Related careers
People from administrative staff often come to the HR sphere: often an office manager, assistant or assistant to the general director is engaged in "part-time" filling out work books and gradually "acquires" HR functions. In large foreign companies, you can start with the position of an assistant in the personnel department, the next step will be a coordinator, then a specialist, then a manager, and so on. A lot of people come to HR departments from recruitment agencies. They have a serious advantage - great experience in recruitment and knowledge of real business.
As far as gender distribution is concerned, historically more women enter the profession, but at the highest level there are still more men, and they are valued significantly more. According to hrlead.ru statistics, 21.10% are men (62.75% in top management), 78.90% are women (37.25% in top management).
Functional responsibilities
Human resources workers, as a rule, are not very interested in business.
- Selection and hiring of personnel (recruitment).
- Personnel management.
- Remuneration and staff motivation (Compensation&Benefits, C&B). Analysis of the labor market in terms of remuneration, bonus schemes used and social packages provided in order to maintain their own corporate motivational schemes at the right level.
- Development and training of personnel (Training & Development, T & D). An HR needs to be aware of what competencies employees should have, what else needs to be developed and how.
- Organizational development (Organization Development). HR takes part in solving the following issues: what organizational structure corresponds to the company, how it will develop and what departments need to be created or reorganized in order for the staff to work most efficiently.
- Corporate culture. HR is engaged in activities related to bringing the company's values to each employee (team building, internal communications: publishing a corporate newspaper, sporting events, etc.).
- Work with trade unions. Few HRs are still able to implement it, but since some trade unions have become very strong thanks to state support, they can no longer be discounted.
Skills
For an HR, it is important to be able to work with line managers, he is an internal consultant on all issues related to personnel, and really communicates with a huge number of people, but he is not a psychologist, although there are specialists of this type (“mothers”). It is difficult to imagine a successful HR without good communication skills. As for the HR director, in any case, he must first of all be a strong manager.
Many people think that HR specialists do not need specialization (by industry, market segments), because the technologies are the same. Indeed, for a person involved in personnel administration, it is not so important what industry he works in. An HR director is another matter. Ideally, he should know the business at the level of top management. Business knowledge directly depends on this - an understanding of where the company is moving and how to build a personnel policy. There are several areas where employers want to see a person with experience in a similar business as an HR - finance, IT, high-tech.
Pros and cons
The main problem is that HR workers, as a rule, are not very interested in business. If an HR knows very little about the company's clients, about its strategic objectives, then he pays much more attention to procedures a la performance appraisals (performance evaluation) than to real results. So far, in Russia they do not know how to correctly assess the main indicators that should serve as a measure of the professional success of an HR manager: creating the necessary working atmosphere, attracting and retaining talented employees, or creating productive social networks in an organization. Instead, it measures the number of staff positions filled or the number of educational trainings per capita of the corporate population. The salary of an HR manager depends on the organization, as well as the goals and objectives set for him. If the HR is not just an administrator who follows the instructions of the boss, but chooses the role of a trustee of employees, then, protecting his wards, he can enter into difficult relationships with the management. But with a certain set of knowledge, methods and confidence that makes him listen, he may well become a strategic partner for the leader.
Prospects
Horizontal movement is quite common for HRs: they make cross-industrial transitions quite easily. There are personnel workers who become serious strategic partners and are members of the board. There are even cases of transition to the general management of the company. One of the options for developing a career as a HR director is to "grow" out of a particular company and take the position of a management consultant.
