Beyond the Drawbridge

Brunhilde is agog at some of the language in the latest HR newsletter:

SydneyRecruitment manages the end-to-end recruitment of staff and the on-boarding of new staff.

On-boarding sounds like the sort of thing young, fit babes might get up to at Bondi.

I’m afraid I never read those emails anymore. They’re full of such stuff. I retrieved this month’s copy from the trash and chose a few lines at random:

…cancellation of any sponsorship rights going forward.

SydneyPeople is divided into HR teams that work together to service all your HR needs

advice and guidance to [clients] on strategic and operational human resources issues impacting the University’s performance.

…proactive development of internal talent…

…ensures the principles of workforce diversity and EEO are embraced

..ensuring the University’s overall remuneration strategy meets the domestic and global
competition for talent.

I thought ‘meeting competition’ was a great concept, but I’m worried that I’ve been re-aligned:

With an effective date of 1 August 2008 the HR Service Centre will have re-aligned the support of the University’s groups/schools/units to different HRSC Team Members.

Do you think that might impact my performance to such an extent that I might need to proactively embrace internal talent development and be serviced by HR?

This is what you get when stuff is written by people from the Centre for the Mind. Seriously.

So there we were, having fruit instead of cake (Mrs JM thinks we eat too much cake and we should all go on diets) because Thu was going on maternity leave. Boris is peeling lychees and trying to figure out which bits you eat, and which you don’t.

“If you swallow the seed,” says Thu with a smile, “it grows into a tree inside you.”

“Oh,” says Boris, “Then what did you swallow?”

I nearly choked on my char masala and had to be excused.