What Does HR Actually Do? Key Responsibilities

We are becoming more and more aware of the importance of employees for the company. People are the backbone of many businesses. Thanks to them, they have a chance of success. Their skills, efficiency, and commitment are important not only for their development but also for everyone's actions. Therefore, it is important to manage people properly. Almost every company has an HR department. What exactly do its employees do? Can a company exist without human resource management? In this article, we will answer these questions!

What does the HR department do?

The HR department (human resources, human resource management) links between management and employees. HR people are mainly associated with conducting job interviews - of course, recruitment is a large part of their activity, but certainly not the only one.

The HR department not only recruits job candidates. Its employees' tasks also include appropriately motivating employees to perform their duties, preparing and conducting various types of training, recognizing people who are extremely valuable to the team and those who slow down their work and should be dismissed.

HR everyday tasks

- recruitment of new employees (often from A to Z - from designing a recruitment campaign, through editing advertisements, CV selection, arranging and conducting job interviews, to planning onboarding new employees);

- participation in arranging workplaces, sometimes also in designing or equipping the company's headquarters;

- building and monitoring employee experience;

- building incentive systems (choosing benefits, organizing occasional packages, etc.);

- taking care of team integration (planning and organization of events and other corporate events);

- preparing trainings (often also conducting);

- supervising the employee appraisal system;

- talent management, co-planning of employee career paths;

- help in solving conflicts in the team;

- co-building and implementing an employer branding strategy.

Who can become an HR specialist?

Contrary to appearances, the field of education does not have to play a key role here. However, graduates of such faculties as human resources management (fortunately, this unfortunate name appears less and less frequently), psychology or sociology, and (in the case of hard HR) administration are certainly more desirable. Or economic faculties.

More important, however, are personality predispositions; colloquially speaking, an HR specialist has to be familiar with people like them and work with them. For this reason, it should be characterized by:

- emotional and social intelligence;

Thanks to these qualities, he can understand his colleagues and support them in teamwork.

- negotiation and conflict resolution skills;

Mitigating disputes and clearing up misunderstandings is one of the inherent aspects of working in HR, and it happens more often than you might think from the outside.

- stress resistance;

the HR specialist is often the "whipping boy" because he or she usually communicates unfavorable changes made by the employer to employees and assumes their dissatisfaction.

- tolerance of differences;

It cannot recruit based on its own prejudices.

- assertiveness;

he must be able to refuse when his co-workers ask him to bend the regulations, e.g., settling working time, and such situations occur.

- Objectivity;

Especially in recruitment, when its task is to select the most suitable candidate, not the most pleasant. This is a trap that managers often get caught, but a good recruiter cannot afford it.

- openness to technical innovations;

It isn't easy to imagine modern HR without digital tools, and these, in turn, are constantly evolving. The specialist must keep up with the technology development and sometimes overtake it, defining the company's needs in the field of newly developed IT solutions.

It is difficult to be an HR?

Working in HR is one of those activities that are very difficult to learn without having predispositions to do so. Yes, you can learn the rules of accounting for leaves or work out a selection system for sent CVs, but it is much more difficult to make up for the possible lack of soft skills. Working in this area can be a source of great satisfaction, especially when you look at a well-functioning team in which you have participated in the recruitment and integration. However, it can also bring a lot of stress because the HR specialist works almost all the time on the firing line; mediating between the employer and the employee is not always pleasant or easy to resolve disputes. This is an aspect that is very often forgotten. The balance between representing the employer and representing employees is not easy. This aspect is very often unaware and deprecated. The number of conversations that HR carries out is a capital investment with a long return. HR is also not a broom to sweep all kinds of matters, and sometimes it is forced to do this role, regardless of whether he is a specialist in the "hard" or "soft" area. This perspective escapes when we watch case studies of employer branding campaigns.