The Humans Never Left HR

I saw an interview this week on Instagram from "TheHR Brew" 

The title on screen was “Putting the human back in HR.”

I like HR Brew, genuinely, they’ve featured me in 2023 and I think highly of both people in the interview and their work. No disrespect intended here at all, I’m sure the interview was lovely.

But I never got past the opening. I didn’t need to. That title alone hit me the wrong way, and it was pure timing. Something else was happening in parallel that made it impossible to just scroll past.

Not 2 hours earlier, I posted a TikTok asking one question: what trauma do you still carry as an HR professional?

I listed a few of mine.

• Someone pulled a knife on me.
• I held a man while he sobbed through his own layoff.
• I called 911 when an employee had a heart attack in the office, then had to call his wife myself.
• I sat across from a man lying to my face about assaulting an intern younger than his own daughter, already having seen the tape that proved it.
• I’ve sat with a parent whose child had terminal cancer, watching our own benefits plan deny the treatment that might have bought them time.

Within hours, that video had hundreds of likes, saves and reposts and dozens of comments, HR people from every industry trading their worst days like it was the first time anyone had ever asked.

• A wife told over the phone that her husband, father of five, had just died, and someone stayed on the line with her for half an hour because there was nothing else to do.
• Welfare checks that ended in the worst possible news.
• Sexual assault.
• A resignation letter from someone who’d just learned they had three months left to live.
• Someone who spent an hour in grief counseling with an employee who’d lost her daughter, then walked straight into a hostile client meeting, then straight into celebrating someone’s promotion, all before lunch, and had to fully show up for all three.

Here’s the part almost nobody says out loud: none of us were trained for this.

HR people are not trauma specialists.

We are not grief counselors. We are not social workers or psychologists. And yet, somehow, we’re expected to be all four at once, or at minimum, to manage through it and show up composed for the next meeting.

Reading through those comments, one thing showed up again and again: no one ever asked if we were okay. No one offered resources. No one, at any point, along the entire way, ever said out loud that maybe the people managing everyone else’s worst days might need some support of their own.

So let me say it here, because apparently someone has to.

HR needs resources too. Not because we’re fragile. Because we’re human, and we’ve been treating that fact as an inconvenience for the entire length of this profession.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. If you’ve been ghosted by an ATS, if a recruiter never called you back, if you asked for a raise and got a form response, that’s real, and you’re allowed to be angry about it. I’m not defending that experience away. But that’s a scale problem, not a humanity problem. Somewhere behind that cold process is usually a person who wishes it worked differently and doesn’t have the authority to fix it alone.

Here’s what most HR people are actually doing while that phrase gets repeated at them:

• Running performance cycles that determine whether someone can pay their rent.
• Building compensation models trying to close pay gaps nobody above them wants to fully fund.
• Designing workforce plans meant to prevent the very layoffs everyone blames HR for executing.
• Partnering with recruiters to build hiring processes that are more human, with less budget and less headcount every year to do it.
• And in between all of that, taking the call when someone’s kid is in the hospital, when someone’s marriage falls apart at their desk, when someone needs to be walked out of a building with dignity instead of security escorting them like a threat.

Every HR person I know wants the same basic thing: employees who feel safe, paid fairly, seen, and treated like people. Not because it’s on a values slide. Because we’re the ones who sit with what it costs when a company fails at that, and none of us want to sit there twice.

Here’s the thing that gets lost in that phrase: no HR person I know would ever say we need to put the human back in HR. Because for us, the human was never the part that left.

What actually happened is simpler than that, and honestly a little more damning.

HR never lost the narrative on being human. We just never had it in the first place.

Other people, people who’ve never sat in the room for any of what I just described, got to decide what HR means, and they decided it meant cold, bureaucratic, distant.

Meanwhile we were the ones staying on the phone with a grieving wife for half an hour because there was nothing else to do.

So “put the human back in HR” isn’t really about us forgetting something. It’s a slogan, on the same shelf as “HR isn’t your friend, they only care about the company,” another line that every HR person knows is absurd, because we live the opposite of it every day, and neither one leaves room for what actually happens in this job.

We didn’t leave. The human part never left. It’s been here the whole time, doing the job and quietly paying for it, because that’s what the job has always asked of us.

So to everyone who keeps showing up carrying that weight because there’s no other choice:

I see you, and I’m proud of you.

Dan