What Type of HR Professional Are You?

When describing someone as a “HR professional”, it seems like there’s just too much ground to cover. For the longest time, HR professionals have been wearing many hats, tasked to take on different responsibilities ranging from compensation and benefits, to managing human resources information systems (HRIS)/HR software. If you’re planning to make a career move into HR, perhaps it’s useful to first ask, what type of HR professional are you? Or rather, what type of HR professional would you like to be?

These days, HR is seen as a key role in business strategy. Culture, for example, has become a very large part of business strategy. HR professionals help determine the culture of the company by deciding what type of leadership is nurtured from within/brought in externally, or how to recruit and maintain key talent.

If you’re wondering how you, as a HR professional, can become an effective business partner to the company, you’ve come to the right place.

HR as a business partner

To become an effective business partner, HR teams need to develop deeper business acumen, build analytical skills to underwrite their leadership, learn to operate as performance advisors, and develop an understanding of the needs of the 21st-century workforce – Deloitte University Press

As a HR leader, do you contribute to business strategy?

• Find (new and creative) ways to acquire talent
• Develop employee skills
• Groom leaders
• Engage employees at all levels
• Retain good talent

Or does your job description look more like…

• Manage recruitment administration
• Coordinate training programs with external consultants
• Respond to queries on existing HR policies
• Process monthly compensation and benefits
• Administrate the employee exit process

With the majority of HR professionals entering the function without formal training in Human Resources or Business, it’s no surprise that HR faces difficulty in advancing business growth. How then, can you advocate for a role to play in business growth?

Support comes from the top

Believing you can achieve something and actually doing it is commendable, but having support from your company is also crucial to how much change you can make.

Ask yourself —

How much does your company invest in developing the HR team in areas of technical HR skills, labour market and workforce knowledge, technology and business analytics?

If your company is supporting you and investing resources, that’s wonderful. You’re halfway there.

How to become a HR-business strategist at an individual level

The next set of questions would be on how you as an individual, can become a better HR professional, that supports management:

1. How can you understand your employees and leaders better? Can this be done at all levels?

2. How can you devote more time to developing your own skills?

3. How can you better support business decisions by measuring data and knowing how to analyze it?

There is a quick (not the best) answer to these three questions. It’s the availability of time.

Talenox steps in right here, to essentially grant you the availability of time.

Talenox is your business aid

We’re speeding up routine workflow (kill redundancy, integrate information across key functions) while constantly making our user interface as intuitive as possible (eliminate the need for training, sustain long term company-wide user interest).

This saves you tons of time and energy, therefore granting you more time.

So we’ve successfully made HR less of a headache. Now all that’s left is to couple beauty with brains. We want to make HR sexy.

In the pipeline are intelligent dashboards for data and sentiment analysis. With coaching and feedback taking center stage in talent development, qualitative data needs to be meaningfully analyzed alongside already established quantitative indicators.

The end goal isn’t to make business processes simpler, it’s to allow the discovery of new insights for HR professionals like yourself, which would have been impossible otherwise without technology. And it’s about time HR received some cool new toys.

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