com search or you could be in big trouble for discrimination. Don't forget that not knowing a candidate's race is not an excuse for not being able to submit statistics on the racial makeup of your candidates. Then you have to schedule interviews, review paperwork, copy forms.

You want to do HRIS? Well, welcome to paper central. Who do you think makes sure those lovely forms that have to be signed get sent out and collected? Who does all the reporting?

Comp? Ever heard of a year end salary increase program? Sure, you get to strategize on the best percentage for increases and help managers determine how to go about dividing their available money. But you still have to make sure every eligible employee gets a raise or a reason for not getting one. And then let's talk about salary surveys.

Are you ready to run screaming? It's not that bad. Really, it's not. And you'll find paperwork in any department you go to. And as you start out, one of the worst things you can do for your career is say, "I'm too smart to file/staple/fill that form out. Get an admin to do it." Yes, there are many tasks that a trained monkey could do. However, a trained monkey is much more expensive than a low level HR person.

HR is great. I love it. I try to automate my administrative tasks as much as possible. But, in my experience you can never avoid them completely.

Generally, things such as typing data into databases fall on administrative staff unless it is a special project. I don't think you have to worry too much about that. Make sure when you are interviewing you have a clear understanding of what the job's expectations are. Just because the title says "trainer" it doesn't mean that you won't be responsible for maintenance of the training database. This is fine, you just need to know about it and what that entails.

Good luck and welcome to HR!