Bolt CEO says he let go of HR team for creating problems that didn't exist

pavel_lishin

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.

fakedang

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.

xenospn

Bolt still exists?!

jakub_g

Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).

tqi

Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.

lovich

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.

DoctorOW

In my experience, HR is all too willing to explore gray areas for company benefit, so any "problems" created are likely actual laws.

gamblor956

In a few months (possibly a few weeks) we're going to be reading about a huge harassment scandal at Bolt starring this CEO. Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.

deterministic

If you are being interview by somebody from "HR" and not your potential future boss then it is a massive red flag.

mrandish

As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting. When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot. The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.