Jamie Jackson, host of the hit podcast HR Besties, has heard things that would make your jaw drop. Now she's sharing them
If you've spent any time working in HR, you likely already know: the job description leaves out a lot.
For example, nobody warns you about the flying dentures.
That's a real story. A 25-year-old HR manager is sitting in on her first-ever termination meeting when the employee, trying to prove he wasn't too impaired to work, yanks out his false teeth and flings them across the conference table at her.
His defense? He'd only had a six-pack of beer.
Nobody warns you about the ear-licking supervisor either. The one who, at a team happy hour, used a group photo as an opportunity to swirl his tongue into a direct report's ear, then kept showing up to work like nothing happened.
These aren’t the type of stories that make it into HR textbooks, but they’re exactly the kind of stories that Jamie Jackson, self-proclaimed Chief Meme Officer, co-host of the popular HR Besties podcast, and the creator behind the social media accounts @humorous_resources and @millennial_misery, has built a community around.
"No one believes what HR professionals do on a daily basis," Jackson said. "We're so villainized, and I wanted people to know we're not that bad."
A career's worth of chaos
Jackson spent 23 years working in human resources, often as a department of one, across industries that gave her plenty of material. Some of her stories are dramatic. At one employer, she watched the general manager, HR director, and controller all walk out in handcuffs after a corporate investigation revealed the three had been covering each other's fraudulent expenses in a tidy three-ring circus.
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Some are more…human.
Like the time she was making insurance open enrollment reminder calls and reached a man whispering from a deer blind. When he called back, she walked him through re-enrolling his whole family and noticed his wife's birthday was that very day. After she mentioned it, he slammed his hand on the desk.
"Oh," he said. "Now I gotta go to the Walmart."
"Would that man have even known it was his wife's birthday if he hadn't forgotten to enroll his family?" Jackson laughed. "I saved her from not having a birthday present *and* not having insurance. And she didn't even know."
Her most legendary personal tale might be the “frozen French bread pizza incident.”
Jackson arrived prepared to terminate an employee who had committed a serious policy violation. The employee insisted on having their own office. The second Jackson sat down, she said, "If you don't mind, I'm going to eat my lunch while we do this."
It was 9:30 in the morning. She then produced a partially defrosted frozen French bread pizza. Not heated up. Not cooked. Just “aggressively room temperature” and still slightly frozen.
"So, there I am," Jackson recalled, "explaining benefits continuation and collecting company property while she's taking bites out of what can only be described as a Lunchables survival slab."
"But I do know this," she said. "HR will humble you in ways no one can prepare you for."
Making HR human
Jackson started @humorous_resources on Instagram in September 2020 while running a one-person HR department at a nonprofit health clinic. In the middle of a global pandemic, she needed a creative outlet, and figured if she needed a laugh, other HR professionals probably did too.
In 2021, she launched @millennial_misery, and in fall 2023 teamed up with two fellow HR creators to launch HR Besties. Within weeks it hit the Top 10 on Apple's Business charts. Today, the podcast has surpassed one million downloads, reaching not just HR professionals but everyday employees who want to understand what's actually happening on the other side of that closed office door.
The mission has always been to humanize a profession with an unfairly villainous reputation. HR professionals are employees too, Jackson explained. When benefits get cut, they take the hit alongside everyone else. When a tough policy comes from the C-suite, HR is often the reluctant messenger, not the author.
"We're the enforcers," she said, "but a lot of times the policy is not something we necessarily agreed with or even came up with. We're doing the best we can."
Affairs, body odor, and other HR classics
When Jackson invites listeners to submit their own horror stories, they respond enthusiastically, sometimes with full names still attached that she has to carefully edit out. Certain themes, she says, come up again and again.
Workplace affairs are a perennial crowd-pleaser.
"It's honestly astonishing," she said. "I'm like, what are y'all crazy? Why are you doing that at work?"
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Terminations gone sideways are another staple. And then there is the conversation every HR professional dreads above all others: telling an employee they smell.
"I would rather drink an entire cup of bleach than tell someone that they stink," Jackson said. "Those are the absolute worst."
The difficulty, she points out, goes beyond awkwardness. Someone could be going through housing instability without regular access to a shower, making it an especially sensitive situation. Though she has also lived the opposite problem. At a hotel restaurant where she once worked, two servers doused themselves in so much cologne that diners complained they could taste the Hugo Boss with their burger and fries.
"It wasn't scary telling them they smell," she laughed. "I was like, bros, you smell too good. You need to tone it down."
That ability to find the funny in the frustrating is exactly what keeps people coming back to Jackson’s content. The listeners who submit their own stories, Jackson says, aren't just looking for a laugh. They're looking to feel less alone in a profession that can be genuinely isolating.
"I think they want to tell their story," she said. "Because some of these things, you want to tell someone, but there's no one else who would understand except HR professionals. No one else would be like, 'Oh my God, yes.'"
For Jackson, building that community has become the whole point. HR is hard, she says. It is a thankless job that earns blame for decisions made far above the HR department's pay grade and rarely gets credit for the quiet wins.
Her advice to the HR professionals still in the thick of it is simple: keep advocating for your people, keep doing the right thing, and trust that it matters even when no one says so.
And on the days when that feels impossible? Just remember, Jackson says, you are not alone. Someone else has been there. Someone else has sat in that chair, absorbed that news, navigated that conversation, and come out the other side with a story worth telling.
Maybe even one involving a set of flying dentures.
