Do You Smell A Skunk?

February 10, 2026: Blog/ The "Curiosity Gap": Bad HR practices can linger like a skunk’s spray. Are you missing these hidden red flags in your organization? Read our guide to spotting toxic workplace smells.

Do You Smell A Skunk?

In the United States, poor HR practices often stem from a culture that prioritizes short-term business objectives over sustainable employee engagement.

The following are some of the worst HR practices currently impacting American workplaces:

AI "Workslop" & Candidate Ghosting: Relying heavily on unrefined AI screening tools that reject qualified candidates for minor keyword mismatches, leading to a "broken" recruiting system.

Speed-Hiring without Grounding: Rushing new hires through the onboarding process without providing necessary cultural or operational training, which leads to early confusion and high first-year attrition.

Deceptive Job Ads: Using vague or inaccurate job descriptions where the actual day-to-day duties don't match the role promised during the interview.

Management & Culture "Boogeymen"

Silent Layoffs: Purposely diminishing the employee experience (e.g., forced relocations, removing perks, or RTO mandates) to pressure staff into quitting without severance.

Rank and Yank": Utilizing stack ranking to identify and fire the bottom 10% of employees annually—a practice that even pioneer GE eventually abandoned as ineffective.

Managerial "Meltdown": Promoting individuals based on technical skills while failing to provide any leadership training, resulting in managers who struggle with basic empathy and conflict resolution.

Ethical & Legal Failures

Wage and Hour Violations: Misclassifying employees as independent contractors to avoid benefits or refusing to pay overtime for non-exempt staff.

Inhuman Leave Policies: Offering inadequate or zero bereavement time, or requiring salaried employees to "make up" billable hours after taking paid time off (PTO).

Failure to Document: Terminating employees without prior warning or documented performance evidence, often leading to wrongful termination suits.

Modern "Anti-Trends"

Quiet Vacationing Stigma: Creating a culture so restrictive that employees take "ghost vacations" (working secretly from a vacation spot) because they fear a stigma around using their earned PTO.

Engagement Theater: Implementing superficial perks (like office snacks) instead of addressing structural issues like fair pay or reasonable workloads.

Last But Certainly Not Least

HR Recruiters who have no Active Listening Skills.

HR Recruiters who lack life experience.

HR Recruiters who have little or zero Cultural Awareness.

HR Recruiters who have little or know Street-Knowledge and can’t see beneath the dirty tactics being used by the company they themselves work for.

Listen, make no mistake about it.

No College Course or Institutional Biased and Racist Training can prepare you to be an effective HR Professional.

Some of you need your head examined for refusing to hire good people.

Smh!

Wisdom & Empahty Have Spoken.