Unicorns, Builders, and the HRIS Gang: What Our Nicknames Are Admitting
tldr;
Two people I respect and myself have three different names for the same job. I assumed we were all saying the same thing. We are not.
Unicorn is a scarcity claim. Builder is a craft claim. HRIS gang is a solidarity claim. Each one is a different theory of why the work goes unseen.
The real tell isn't which nickname you use. It's that the nicknames exist at all.
Settled professions don't need affectionate in-group slang for themselves. Ours grew in the gap our official titles left behind.
A field that has never had to defend itself as a discipline doesn't get to name itself. That's a problem we're about to feel in a much more expensive way.
Ceci calls us unicorns.
I call us builders.
Dani calls us the HRIS gang.
Three people, same discipline, three different words. I noticed it and thought, well, that's nice. Everyone has their own affectionate shorthand for the same thing. We're all basically saying the same thing.
We're not.
Three names, three arguments
Unicorn is a scarcity claim. You are rare. The market cannot reliably produce you. There is no degree program that outputs a person who can hold configuration, compliance, org design, and a straight face in the same meeting. If you're a unicorn, your value comes from how hard you are to replace. The compliment carries a warning inside it: rare things are also lonely things, and there is no bench behind you.
Builder is a craft claim. That's mine, and I'll own the bias. It says the identity lives in the making. You didn't advise on the thing. You didn't recommend the thing. You built the thing, and then you owned it at 11pm when it broke. Craft claims put the dignity in the work itself rather than in the title above it. That's the appeal. That's also the limitation, because craft claims don't scale into org charts very well.
HRIS gang is a solidarity claim. It's us. And any time there's an us, there's a them, and the them is usually the layer of the org chart that describes your job inaccurately in front of people who can fund it. Solidarity claims are the warmest of the three and the most honest about the emotional reality of the role. They also, quietly, concede something. You don't form a gang when you're already at the table.
Rare. Productive. Embattled.
Pick one and you've picked an entire theory of why this job feels invisible.
The part I actually can't stop thinking about
Here's what got me, though, and it isn't which name is right.
Professions with a settled identity do not need affectionate slang for themselves.
Surgeons are not the scalpel gang (although that is a far cooler name). Structural engineers do not refer to each other as unicorns, and they are genuinely rare and genuinely load-bearing. Actuaries are as niche as it gets and have never once needed a nickname to feel real. Those fields have a name, a body of knowledge, a credential that means something specific, and a shared story about what the work is for.
We have five nicknames and counting.
The nicknames didn't appear because we're clever. They appeared because the official language never described the work. "HRIS Analyst" describes maybe a fifth of what the job is now. "HR Technology" is a category, not a practice. "Systems Administrator" is a 2009 title on a 2026 job. So people built their own vocabulary in the gap, and the vocabulary is affectionate because it had to do emotional work that the titles never did.
The slang is a symptom. It's what grows in a discipline that never got formally defined.
Where the concession goes
Now, I don't want to be precious about this, because the nicknames are load-bearing and they've earned their keep.
"HRIS gang" got a lot of people through month 14, when the SI statement of work ended and the phone stopped getting answered. That kind of belonging is not decoration. It's retention. I've watched people stay in this field because of a group chat.
And there's a fair defense of the naming mess itself. The work genuinely changes every eighteen months. Position management, integrations, security design, and now agent governance. A field moving that fast has a real reason not to have settled on a name yet. That's not entirely a failure. Some of it is just velocity.
Fine. Both things are true.
Why this matters more than it used to
But here's where it stops being a fun vocabulary observation.
I've been writing about how competence gets proven in this industry. Screening systems reading resumes that other systems wrote. Credentials that live on a platform until the platform decides otherwise. The whole apparatus of demonstrating that you can actually do a thing.
You cannot credential a discipline that has not defined itself.
You cannot build a portable, verifiable record of skill in a field where five practitioners give you five different accounts of what the work even is. Every certification we have certifies product knowledge, which is exactly the thing that expires. None of them certify the actual practice, because the practice has no agreed shape. The nickname problem and the credential problem are the same problem wearing different clothes.
That's the bill coming due. Not today. But soon, and from a direction most of us aren't watching.
So
I'm not going to tell you to stop saying unicorn. I like unicorn. Ceci is right that we're rare and she's right that the market can't manufacture us.
And I'm not going to tell you to stop saying HRIS gang for similar reasons. There is and us and them right now, and we need the group emotional support.
I'm saying the reason we have different names is that we've never had to defend this as a discipline. Nobody made us write down what the work is, what good looks like, or what someone should be able to do before they're trusted with a tenant. We got to skip that step.
And a field that has never had to defend itself doesn't get to name itself.
So pick your word. Unicorn, builder, gang, whatever you've got.
Then be ready to say why.
— Mike.
P.S. I want to hear yours. What do you actually call this job when you're talking to someone who does it too, not the title on your badge? Reply and tell me. I'm collecting them, and I'm going back to Ceci and Dani to ask why they picked theirs, because I think the reasons are more interesting than the words.