You have just become the HR person. Maybe you were promoted from office manager, maybe you are a new generalist inheriting a file cabinet and a shared drive from someone who left. Nobody handed you a list of what must be right on day one, and the people around you are already asking about hiring, a problem employee, and the benefits renewal.
This plan covers the HR fundamentals in the order that risk dictates: first find out which laws apply and fix the things with
Job titles in HR are unreliable. One company's "HR manager" is a department of one who processes payroll changes and plans the holiday party. Another's "HR coordinator" is quietly running leave administration for 400 people. If you are comparing roles for your own career, or deciding which one your organization should hire, the title on the posting tells you less than three questions: how wide is the scope, who makes the decisions, and what experience does the work
Most HR people have read hundreds of resumes and still struggle to write their own. The problem is usually the same one: an HR generalist resume that lists duties ("responsible for onboarding, benefits and employee relations") reads exactly like every other one in the stack. The reviewer learns what the job description said and nothing about what you did with it.
This guide covers what employers screen for in a generalist, how to organize the document, and a
An HR generalist interview is unusual because the candidate is being assessed on the very process they are sitting in. They know what a structured interview looks like, they know which questions are improper, and they will be running interviews for you within a month of starting. That raises the bar on both sides of the table.
This guide lists HR generalist interview questions by topic and, for each, describes what a strong answer shows. Candidates can use it to
You have an offer in hand, a review coming up, or a requisition to price, and you need a number you can defend. Search "HR generalist salary" and you get a dozen different answers, most from commercial sites that blend job-posting data, self-reported pay, and their own modeling without telling you which is which.
This guide takes a narrower approach. It uses only U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, says exactly what each one measures and when it was
An employee tells her supervisor she has been struggling to get in by 8:00 since she started a new treatment. He tells her the schedule is the schedule. Three weeks later she is written up for tardiness, and two months after that HR learns about the conversation for the first time, from a charge of discrimination.
The supervisor did not know he had just received an accommodation request. That gap is what ADA training for managers exists to close. Managers need to do
Search for ADA coordinator certification and you will find two kinds of programs presented as if they were interchangeable. They are not. One prepares the person a city, county, school district, or state agency designates to run its ADA compliance program for the public. The other prepares HR professionals to handle employee accommodation requests. Both are legitimate. They teach different law for different jobs, and enrolling in the wrong one costs you time without closing the
You were asked to "get ADA certified," or a job posting lists ADA certification as preferred, and a search returns a confusing mix: HR courses, building inspector credentials, website audits, and badges for service dogs. Before you spend a training budget, it helps to know one fact that most of those pages leave out.
There is no government-issued ADA certification for employers or HR staff. The EEOC does not certify HR professionals, and the Department of Justice
An employee with a new lifting restriction asks to be excused from unloading the weekly supply delivery. Her manager says lifting is "part of the job." You pull the job description. It was last updated nine years ago, it lists 23 duties in no particular order, and the only mention of lifting is a line in the boilerplate at the bottom that appears in every description the company has.
Whether she is entitled to that accommodation depends on one question: is unloading
An employee's doctor releases him to return after shoulder surgery with a 20-pound lifting limit for six weeks. The plant manager says he can't come back until he's "full duty." In the same week a letter goes out to another employee: her 12 weeks of leave are used up, and her employment ends Friday.
Both decisions were made by policy, with no one looking at the individual. A 100% healed policy and an automatic maximum-leave termination rule have the same flaw under
A forklift operator has a seizure at home and tells his supervisor. A nurse returns from leave on a new medication that can cause drowsiness. A manager reports that an employee with a known psychiatric condition "scared people" in a meeting. In each case someone will say the same thing: we can't have that person here, it's a safety issue.
Safety is a legitimate reason to act, and under the ADA it is tightly defined. The ADA direct threat standard lets an employer
A department head tells you the accommodation an employee asked for "just isn't workable." It costs too much, the team will resent it, and customers might notice. He wants you to deny it as an undue hardship.
Maybe it is one. But ADA undue hardship is a legal defense with defined factors, and the employer has to prove it. "Not workable" is a conclusion, and you need evidence. This article explains the standard, the listed factors, the reasons that do not count, how
The return-to-work meeting is where a well-handled leave either lands cleanly or goes wrong. The paperwork is usually fine: a release note, a list of restrictions, maybe a fitness-for-duty certification. The risk sits in the conversation. A supervisor who asks "So what was wrong with you?" or "Does this run in your family?" has just made a disability-related inquiry or asked for genetic information, often in front of a witness, and usually with good intentions.
This checklist gives ...
A wage garnishment turns the employer into a collection point for someone else's debt. The employer does not owe the debt, but the law makes it responsible for withholding correctly once it has been served. When the process breaks down, the liability usually shifts to the employer: the amount it should have withheld, sometimes the whole judgment, plus fees, costs and, for some order types, penalties.
This guide walks through what actually happens when an employer failed to garnish ...
A reliable employee starts missing deadlines. When her manager raises it, she says she has been diagnosed with depression and an anxiety disorder, her medication was just changed, and she needs "some flexibility for a while." The manager walks into your office and asks two questions: Does she have to prove it, and do we have to give her whatever she asks for?
The answers are "to a point" and "no." ADA accommodations for anxiety and depression follow the same rules as
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