If the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that if Wells Fargo was ever good at something, it was at screwing up. Once seen as the very embodiment of a safe and boring and well-run bank, that body has since been wracked by a series of metastasizing scandals, multiplying and growing out from one another before again fusing and creating a new scandal that eventually gets to the point where you hardly even notice it anymore.
Given that, it probably goes without saying that the bank’s human resources effort could have perhaps been a bit better. After all, someone hired those bankers who crafted the O.G. stagecoach pileup, that of the unauthorized accounts, and the managers who intensively trained them in forgery. And, of course, there’s a human resources element to firing whistleblowers and top executives using the term “big-girl panties.” But as at every other part of the bank, those individual whoopsies are not, as it turns out, merely isolated incidents, but small if vibrant parts of a rather baroque tapestry of mismanagement and incompetence truly worthy of the name Wells Fargo, which you can imagine has a lot of HR issues to fail at handling right now.