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Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IDEA Cash from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. Today I'm talking with

Wharton Professor Peter Capelli, author of the HBR article Why We Love to Hate

HR and What HR can do about it. Peter, thank you so much for talking with us today. Thank you.

So I thought before we get into why we love to hate HR, I thought we'd talk a little bit about

the history of HR, which you do mention in the article article or as it was once called personnel.

How has this department sort of evolved over time?

Well you know it's one of the oldest functions of business in terms of like a real live department that begins

in World War I when the Army discovers employee selection, you know, the selection test to figure out who's going to be good at what.

And then after the war, when scientific management becomes a big deal, which is Taylorism, it becomes pretty crucial in terms of organizing work and then organizing

the companies around that.

I think in general, I think HR in modern times has been a force describing and explaining to people who are in other

parts of the business, particularly people who are engineers and financially oriented, what

human beings are like.

In terms of the way you have to manage them, there are a bunch of things about people that you should pay attention to when you're managing them.

And so the history of human resources and personnel has been a kind of up and down thing in terms of its power and influence

depending on what's going on in the economy. So when unions got to be a big deal, for example,

human resources becomes a really big deal as the way

companies were dealing with them in tight labor markets because people quit really quickly

if they're unhappy and it's hard to hire people. But then also when the

economy is turned down, HR becomes kind of a thorn in the side for a lot of executives

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