The strangest hiring process in any company is the one where HR hires HR. If you are a senior HR professional who has been through one lately, you already know the feeling I am about to describe, and you have probably never said it out loud.

The profession that designs the interview is the profession that behaves worst inside it. I have been on both sides of that sentence.

The junior who interviews the senior

Here is a scene most senior HR people will recognise. A Head of HR role. First-round screening by a talent acquisition partner in her second year of the job. Thirty minutes on a video call, a scorecard she did not write, a list of questions she did not choose.

The candidate on the other end has run performance cycles for a thousand people, closed redundancy programmes, sat in front of regulators, and hired the person who trained the person now asking the questions.

And the questions come. Tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult stakeholder. What is your biggest weakness. Where do you see yourself in five years. How would you rate your knowledge of employment law on a scale of one to ten.

And once, asked of me, word for word: how do you work with people less gifted than yourself? The person asking was describing herself, and neither of us said so.

The senior candidate answers. She answers a framework she may well have written a version of, to a person who, if the process goes her way, will report to her within six weeks.

What is actually happening in that call

The junior is not incompetent, and she is not cruel. She is measuring a career she has not had yet, using questions built for candidates at her own level, and she can judge none of the answers. Underneath the professionalism, she knows it.

That gap produces one of two things. Deference, which makes the interview useless, because nothing gets tested. Or grilling, which is deference turned inside out: the extra follow-up, the probing on the one weak answer, the slightly too satisfied note on the scorecard. Grilling is how a junior HR person handles feeling small in a call they are supposed to be running.

The senior candidate feels every second of it, and cannot say a word, because anything she says will be written down as difficult.

HR reads HR worst of all

This is the pattern across the whole profession, not just the screening call.

HR people are the harshest readers of other HR people's profiles. We know every trick, so we assume every line is one. We know how a role gets inflated on paper, so we deflate every title we see. We know how a testimonial gets manufactured, so we discount every reference.

The result is that a senior HR candidate gets the least generous reading in the market, from the people best placed to give a generous one. The Head of Operations who applies for a bigger operations job gets read by someone who admires operations. The Head of HR gets read by someone who does her job and is not yet sure she does it as well.

Envy inside HR has a specific flavour. It is the envy of someone who knows exactly how the game works, watching someone else win it.

Outside the hiring process

The same envy runs through the profession's daily life.

There is the HR leader who will not praise another HR leader's work, even in private. Praise would mean someone else thought of it first.

There is the one who copies your framework, your language, your programme. She rolls it out as her own. She never says you were the reason she moved.

There is the one who will not give you the time of day when you ask her a question. Answering would mean you were worth an answer.

And there is the one who says your name only when it serves her. In public, she goes silent on your work. Engaging with it might look like weakness to her boss, or like not knowing enough to her own audience.

None of that is in a job description. But it matters more than it looks.

HR has a strict, lawful core. Nobody gets to be creative with that part. Around it, there is more room for creativity than most people outside the profession realise.

A performance framework. An onboarding design. A way of running a redundancy that leaves people their dignity. Those are creative acts. Done well, they make a workforce. Done badly, they break one.

Creativity is where envy bites hardest, because a creative contribution has an author.

Nobody envies a compliance process. The regulator wrote it. A programme that changed how a thousand people were managed has a name attached. That name is what the envious cannot forgive.

I have never carried that fear of engaging with a peer's work. I count that as luck as much as character. But I have watched it silence HR people who had far more to say than the ones doing the talking.

The lobby

Sometimes it is not a junior. Sometimes it is a peer. A friend. Someone you once admired.

This is the story I have never told publicly.

A few years ago I was invited to an online interview. On the day, nobody appeared on screen.

I wrote to the office manager, who was arranging interviews at the time. The reply came from the hiring manager himself: Anca, we thought this was face to face?

Nobody had told me that. I said I was happy to comply, and I prepared for the face to face version.

I arrived on the day and waited in the lobby.

Ten minutes in, the secretary came over and asked for my full name. I gave it, slightly confused.

Five minutes later a woman walked into the same lobby. She went up to the secretary and said: Hi, I am Anca, I am here for the interview.

I froze.

Two candidates. One first name. One chaotic process.

Ten more minutes of panic went by. Then the secretary came back to both of us and apologised for the mix-up. The head of office arrived. He pointed at her and said: you Anca, that room. He pointed at me and said: you Anca, come with me.

We giggled. Everything was being sorted.

And then she said something I still think about.

Funny coincidence, she said, in front of the people about to interview us both. You know, I am responsible for Anca getting into HR.

I had met her ten years earlier. For a while we were friends. Close enough to share stories. I admired her tenacity and her resilience.

When I moved into HR, I had seven years of leading operations behind me. I knew that system like the back of my hand. The decision was entirely mine.

What I did not have was a well-designed performance management structure. She was the only person in HR who would talk to me about one. So I asked her for a format. Our industries were different. Over the years that followed, I rebuilt that process for my own industry. I adapted it. I put my signature on it.

That was the whole of her contribution.

In a lobby, competing for the same role, in front of the people who would decide, she made it sound like she had built my career.

I would never have done that to her. Not to get ahead. Not to get a job.

My interview went well. So did hers. She got the job.

I got the lesson.

What the lesson was

Envy from HR to HR is the most informed envy there is.

The junior on the screening call cannot judge your answers. But she owns the scorecard. Writing "lacked structure" or "not a cultural fit" costs her nothing, and nobody senior checks it.

The peer in the lobby knows exactly which sentence will make the panel see you as the protégé and her as the mentor.

It is envy with a professional toolkit.

And it works on you for one reason.

At the time, none of it was written down. My seven years in operations. The process I designed. The decision I made on my own. All of it lived in my head.

My profile listed my job titles and dates. It said nothing about the work behind them.

So she could claim a piece of my story, and nothing on record contradicted her.

If your career story exists only in your memory, anyone can take credit for part of it. And HR people understand better than anyone how credit gets assigned.

What it means for you

You cannot stop a junior from grilling you. You cannot stop a peer from reaching for your story.

You can make both of them pointless.

Write your work down in specifics. The programme you designed. The year. The number of people. The decision that was yours. The result it produced.

When your profile and your CV carry that level of detail, a junior's scorecard has nothing to probe. Every answer is already documented. A peer's claim has nothing to attach to. Your name is already on the work.

Seniority written as titles and years invites comparison. Work written as dated, numbered, owned achievements ends it.

Responsibility for the process still sits with the process. A company that puts a second-year recruiter alone in front of a Head of HR, with no senior reader in the loop, has designed the envy in.

But while you wait for better systems, write your story down so precisely that it belongs to you in every lobby you ever stand in.

Anca