Getting into the World of HR? Here’s what you should know

The Human Resource (HR) department has a variety of cogs in their machine that help it serve as a liaison between the management and the employees of the company. However, the subject of HR is vaster than one might think. If you are toying with the idea of getting into HR yourself, here’s a run-through of two important positions in the HR department.

HR Coordinator

The HR coordinator’s job is to represent the HR department and help handle the HR programs and functions.

HR coordinates work under the HR director or HR manager and are instrumental in addressing employee concerns, putting orientations together, and handling HR programs and functions such as employee training, especially in large organizations.

An HR coordinator job description includes primary functions and responsibilities such as orchestrating plans for employee health and welfare, acting as a liaison between the insurance providers and employees, handling employee issues and queries, taking care of payroll and benefits and HR processes, handling issues related to benefits, helping with the recruitment of new employees, and assisting with termination processes and employee performance review.

The Different Types of HR Coordinators

There are a variety of HR coordinators that relatively bigger companies use to boost their productivity and performance. Here are some of those types of HR coordinators:

Training Coordinators

These coordinators are responsible for analyzing training needs, designing a curriculum based on those needs, and training courses to implement it. Additionally, they gauge the performance and progress of the current and new employees after training.

Recruiting coordinators

Recruiting coordinators are typically in charge of handling the corporate’s staffing needs in large corporations.

These coordinators are tasked with the job of designing and implementing effective recruitment strategies to make sure they have their staffing requirements met. Getting this done is no mean feat. It includes a wide variety of tasks. Here are a few: Cementing relationships with placement offices in universities, planning and attending career fairs to draw in new candidates, working with managers with different departments to come up with strategies for recruitment.

Employee Benefits Coordinators

Employee benefits coordinators are responsible for taking care of employee benefits programs, pensions, and others. Here are some things they are tasked with: Conducting orientations for benefits, ensuring all employee files are accurate, recording status reports and the changes in pay, and processing claims.

Human Resource Analyst

HR analysts are in charge of gathering statistics on salaries for different positions and evaluating personality test results and then matching the candidate to the ideal job opening.

An HR analyst job description includes responsibilities like making sure the employees and managers are up to date with the issues, concerns, and everything else that is relevant to the company in question. HR analysts who are involved in training programs for employees may carry out surveys to find out information on job satisfaction before they evaluate it and make constructive suggestions to the company managers.

Skills and Competencies that HR Analysts must have

Here are some skills that you ought to have if you want to cement yourself as a competent HR analyst:

Communication

Even though you may spend a large chunk of your time analyzing and evaluating data, you will need to communicate with stakeholders, the company you are working for, and do so very clearly so that their expectations are managed. Additionally, you need to have these communication skills in check to show the results of your analysis to your target audience.

HR Expertise

You need to make sure you have HR expertise in spades irrespective of whether you are on the business side or working on statistics. In other words, you need to be well-versed in the best HR practices, the science and working of HR and have a thorough understanding of HR processes.

Business acumen

Here’s an essential but often overlooked prerequisite that you need to have. You need to know how to make the right decisions to ensure your company grows, which is why business acumen is a critical competency for an HR analyst to have. As an HR analyst, you need to be sure of how your data analysis will affect your business before you go ahead with the data analysis.

Data analysis

As an HR analyst, you need to handle the foundation of the data-driven HR in the company. Many organizations go with Adhoc reporting and dashboarding. Adhoc reporting refers to manually retrieving information from systems to be reported and analyzed.

You need to make sure you are involved in maintaining the quality of the HR data, its analysis, and the aggregation of the data.

Relationship management

This competency ties in with communication. It is your job to manage relationships and the expectations of your stakeholders. Also, you must keep your business up to date with your analytics project and clearly explain to them any progress or setbacks that you may have come across.

These are some critical skills you will need to solidify if you want to become an HR analyst. Additionally, you must be proficient in MS Excel. Most organizations still use MS Excel, which means that you need to be good at combining worksheets and analyzing large amounts of data with ease. Work experience in the HR department is always a plus.