Human Resources Business Partner

A pompous job title self-servingly contrived by human resource (HR) "professionals" to be applied to themselves, obviously intended to justify the existence and further expansion of the HR function within business organizations. A further objective of this ruse appears to be propagation of the illusion that the HR function possesses a holistic grasp of broader strategic issues facing the organization enabling it to contribute expanded economic value and thereby providing justification for elevated compensation demands for HR staff. A look at online job advertisements will confirm that the use of this title is spreading faster than a California wildfire, giving credence to the notion that this scheme was recently cooked up in some HR industry association initiative as a way to rebrand HR "professionals" as being more than the administrative paper pushers they, in fact, are. The absurdity of this inflated moniker is further appreciated when one considers that no other functions appear to have widely implemented similar titles in their functions. For example, one seldom sees job postings for bizarre titles such as "engineering business partner", "sales business partner", or "legal business partner".