HR-speak at its worst
A reader forwarded me this wonderfully bad piece of HR-speak, which had landed in his inbox:
Grow your talent pool at no charge: Recruit skilled XYZers with Right Management Software
Right Management is a global leader in talent and career management workforce solutions within the ManpowerGroup and their mission is to help you grow talent, reduce costs and accelerate performance. They deliver solutions to align talent strategy with business strategy.
XYZ and Right Management are providing you with the opportunity to have talent transitioning out of XYZ get direct access to your available job openings. Registration with Right Management's job database, Right Job Opportunities, will get you started and there is no cost to participate.
(Text somewhat anonymised to protect the illiterate)
Or, in other words:
Please, please, please take some of XYZ’s cast-offs or our client will end up with a stack of lawsuits. If you’ve got any jobs going, do list them in Right Management’s database. We won’t even charge you!
If the original appeals to you more than my version, here are seven tips for sounding like a Right Management pro.
1. Mix your metaphors Is a workforce like a plant? Or more like a body of water? Can’t decide? Then start with a strong image like grow your talent pool.
2. Don’t get straight to the point Your readers have time on their hands. So start by bigging-up yourself with some corporate throat-clearing about you being a global leader in something or other.
3. Bombard your reader with abstract nouns In recruitment? Not sure how to describe what you do? Then assemble a load of HR-y sounding abstractions like talent, career management and workforce. Just add solutions and here’s your USP: being a global leader in talent and career management workforce solutions.
4. Remind people you’re on a “mission” You’re the guys who put the mission into commission! Because creaming off a fee for every hapless bod you add to your list of situations vacant is somewhere between religious calling, military reconnaissance and space flight.
5. Take an intransitive verb and give it an object In normal language, things accelerate. But you can accelerate things – and abstract things like performance, at that. My, aren’t you impressive?
6. Keep saying solutions This word is especially powerful when used in a sentence that contains other clichés of the corporate lexis, like deliver, align, talent and strategy.
7. Verbify a word that’s usually a noun (see what I did there?) Transition may usually be a noun, but it sounds much more impressive as a verb.
Admittedly, my dictionary lists undergo or cause to undergo a process or period of transition as a secondary meaning of transition, but with the caveat chiefly N. Amer.
So not only are you fudging the whole question of whether these hapless XYZers are “undergoing” or “being caused to undergo” the chance to be listed on Right Management's job database. You’re also giving yourself an impressively transatlantic twang – nice!
