What Human Resources Is Actually Like

When you tell people you work in HR, what do they assume?

They assume I fire people for a living. Or that I plan office parties. Those are the two ends of the spectrum and everything in between is invisible to most employees. I had a conversation last Thanksgiving with my cousin Darnell, who works in supply chain at a beverage company. He said, and I'm quoting, "so you're like the principal's office for adults?" And honestly, that's not the worst analogy. It's just incomplete. The principal's office for adults, sure. But also the guidance counselor's office, the legal department's first line of defense, the budget analyst for headcount, the translator between executives and everyone else, and the person who has to pretend they don't know about the layoffs for three weeks before they happen. That part, the pretending, takes up more emotional energy than any actual task on my calendar.

Walk me through what last Tuesday looked like.

So I got into the office at 8:15. I work hybrid, three days in, two remote. Tuesday is an in-office day. First thing I do is open Workday, which is our HRIS, and check if anything flagged overnight. We have about 420 employees. I'm the HRBP for the engineering and product orgs, which is roughly 180 people. My counterpart, Delia, handles sales and operations. We split the company between us and then there's our director, Margot, who handles executive-level stuff and whatever's on fire.

Nothing flagged in Workday. But there was an email from Margot at 7:48 AM. Subject line: "Need 30 min today." Which in HR means something is wrong, because Margot doesn't schedule time with you to chat about the weather. I Slacked her back and she sent a calendar invite for 9 AM. No agenda. No description. Just the meeting.

Between 8:15 and 9, I had my coffee and worked on a compensation benchmarking project I'd been putting off. We're doing a market adjustment in Q2 and I need to pull salary band data from Radford and cross-reference it with our internal data in Workday. This is the "strategic" part of being an HRBP that looks good in a job description. In practice, it means I'm in a spreadsheet comparing our P50 for a Staff Software Engineer against the Radford 50th percentile for Austin metro, adjusting for our equity component, and flagging anyone who's more than 10% below band. There are 14 engineers below band. Four of them are significantly below, like 18 to 22 percent. I know one of those four, a woman named Priti, is about to get a competing offer from a Series D startup because her manager told me in our one-on-one last week. If we don't adjust her before the offer comes, we'll lose her, and backfilling a senior backend engineer takes four to six months and costs about $45,000 in recruiting fees.

What was the 9 AM meeting?

Margot told me that an employee on the platform engineering team, I'll call him the complainant because I have to, had filed a formal harassment complaint against his manager. The manager, Naveen, is well-liked. Really well-liked. His team gives him the highest engagement scores in the engineering org. He got a spot bonus last quarter. The CEO mentioned him by name in the last all-hands as an example of great leadership. And now I have a formal complaint alleging that Naveen made repeated inappropriate comments to this employee over a period of three months.

I can't tell you the specifics because even in a composite interview I don't want to get into the details of what was alleged. What I can tell you is that my immediate emotional response was: oh no. Not because I doubted the complainant. Because I knew what was coming. An investigation into a popular manager is one of the hardest things in HR. If the complaint is substantiated, you have a beloved manager who has to be disciplined or terminated, and his team will blame HR for "going after" their boss. If the complaint is not substantiated, the complainant feels like the system failed them, and you have to manage that too. There is no outcome where everyone walks away feeling good.

Margot and I spent 45 minutes mapping out the investigation plan. I would conduct the interviews. She would review my notes and recommendations. We identified six witnesses I'd need to talk to. The outside employment counsel, a firm we keep on retainer, would review the final report before we made any decisions. That conversation, where Margot and I sat in a glass conference room and talked about timelines and interview questions and documentation requirements, felt clinical. Professional. Methodical. And then I walked back to my desk and Naveen was standing in the kitchen pouring coffee and he waved at me and said "morning, Sasha" and I waved back and thought about the fact that within 48 hours I would be sitting across from him asking him to respond to specific allegations, and he had no idea yet. That moment, the coffee wave, is the part of this job that lives in your body.

What happened after the investigation meeting?

