How does psychology apply to HR?

In this first instance, you apply your understanding of people and their psychology to try to spot the ones who ‘fit’ with the new team. Will they get along, will they be honest, hard-working, smart enough, interested enough in the work to stay, learn and do well?

In a great many ways. HR can be seen as just administering payroll, benefits sign ups and so forth, but it is an offshoot of payroll signing in old organizations. It’s first real “HR” application is usually recruiting. Managers don’t like having to look for and interview possible new hires, so they delegate or hire someone to do that for them (then complain when the people who the person hires don’t work out). We (and full time psychologists) can debate exactly how this ought to work best, that is itself a psychological puzzle.

In this first instance, you apply your understanding of people and their psychology to try to spot the ones who ‘fit’ with the new team. Will they get along, will they be honest, hard-working, smart enough, interested enough in the work to stay, learn and do well? The applicant is trying their best to convince you of all these and you are trying to assess if they actually understand what is needed and are being truthful and/or accurate in their assertions that they will fit.

So now the person starts work and you discover they don’t fit exactly. They or the boss comes to you with a problem. They want your help solving it. You try to figure out who’s got the most accurate understanding, who’s generating the problem, what the solution might be. Should the boss or employee be more tolerant, can you help with that, how? All psychology. There are a million variations of what can go wrong and what will fix it. Some HR people give up sooner than others and go along with bosses who have given up in helping fire people and start over. It’s often better to try to work things out first, but that takes understanding how bosses think as well as employees (and by the way, you may need that sort of psychology to understand your own boss and your own management style, why it works, when it works, how to improve it, etc.) More psychology.