Finally, someone has seen the light:
Bolt CEO fires his entire HR team because they “created problems that didn’t exist”, and “those problems disappeared when I let them go”.
Welcome to the party, pal.
Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to “start-up mode”.
The 32-year-old added that HR professionals were more suited to “peacetime” conditions at larger companies rather than a start-up environment focused on rapid growth and efficiency.
In his seminal work, Up The Organization, the late Robert Townsend had a small chapter as part of his plan to make companies more successful: “Fire the entire HR department.” (I should point out that his incendiary book — which was and still is one of the best management books ever written — was published back in 1971. One can only wonder what he’d think of today’s HR.) Also, for those who don’t remember, Townsend was responsible for taking #2 car rental firm Avis to #1, so he knew what he was talking about.
I used to publish this little comment as a joke, except that it isn’t, really:
What I like is that the BOLT CEO has replaced HR with a small team tasked with “training and employee support” — i.e. the original function of the “Personnel Department” before they adopted the soulless “Human Resources” nomenclature.
Incidentally, Townsend sneered at HR being part of the hiring process, saying that this function should be left to the department managers, who should have a better idea than some third party of the kind of person they’d need.
I bet that Breslow would agree with that, now.
Getting rid of HR and Gov’t shutdowns have a lot in common, people don’t miss them when they aren’t there.
When I was getting ready to retire, went to HR (first time ever) to get info. Got handed a brochure and told everything I needed to know was on the company website. That was it. Wow, some lady earns 6 figures to sit in an office and hand out brochures and the company website info.
Mr. du Toit:
This is a fun coincidence because I posted this over at Legal Insurrection yesterday.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/05/another-illegal-alien-truck-driver-released-under-biden-involved-in-deadly-crash/
“The problem is generally caused the by the “Human Resources” (aka, “HR”) departments within the major corporations, and now even extending down to small companies. They are typically run and staffed with box-wine guzzling AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals), purple-and-green-haired communist lunatics, and utterly useless and permanently aggrieved affirmative-action hires. Their sole purpose is to completely and totally PREVENT the hiring of competent employees in favor of AA/DEI idiots.
What corporate and small-businesses need to do is fire every single one of them that hasn’t passed an accountant’s certification and restore it as a “payroll” department. They can take care of salary deductions for insurance and retirement, and take care of income tax withholding. And that should be ALL.
Let the department heads do the searching for employees and make the hiring (and firing) decisions. Aw, those folks might actually have to WORK for a living rather than calling endless successions of useless meetings.
And in the meantime let the executive head of the HR departments for the trucking companies go to trial and explain to a judge or jury why they were hiring illegal aliens, and then attempt to explain why they shouldn’t be tried for murder and/or manslaughter because of the direct result of their complicity.
The odds of ANY of that actually happening in the communist states of America is precisely zero.”
I’ve long held that HR should be empowered to do little more than fill out benefits forms, even before I discovered that HR has become a key vector for Leftist incursion into corporate America. Other wings of the incursion spent much time and coin preparing the battle space, providing them with various legal cudgels such as creating the need to demonstrate that the firm has taken steps to prevent a “hostile workplace environment” as a defense against various wide ranging legal exposures, for which other wings were happy to identify and provide plaintiffs.
While we can’t wave away such concerns, the nasty nest can certainly be broken up and scattered to the winds. The important values that HR serves can be reassigned to appropriate departments, which makes it much harder to hide and coordinate ideological subversion.
Not HR, but definitely reality.
https://bustednuckles.net/government-hypocrisy/
Our old HR director was awful. She (It’s always a she) was nice enough, but was overly impressed with herself, and had zero sense of humor. I made a crack once and was asked “Why would you say that?”, because I was joking ma’am.
New one we have is a hell of a lot better. More likely to do Tequila shots with the crew.
Other than negotiating with the Medical Insurance companies for the health plan….the role seems completely in the way.
Some of it depends on the company, a lot depends on their training and the ideology that drives that training.
And yes, HR IS there to protect the company against you, the employee, not the other way around. As should be apparent to anyone with half a brain as the company pays them.
Had one company where a new head of HR came in. First time he saw me, not even having been introduced yet, so he didn’t even know my name let alone what my job was, he told me to my face “I’m going to get you fired” (yes, he said that, literally, as the first thing he ever said to me, and one of the last things too). Took him 18 months of dirty company politics and stuff until he had an excuse that the CEO (who was the only one who had the authority) agreed to not renew my contract.
The reason? I’d been sick too much during the last year. That year was 2020, I’d come down with Covid HARD and taken 3 months to recover, part of which I tried to return to work on my own accord but couldn’t do it because of the chronic fatigue.
The official reason in the paperwork (health problems is NOT a legal reason here to terminate an employee)? “Irreconcilable differences of opinion about the way the company should be run”.
I guess taking time off because you’re seriously ill was that according to the HR manager.
HR used to help fill out paperwork. Now they won’t even do that. I haven’t worked for any company since graduating college that had an HR department that was useful for anything other than collecting fat checks for providing no value.
Last company I worked for, HR was an integral part of the finance and facilities department.
The hiring manager was also the fleet manager for their fleet of company vehicles for example.
It can be done.
That said, they weren’t much good at being there to assist employees, unless assisting employees was directly of benefit to the company (like calling an ambulance for a colleague who had a medical emergency at the office, happened when I was there, when reception (who should have done it) refused because they claimed that “providing medical care was not their responsibility”, a based on a policy to not give people over the counter painkillers and antacids to avoid liability problems.
My 1st face to face exchange with HR was also my 1st at-work encounter with woke. At one of my last radio gigs 20+ years ago (at an NPR affiliate – there’s a shocker) we had this female producer. Big girl with big tits. She was outgoing & witty, the 1st time I met her she introduced me to her Big American Breasts, which she had named: Constantinipple, and I forget the other name, it was just as clever.
Fast forward a few months. I came to work one day and she was wearing a new jacket. Southwestern motif, highly colored & quite striking. I said, “Hey, cool jacket.”
Couple days later I got hauled into the program director’s office for a meeting with the PD and the HR director. The PD was there as a witness, the HR cow did all the talking. She issued a verbal warning for having made the producer uncomfortable by complimenting her attire. Needless to say, I was thunderstruck. After 5 minutes of bullshit back & forth, I wound up laughing in the HR director’s face. I left the office shaking my head & snickering, the HR director seemed disappointed.
A few months after that, I was summoned to another meeting, where I was written up (!) for mangling an Hispanic name on the air. Because “cultural insensitivity.” I shit you not. My retort that I don’t speak Spanish was not persuasive.
After signing the form acknowledging the infraction, I immediately filed an HR complaint against the entire staff for mispronouncing my surname. It’s spelled Kotowski, but is more authentically pronounced Kotofski. That no one does that across the fruited plain is irrelevant. How dare you disrespect my ancestry. There were no more complaints about my Spanglish after that. That was also my last meeting with HR.