I had a 10 AM one-on-one with the VP of Engineering, Kendrick, which was already on my calendar. This is a standing weekly. We talk about headcount, performance concerns, promotions, org design. This week he wanted to discuss whether to backfill a role or redistribute the work. The role was a program manager who left three weeks ago. Kendrick thinks they can absorb the work across two existing PMs. I told him the two existing PMs are already at 110% according to their managers, and that absorbing more will push someone into burnout territory within six weeks. I have data for this. Last year we had a similar situation on the data team, and the person who absorbed the extra scope was on medical leave by month four. I keep a spreadsheet of these patterns. Not because HR asked me to. Because I noticed that every time we "absorb" a departure instead of backfilling it, someone else breaks within a quarter. Kendrick said he'd think about it. Which means I'll bring it up again next week with the same data and a chart.

Then I had lunch. I ate a salad at my desk because I had three witness interviews to schedule for the investigation and I needed to find rooms that weren't near the platform engineering team's area. You don't schedule investigation interviews in a fishbowl conference room next to the accused person's team. You book a room on a different floor, or off-site if possible. I booked the small room near the finance team. Nobody from engineering goes there.

How much of your job is this kind of employee relations work?

More than I expected. When I interviewed for this role, the job description said "strategic business partner, organizational design, talent management, workforce planning." About 30% of my time is that. The compensation benchmarking, the org structure conversations, the succession planning for senior roles. The other 60 to 65% is employee relations. Performance improvement plans, manager coaching, conflict mediation, complaint investigations, accommodation requests, leave management when it gets complicated. The remaining 5 to 10% is admin that theoretically should be handled by our HRIS but isn't, because Workday doesn't auto-generate itself and someone has to enter the data.

The employee relations piece is what makes this job emotionally expensive. Every case is a person. Every case has a story I'm only hearing one side of at first, and then I hear the other side, and then I have to figure out what actually happened using imperfect evidence and conflicting accounts. There's no forensic team. No body cam footage. It's my judgment, informed by training and experience and the company's policy manual and whatever employment law I can remember from my SHRM certification prep. I got my SHRM-CP two years ago. The exam cost $400 and the prep course cost $1,200 and the most useful thing I learned wasn't a specific law. It was the framework for documenting decisions so that if something goes wrong and we end up in front of the EEOC, there's a paper trail that shows we acted in good faith.

What does "acted in good faith" look like in practice?

It means I write everything down. Every conversation, every interview, every decision point. Not in Slack, because Slack is discoverable and also because Slack is too informal. I use a template in our case management system that documents the date, who was present, what was discussed, and what the next steps are. For this investigation, I'll probably generate 15 to 20 pages of documentation over the next two weeks. My notes from the first witness interview alone were four pages, single-spaced.

Acting in good faith also means I don't skip steps because it's inconvenient. The outside counsel review takes three to five business days. Three to five business days feels like an eternity when the complainant is asking me every other day for an update and I can't tell them anything because the investigation is ongoing and I'm legally required to not discuss the specifics. I say "the investigation is progressing and I take your complaint seriously" approximately seven times per case. It sounds hollow by the fourth time. It IS hollow by the fourth time. But I say it because the alternative, which is telling them something substantive before the process is complete, creates more risk than the hollowness does.

What's yours?

How much of the job is pretending you don't know something. I know who's getting laid off before they know. I know who's on a PIP. I know who made a complaint about whom. I know that Priti is being underpaid by 22% and that we might lose her. I know that there's a reorg being discussed that will eliminate two manager positions. And I walk through the office and I make small talk and I smile and I ask about people's weekends and I carry all of that information behind my face every single day.

My friend Layla is a therapist. She said once that therapists have a concept called "holding," where you hold someone's pain without trying to fix it. I think about that a lot because HR is holding too, except it's not just pain. It's secrets. Information asymmetry. I know things about the company's plans that would change how people plan their lives, and I can't share any of it. There was a week last year where I knew about an upcoming layoff, and an employee on the affected list asked me for advice about buying a house. He was in my office talking about mortgage pre-approvals and school districts and I sat there and nodded and said "that's exciting" while knowing that in nine days his position would be eliminated. I went home that night and cried in the shower. My partner, Amara, asked what was wrong and I said "I can't tell you." She's heard that enough times to stop asking. That's the tax. Not just carrying the information. Carrying it alone.

You studied psychology. How did you end up in HR?

