Chapter 17
The Cheerleader Department
The Utopia of the Agentic Enterprise, Part III. Headcounts and Headquarters
One of the people who wrote to Graeber was a banker, Rupert, who went through the jobs at his bank that did nothing and started with “the cheerleader Human Resources Department”. HR had been told to turn the intranet into a community. Nobody used it, so the page filled up with HR staff posting something cheesy about the company and other HR staff replying “Great post! I really agree with this”. Then there was the charity week. HR set a participation “target” of 90% or so, all of it “voluntary”, noted the names of the people who hadn’t signed up and sent someone round to ask them why. In the last two weeks came automated mails that looked as if they were from the chief executive. Much of it was for the “best company to work for” awards, which asked for charitable work and helped the bank recruit.1
Rupert’s week runs on flunkies replying to each other, a taskmaster’s target and a box ticked for an award, and an agent can now do every part of it at no cost to anyone in HR. The mails in the chief executive’s name were generated before anyone had a model to generate them.
Graeber’s book set out to explain why a short list of sectors had grown, and human resources was on it, next to corporate law and public relations.2 That doesn’t make the people in HR the problem. The function attracts all five of Graeber’s kinds of bullshit job because of what it was built to do, and the people in it work inside that design like everyone else.
HR manages individual employment relationships, and it was designed to protect the organisation from the liability each worker represents. Nothing in it tracks the relationships between workers, so when three people leave, HR processes three individual events.
Its systems track contracts and grades, and a role can be downgraded without a demotion when the work that gave it authority moves into a system someone else owns. As far as HR is concerned nothing happened, and “your job is safe” is perfectly true.
Sort what the function produces by who consumes it, and the rest follows from that design. Policies, training records and the paper trail of every exit go to a file, in case anyone asks. Surveys, review cycles and mandatory courses go to employees as tasks. The framing of a decision someone else made goes up, to the executive who made it. Very little reaches the person doing the work in a form that changes how they do it, because the work was never HR’s to change.
HR has a narrow lane where it is legitimately expert: employment law and benefits administration.
The organisation uses the function outside that lane when a decision has already been made and needs a legitimacy wrapper. A round of role eliminations becomes a workforce-planning exercise, and an incentive misalignment a culture initiative. The executive wanted the outcome but is no longer its author, because the framing now comes from the function that exists to produce policy artefacts.
Nobody’s career suffers for it, and the slide reads well upward. The executive needs someone to make the decision sound reasonable, and HR happens to be available. The cost comes later, when HR is back in its own lane and nobody believes it, because everyone has learned to read any HR document as potential cover.
A drafting agent makes the wrapper cheaper and warmer. It’s trained to please the person asking, and the person asking is the executive.
The part of HR that faces outward is the screen, where the employer’s agent scores CVs that the candidates’ agents wrote to match the posting. Applicants pay for that contest, and since 2024 the company selling the screen may have to pay as well. In July that year a federal judge in California let a job seeker, Derek Mobley, pursue Workday over the screening tools its customers used, on the theory that the software vendor had acted as the employers’ agent. Mobley, who is over 40, said he had applied for more than 100 jobs at employers using Workday’s platform and been turned down every time. In May 2025 the court let applicants over 40 across the country join the case.3 The court meant agent in the old legal sense, someone acting on another’s behalf, which is also what the vendors sell.
The screen has a quieter cost too. Rory Sutherland points out that someone hiring one person plays safe, because one bad hire is visible, while someone hiring 10 will take a chance on a few unusual ones. “By applying identical criteria to everyone in the name of fairness,” he writes, “you end up recruiting identical people.”4 A screening agent applies one set of criteria to every application, one at a time.
Inside the building, HR’s taskmaster work is the review cycle. One of Graeber’s correspondents, a manager called Finn, called performance reviews bullshit, because “everyone already knows who the slackers are”.5 With agents the cycle can run without anyone reading it: the employee’s self-assessment drafted by a model, and the manager’s review drafted by another model from the self-assessment. Each document goes to a file and took somebody less of an afternoon than last year, which makes the cycle easier to keep than to question.
Where HR went to a provider, its platform answers employee questions from the policy. The questions the policy didn’t foresee go to the line manager, who becomes HR’s duct taper without the title or the training.
Workday, the vendor in that lawsuit, also sells the systems HR keeps its records in. In February 2025 it launched an Agent System of Record for managing a company’s AI agents alongside its people, with agents for payroll and contracts joining earlier ones for recruiting. “The workforce is expanding,” its chief executive said. “It’s no longer just human workers, it’s now digital workers.”6 So HR may end up keeping the roster of agents as well as the roster of people, each with a role.
That would put the sort in HR’s hands. For each agent on the roster, someone has to ask who consumes what it produces, and who used that work before the agent had it. A function that has only ever tracked contracts and grades would have to start tracking work.
Peter Cappelli, who teaches management at Wharton, has argued that complaints about HR come and go with the business context. When companies struggle to find and keep people, HR is a valued partner, and when they don’t, managers wonder what it’s for.7 Agents bring a labour problem of a new kind: what each job is for once part of it goes to software.
The narrow lane holds work nobody else in the building is trained for: employment law, pay, and the works council that has to agree before a monitoring system goes live. What HR never owned is the design of the jobs themselves, the properties Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham found in 1976 make a person care about a job.8 But every agent is built from a description of a job, and the job description is the one document about the work that HR does own. Written to say what the job is for and who relies on it, it’s where an agent rollout ought to start.
Checklist
- Sort a month of HR’s output by who consumes it: a file, employees as tasks, the executive as framing. What reaches the people doing the work in a form that changes how they do it?
- Which HR processes now have a model at both ends, such as a self-assessment and the review drafted from it? Does anyone read what passes between them?
- If your screening vendor were treated as your agent, what has it done in your name? Who has looked at whom it turned down?
- Who answers the employee questions your HR platform can’t, and does their job description say so?
- If agents go on HR’s roster, who asks of each one who consumes what it produces, and who used that work before?
- Before anyone builds an agent from a job description, does the description say what the job is for and who relies on it?