Halloween HR Horror Stories

Halloween is a good day to share scary stories. Here are five tales of HR horror from Halogen Software, a performance management company. Halogen chose today to release a survey on employee-appraisal nightmares. Pray these creatures don’t haunt your office:

• The mother of a 20-something worker who told HR that her son’s review score should be raised so that he could get a better raise. “She offered to come in and show me reference letters from his teachers and former employers to reinforce her story,” the respondent wrote.

• The boss who said his all-female work group reminded him of a bunch of mares scratching and biting each other. The respondent said the boss’s daughter rode horses, “so I guess he thought that was a good analogy.”

• The reviewer who wrote of an employee: “Bob did pretty good for an old guy.”

• The manager who copied his 12 employees’ self-appraisals … and submitted them as his own.

• The nurse who was being evaluated on how well she delivered medications and told her supervisor she followed what the voices in her head told her to do.

Can you top those? If so, send a note to editors@workforce.com.