What else do HR professionals do other than recruiting?
HR used to be known for mainly one purpose: recruitment. The HR department's priorities however, have seen quite a change – while HR professionals still hire new employees today, their roles have clearly evolved.
The modern-day HR department is tasked with responsibilities including counselling and conducting employee evaluation. When deployed efficiently, the HR department has the power to raise its profile in the boardroom. This can be in the form of improving practices at multiple organisational levels.
Here are some ways the HR department shows that it serves more than just a recruitment purpose.
HR as a catalyst
The HR department understands the organisation’s manpower needs best. They are thus able to design structured interview questions in order to sieve out the best candidates during recruitment drives.
They provide useful counsel which enables the management in making informed decisions such as hiring. Additionally, a HR professional possesses expertise in analysing the internal and external labour pool. This allows them to identify and correct loopholes during succession planning and when nurturing talent pipelines.
Creating an engaged workplace culture
Besides fulfilling talent demands, the HR department can also engineer a more participative and engaged workplace culture.
By keeping an eye out for any anomalies in performance ratings, the HR department can identify employees that require training, mentoring or remediation. These findings may also be an indication of a need to improve workplace morale, which can be addressed through dialogue sessions, bonding activities or facilitation during the onboarding process.
Employee evaluation
Traditional methods of assessing employees such as the five-point scale employee ratings can be improved on and made more objective. Such assessments could focus less on the managers’ subjective perceptions of the skills of each team member, and more on the future intentions of each employee.
For example, managers can be asked to rate how likely they would be to promote an employee, or if they would increase the employee’s pay package. The evaluation process can be further improved by taking qualitative factors into consideration. For instance, instead of accessing formal projects, HR could take into account the difficulty of project assignments in a given year and the respective employee contributions. With more objective ratings, performance levels can be gauged more accurately, providing an insight into the company’s efficiency. Productivity can be boosted once problem areas are identified and remedied.
Ensuring the well-being of employees
One key factor affecting the productivity rate of employees in an organisation is health. Frequent sick leave, high turnover rates and increased workplace accidents affect the performance of a company. The HR department can step in to address these issues with their expertise. Through monitoring factors such as absence data and employee engagement surveys, HR professionals are able to intervene or provide counsel at the right time.
HR is by nature a long-term play. Skills upgrading, performance tracking, or engineering a better workplace culture are all projects that must be constantly nurtured. Plans would not be able to unfold properly without the cooperation and support of multiple stakeholders, even with the full effort of HR. With that in mind, the upper management of an organisation must work hand-in-hand with HR, in order for the plans seeded in the present to bear fruit in the future.