I did one practicum at a counseling center during my junior year. Sat in on intake sessions. Listened to a man describe his marriage falling apart for 50 minutes. Walked out and thought: I can't do this 30 times a week for 30 years. It wasn't that I didn't care. I cared too much. I knew immediately that I'd take every session home with me and it would eat me alive. So I finished the degree because I was three semesters in and dropping it didn't make financial sense, and then I applied for anything that used the word "people" in the job title. HR coordinator at a logistics company in Columbus was the first callback.

The interview was with my current manager, Frankie. He asked me what I knew about HR and I said "almost nothing, but I understand people and I'm good at following processes." He laughed and said "that's actually the job." Three years later, I think he was about 80% right.

What does a normal day look like for you?

So we're 180 people. About 120 of those are warehouse and logistics staff. Drivers, forklift operators, warehouse associates, shift supervisors. The other 60 are corporate: sales, ops, finance, IT. I handle HR operations for everyone, which means I'm the person who touches every employee lifecycle event. Someone gets hired, I set them up in ADP, which is our HRIS and payroll system. I enter their personal data, their tax withholdings, their benefits elections, their emergency contacts, their I-9 verification. An I-9 is the employment eligibility form that verifies someone is authorized to work in the US. I have to complete the employer section within three business days of the hire date or we're out of compliance. I have a spreadsheet that tracks every pending I-9 by hire date and I check it every morning at 8:30.

After the I-9 check, I look at my email. On an average day I get between 15 and 25 emails from employees. Most of them are benefits questions. "Does my dental plan cover crowns?" "How do I add my newborn to my insurance?" "I need a letter for my apartment application proving I'm employed, can you send one?" That last one, the employment verification letter, I do about four of those a week. I have a template. I change the name, the hire date, the title, and the salary. It takes three minutes per letter. Four letters a week is twelve minutes of my week spent confirming that people work here. That's not what you imagine when you study psychology.

You mentioned open enrollment. What's that like?

Open enrollment is three weeks in November where every employee has to review their benefits and make elections for the following year. Medical, dental, vision, FSA, HSA, life insurance, disability. We have 180 employees and during open enrollment roughly 110 of them have questions. Some of those questions are simple. "Can I keep the same plan?" Yes. Some are not simple. "My wife just got diagnosed with something and I need to switch from the HDHP to the PPO, can I do that outside of open enrollment?" The answer is yes, if there's a qualifying life event, but a diagnosis alone doesn't qualify unless it triggers a change in coverage under the spouse's plan, which requires documentation, which requires me to explain the distinction between a qualifying life event and a change in medical need to someone who is scared about their wife's health and does not care about IRS guidelines.

Last November, our benefits portal, which is a module within ADP, crashed on the second day of open enrollment. Just went down. A blank screen where the election form should have been. I got 34 emails in three hours. Thirty-four. Each one some version of "I can't access the benefits portal." I called ADP support. Hold time was 47 minutes. While I was on hold, I walked the warehouse floor and told people in person that the portal was down and to try again tomorrow. A forklift operator named Claude asked me if this meant his benefits were canceled. They were not canceled. I explained that the portal outage was a technical issue and had no impact on anyone's current coverage. He looked at me like I was personally responsible for his family's health insurance disappearing. I was not. But in that moment, I was the only HR person he could see, so I was the target.

ADP got the portal back up by 4 PM. I extended the enrollment deadline by three days. I sent a company-wide email explaining the extension. Frankie reviewed the email before I sent it, which is our process for anything that goes to all-staff. His edit was one word. He changed "we apologize for the inconvenience" to "we apologize for the disruption." He said "inconvenience" sounds like you're sorry about a parking lot. He was right.

What about the non-benefits part?

I also handle onboarding, which means I run the new hire orientation every two weeks. We hire in batches because it's more efficient. The orientation is a half-day. I walk new hires through the company handbook, the benefits overview, the safety training for warehouse staff, the IT setup, and the cultural norms. The cultural norms section is the one I'm most proud of and also the one the company didn't ask me to build. I created it after my first six months because I noticed that new hires kept asking the same questions. "Is it OK to eat lunch at my desk?" "Can I work from home if my kid is sick?" "Who do I talk to if I have a problem with my manager?" Those aren't in the handbook. They're the informal rules that nobody writes down. I wrote them down. I put them in a one-pager called "How Things Actually Work Here" and I give it to every new hire. Frankie said it was the best HR initiative we'd done in years. It cost nothing and took me two hours to make.

