The most feared of the departments, at least by members of the other departments: Finance & Human Resources. Housed in the towering black spire of Building 6 of corporate headquarters, all promotions, demotions, and pay-rises go through F&HR, giving them huge influence on employees prospects, professional development, and life-expectancy. Many a working-group has been ravaged by H&R as they seek to generate synergy by downsizing: its employees reassigned to mysterious sub-departments of the corporation never to be seen again or posted to branch offices in regions of political or tectonic instability. Meanwhile, all project funding must be signed off by Finance and those who embezzle too much, not enough or from the wrong budget will find themselves hauled before the dreaded financial review board in sub-basement C.
Finance keeps an iron-grip over the company's resources ensuring that 23% of projects run over budget in line with the company's last corporate directive. Their creative accounting department works closely with the legal department to minimise tax exposure and ensure that the company accounts are both transparent, well-documented and utterly inaccessible. Recent triumphs include the filing of a tax return that resulted in the collapse of the Malaysian ringgit and the successful patenting of addition.
As well as hiring and firing, HR is responsible for training and employee development arranging educational ‘reprogramming’ sessions to better help employees deal with the day to day challenges of the corporate environment. This has led to several recent high profile cooperative projects with R&D's advanced neurological cybernetics research group. More recently, in line with the company policy of streamlining employee retirement and termination policies, H&R have been working on ‘Recruitment Drive 37b’ that, employees are assured, has nothing to do with the black obelisks being erected atop Building 6. Successfully spearheaded HR initiatives include the merging of all 1323 members of the customer service department into a single part-time unpaid internship role and the introduction of the 30 hour day.
Young? Ambitious? Ruthless? Efficient? Cruel? Have you considered a role in Finance and Human Resources? Ever want to control the fate of your fellow employees? Want to win promotions based off other peoples' redundancies or salary deductions? Then F&HR is for you!
Our department works for the benefit of the company, maximising productivity and profits in line with the company's core strategic objectives of minimising workforce size, and never paying more than $2.95 in tax and global financial dominion. Day to day work includes evaluating employee productivity, auditing project finances, organising disciplinary proceedings, recruitment drives, organising motivational/demotivational seminars and evicting families from corporate housing (for earners).
Finance professionals within the department tend to focus on the Auditing and Bureaucracy core competencies to either detect or commit massive financial fraud, as directed by the board.
HR specialists focus on the Leadership and Bureaucracy core competencies which are most effective at convincing large numbers of employees that they are harming productivity and must be redeployed or fired, and are excellent at falsifying productivity reports.
Both department have current vacancies for Highly Effective People specialising in Outer-Sourcing.
The department’s director and youngest director in corporate history. Her power-shouldered, bun-haired rise through the ranks of management is the stuff of legend… Particularly the series of bizarre accidents that removed all competition for her position and which were later blamed on outdated corporate head-hunting techniques and poor lift maintenance. She is said to keep a perfect replica of the glass ceiling in her office and dates entirely within her own department to maximise face-time efficiency. She is the captain of every company sports team and is a three-time Corporate Olympics gold medallist fencer.
Patrick, Pat to his friends, which is everybody, is never seen without a smile on his face. His blinding white grin a message to all staff that he is approachable and empathetic about their concerns and issues. He is renowned for taking coffee breaks with the regular employees and personally leads every management training away-day. He is the most popular of the Executive Directors among staff despite the fact that, technically, he must sign off on every redundancy. Staff are welcome in his office at all times for a friendly chat, where there are always sweets on the desk and they can admire his collection of mesoamerican ritual disembowelling knives.
The most brilliant financial mind of his generation according to his self-published autobiography. Lucien Professor of Mathematics at Oxbridge 1), Chief Economist of the New York Stock Exchange and Lead Policy Advisor to the World Trade Organisation. Responsible for some of the Company's most successful profiteering strategies such as the reclassification of the atmosphere as a financial commodity and project '1+1 = 513% net profit'. The finance department has exceeded its annual targets every year since he took the lead.