- I wish he'd described some of the problems. What we get from the article is very vague.
> While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
> “We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,” he added at the Fortune conference.
- The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.
- Liquidity in human capital. Sounds rife. Hire and fire right? via chat message on Friday night, hire back Monday.
- Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.
- Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).
- Without examples of said problems this has the energy of saying cases will go down if you stop testing. That or the HR team told him about pesky problems like the law.
I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.
- Bolt still exists?!
- In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team.
- Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding
We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.
- What are you talking about?
The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.
Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.
32 points by cdrnsf 2 hours ago | 9 comments