I also pull reports. Turnover reports, headcount reports, time-off accrual reports, EEO-1 data. The EEO-1 report is a federal requirement where we report demographic data about our workforce by job category. It takes me about two full days to compile because the data in ADP doesn't map cleanly to the EEO-1 categories and I have to manually reclassify about 40 positions. Two days, once a year, spent putting people into boxes that don't quite fit, so that the federal government can confirm we're counting everyone. That's HR at the compliance level.

Is this what you want to be doing long-term?

I think so? I like the structure. I like that there's always a next task. In therapy, from what I saw during my practicum, the work is open-ended and you sit with uncertainty all day. In HR, I have processes. The I-9 is due in three days. The benefits portal opens November 1st. The orientation is every other Tuesday. There's a rhythm. I find that calming. What I'd like to do eventually is move into an HRBP role, more strategic, less data entry. But I also know that HRBP work involves investigations and layoffs and difficult conversations, and I'm not sure I want that yet. The psychology thing, the part where I absorb other people's stress, that hasn't gone away. It just shows up differently here. Instead of a man describing his failing marriage, it's an employee crying in my office because they can't afford the PPO premium and the HDHP doesn't cover their specialist.

What's yours?

People don't think of me as a colleague. They think of me as HR. It's a category, not a person. When I walk through the warehouse, people straighten up a little bit. Not a lot. Just enough that I notice. Like a classroom when the teacher walks in. Corey, one of the warehouse supervisors, he's friendly. We talk about the Buckeyes sometimes. But last month he was venting to a group of shift leads about overtime scheduling, saw me coming, and stopped mid-sentence. He said "hey, Ryland" with this specific tone that meant "I was just saying something I wouldn't say in front of you." I'm 29. I'm not their boss. I'm the HR coordinator. But to them, I am the institution. I represent the company in a way that, say, someone in marketing doesn't. If someone in marketing overhears you complaining, nobody worries. If I overhear you complaining, there's a flicker of "is he going to report this?" I never would, for the record. But the flicker exists, and the flicker keeps me at arm's length from 180 people I see every day. That's a specific kind of loneliness that nobody mentioned in the job posting.

You went from banking to startup. What changed?

Everything and nothing. At the bank, I was an HR Director overseeing about 600 employees across four branches in the Denver metro. Big bureaucracy. Policies for everything. A 42-page employee handbook that required legal review for any change. A comp structure that hadn't been meaningfully updated since 2017. I spent five years trying to modernize our performance review process and by the time I left, we'd moved from annual reviews to semi-annual reviews. That was the pace. Semi-annual felt like a revolution.

I joined the startup four years ago when they were 35 people. The CEO, a guy named Felix, called me because a mutual contact told him he needed "a real people person" before the company hit 50 employees. His exact words on our first call were "I've been doing all the HR myself and I think I've been doing it wrong." He was right. He'd been keeping employee records in a Google Sheet. The offer letter template had a typo in the arbitration clause. There was no benefits broker. He'd signed up for a group plan on eHealth and half the employees didn't understand their deductible. I looked at the Google Sheet and the eHealth plan and the offer letter with the typo and I thought: this is either the biggest mess I've ever seen or the most honest starting point I've ever gotten. I took the job.

What did building it from scratch look like?

First 90 days, I set up the infrastructure. Selected and implemented BambooHR as our HRIS, because at 35 people you don't need Workday, you need something that works and doesn't cost $150,000 to implement. Hired a benefits broker named Gail who specializes in startups under 200 employees. Gail found us a PEO arrangement that gave us access to a Fortune 500-level benefits package at a small company price. Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with a 4% match. Total cost went up about $80,000 annually over what Felix had been paying, but the quality of coverage tripled and I stopped getting panicked Slacks from employees who couldn't find an in-network doctor.

Then I wrote the handbook. Not a 42-page banking handbook. A 14-page document written in actual English that explained PTO, parental leave, the complaint process, and the expectations around remote work. I based the tone on the idea that the reader is a smart adult who doesn't need to be threatened into compliance. Felix read it and said "this doesn't sound like an HR document." I told him that was the point.

