5 essential skills to succeed in HR
HR is constantly changing, and always people focused. It can be interesting at times and infuriating at others – but always proves rewarding.
If you’re looking to buff up on your HR abilities, we’ve selected five skills to help you focus your efforts.
1. Strong understanding of tech
Tech is changing the workplace in ways we could never have imagined even 10 years ago. As a HR professional, staying abreast of those changes and finding the best way to make tech work for you is imperative.
There is some key tech that can help you fulfil your core duties. One important duty is to manage the learning and knowledge of your organisation, and an online learning management system is the best way to handle the various users, reports and formats that contain your organisation’s knowledge.
Similarly, your learning decisions should be guided by an effective e-learning strategy – which can now be developed, implemented and tweaked more efficiently than ever online. With just these two pieces of tech you will be able to improve efficiency and productivity in ways that would not have been possible in the past.
2. Proactive recruitment style
Developing a strong talent pipeline is key to any successful HR program. And in order to find the best people, you have to be proactive – get out there and search! Market mapping is central to this and will allow you to create a broad network of potential candidates who have the right skill sets for positions you may have.
This market map should then be narrowed by talent pooling – whereby you build richer profiles of your key candidates for serious consideration in the role. Developing these skills will allow you to find the best candidates for your roles every time.
3. Administrative & organisation skills
This one almost goes without saying, but if your admin skills are lacking, you need to work on them. As an HR professional you are required to handle large volumes of information every day. In addition, a lot of times that information is extremely sensitive – from employee salaries to health conditions. Mismanagement of these details can result in a massive loss of trust, employment ramifications or even criminal proceedings in extreme circumstances. So keep the basics together!
4. Communication
It’s been said many times and for many reasons, but nowhere is it as true as in HR: communication is key. In the course of your role you may have to deal with stakeholders, complete strangers, senior executives or employees in distress – sometimes all in the same day. So it’s important that you work on your empathetic communication as well as your professional communication skills to ensure you can respond accordingly to whatever situation presents itself.
5. Flexibility
HR is probably the most people-driven area of any business. Every job role is based directly on people, for people or about people. And people can change quickly! So it’s important that you develop flexibility in the workplace to allow you to continue on with the important work even while things are changing around you. You may want to look into resilience training to assist you if this is something you have difficulty with.
By no means is the above list exhaustive. But just by focusing on those five key skills we can all but guarantee that you will see a marked improvement in your own work, and your relationships with others. So hop to it and start improving today!