By the end of my first year, we had a functioning people operation. HRIS, payroll through Gusto, benefits, handbook, onboarding process, performance review cycle, and a comp philosophy that I wrote on one page and that the leadership team actually referenced when making offers. That one-page comp philosophy is the thing I'm most proud of in my career. It says, in plain language, what percentile we target, how we think about equity, and what our promotion criteria are. Most companies have this information distributed across 15 documents and six people's heads. We put it on one page and made it available to everyone. A senior engineer named Petra told me it was the first time she'd worked somewhere that told her how pay decisions were made. She'd been in the industry for 11 years.

Then came the layoff.

Yeah. Last October. The company had raised a Series B fourteen months earlier. The plan was to grow to 130 by the end of the year. We got to 102 and then the revenue forecast got revised downward. Not catastrophically, but enough that the board and Felix agreed we needed to cut burn rate. The decision was to reduce to 90 people. Twelve positions eliminated. My job was to figure out which twelve.

I worked with Felix and the CFO, Janine, for two weeks on the selection criteria. Performance data, role criticality, cost. Every name on the list was someone I had personally onboarded. I'd sat with each of them on their first day, walked them through the handbook, set up their BambooHR profile. Barret, a customer success associate, was on the list. He'd started six months earlier. His wife had just had a baby. I knew this because he'd told me during the onboarding when he asked about the parental leave policy. I processed his paternity leave. And now I was putting his name on a spreadsheet titled "Proposed Reductions."

The notifications happened on a Thursday. Felix wanted to do it quickly, all in one day, so the remaining team didn't have to sit with days of anxiety. I was in seven of the twelve conversations. Felix did three. Janine did two. Each one was about ten minutes. Script, severance details, COBRA information, return of equipment. I said "this is not a reflection of your performance" to four people. Three of them nodded. One, a woman named Ines who'd been with us for two years, said "then why is it happening to me?" I said the company was reducing the size of the team and that we'd identified roles rather than individuals. She said "Celeste, I know you. You identified individuals." She was right. And I couldn't say she was right because the legal script doesn't allow for that kind of honesty.

What happened after?

I led an all-hands that afternoon. Felix spoke first. He said the standard CEO things about "difficult decisions" and "our path forward." Then I presented the support details: severance package, extended benefits, outplacement services, and the EAP reminder for remaining employees. I spoke for about eight minutes. My voice did not crack, which I considered a professional achievement. Afterward, I went to my car in the parking garage and sat there for 20 minutes. I didn't cry. I just sat. My hands were shaking, not visibly, but I could feel the vibration in my fingers. That had never happened to me before in 20 years of HR. The banking layoffs I'd been part of were larger, hundreds of people, but they were also more impersonal. Different floors. Names I recognized but didn't know. This was 12 people whose benefits elections I had reviewed, whose first-day photos I had taken for the Slack welcome channel. The proximity is what makes startup HR different. You're closer to the humans you're managing, which is beautiful when things are growing and devastating when things contract.

How's the role now, six months later?

We're 88 people. Two more left voluntarily after the layoff, which is normal. When you lay off 12%, the survivors re-evaluate. The morale took about three months to stabilize. I ran a pulse survey in January and engagement was back to pre-layoff levels on most questions, except one: "I trust leadership to be transparent about the company's direction." That dropped from 78% to 54%. Getting it back is my main project right now. I'm running quarterly town halls, publishing financial updates, making sure Felix shows up and says real things instead of CEO platitudes. Trust is not rebuilt with a survey. It's rebuilt with 200 small moments over many months.

What's yours?

The mug. The pen mug. That specific moment where a physical object becomes associated with a day that changed you. But more broadly, it's this: at the VP level, HR leadership is a performance. I'm performing confidence when I'm uncertain. Performing neutrality when I have strong opinions. Performing calm when the company is in crisis. The all-hands after the layoff, eight minutes of measured, compassionate, professional messaging, that was a performance. Not dishonest. I meant what I said. But the delivery was curated. The shaking hands were hidden. The version of Celeste that the company saw was not the version that sat in the parking garage. And over 20 years, the gap between the performed self and the real self gets wider, and you start to wonder which one is you. My husband Wyatt asked me once if I like my job and I said "I'm very good at my job." He noticed I didn't answer the question. I noticed too.