Are you interested in starting a career in human resources? Human resources is a varied and intriguing field that requires dynamic individuals. The HR field offers many opportunities for advancement and lateral moves to keep your career fresh. First, let’s look at what human resources means.
What is Human Resources?
Human Resources, or the HR field, involves the employment and development of the workers within a business or organization. Human resources is an umbrella term, meaning it can be used to cover several broad subcategories.
What Does a HR Department Do?
Here are some of the duties that you can expect to encounter as a member of a company’s human resources team:
- The recruitment and hiring of new employees
- Updating company policies such as vacation/sick time, dress code, break times, etc.
- Understanding and implementing employee benefits packages
- Employee training, development, and retention
- Keeping abreast of labor laws and ensuring the company’s compliance
- Time clock tracking and payroll administration
- Employee conflict resolution
While you might not be responsible for administering payroll, for example, maybe that’s something that your company outsources. However, these duties will be managed by the HR department.
How to Start a Career in the HR Field
The best way to get started is by getting hands-on training in the HR field. That might sound obvious, but there are right and wrong ways to go about it.
If you’re serious about learning the job role, consider enrolling in a HR Management program at a trade school. This will give you the confidence you need to hit the ground running in your new career.
When you take courses in HR management at a trade school, you’ll have an edge over the competition. As you’ll come to learn, recruiters are always looking for qualified individuals to fill their positions, and this diploma will fit the bill.
What Will I Learn During an HR Management Program?
There are many topics you can expect to learn during an HR Management program. They include:
Recruiting
Whatever company you work for will want to hire the best employees. It’s up to the HR team to find candidates that have the right mix of talent, skills, outlook, and work ethic. Here’s the rundown on how the recruitment process works.
When there’s an open position, your first duty as a recruiter will be to learn as much about that job as possible. You will talk with managers and supervisors about the duties that the job entails. You’ll need to understand the qualifications and experience that the ideal candidate will have. You’ll also need input on how quickly the position must be filled.
With that information, you’ll begin the search for the perfect candidate. You can enlist the aid of a recruitment consultant, put up a notice on your company’s website, use social media to get the word out, or use all of these options. Once you’re faced with a pool of promising applicants, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Hiring Employees
After you’ve narrowed down the field to determine which candidates are worthy of an interview, you’ll reach out and arrange a time to meet. This is more challenging than it sounds, especially if the candidate is being courted by several organizations.
Depending on how many candidates you’re interviewing, you might want to employ aptitude tests or case studies in the interest of time. These methods can also help the exceptional individuals stand out from the ones who are merely average.
During the actual interview, it will be important to test the candidate’s suitability, including technical skills, if applicable. You’ll also need to know whether this person would be a good fit for the company’s office atmosphere. Being a good judge of character is essential for anyone who wants to take on the role of interviewing.
You might need to interview a candidate more than once to determine their suitability. This is especially true when hiring managers or C-level executives. And even after you’ve offered them the position, there’s no guarantee that they’ll take it right away. You might have to engage in some fierce negotiation.
Employee Development
When you work in employee development, you’ll attempt to improve the competency of your existing employees, as well as implementing new skills that might help support the company’s goals.
Every company should have a learning and development (L&D) strategy, and it typically involves mandatory employee training. Employee development goes further than this. You’ll make sure that employees remain with the organization for the long haul, which will save time and money. The key is to avoid high turnover and the resultant need for incessant re-training.
Employee Records
Every employee on the payroll should be entered into a database. This allows you to keep track of vital information, such as the employee’s date of hire, rate of pay, and tax withholding information. If your company does anything special for employee birthdays, it’s useful to have that information on hand. Many organizations also keep track of the total hours worked and attendance records for each worker.
For large companies in particular, this can be a challenge. When you work in HR, you’re bound to have access to these employee records. That could mean you’ll be responsible for updating them and ensuring that all the information entered is correct.
For example, let’s say that an employee’s vacation time renews every year on their date of hire. If the date of hire is entered incorrectly, the worker won’t receive the benefit to which they’re entitled, at least, not in a timely fashion. Your goal, therefore, will be to prevent such errors from occurring so that the organization runs more smoothly.
Payroll
Payroll specialists are responsible for tracking hours and ensuring that workers are paid for their time. Those are the basics, but their duties are usually more widespread and varied than this.
For example, you might be enlisted to enter the payroll information in the company’s bookkeeping system. That’s an important job that can result in costly errors if it’s not done correctly. You may also be responsible for overseeing the transfer of funds from the main business account to a separate payroll account. This means you would have access to the company’s banking information, a huge responsibility.
When you administer payroll, you’ll need to track vacation and sick time, as well as any other PTO that the company offers. Otherwise, you would have no way of knowing if the individual who’s putting in for the time off actually has the time available.
It’s possible that the payroll department will be comprised of several individuals, so you won’t have all of these duties. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with each of them, in the interest of becoming a well-rounded candidate.
Benefits Administration
What is benefits administration? As the name suggests, it’s the process of creating and updating the company benefits and managing them for each individual employee. This is a critical role, and one that’s usually carried out by the HR department.
Most companies offer benefits such as health, dental, and vision insurance. Vacation and sick time, or any other forms of PTO, are also common. Your organization might also have a 401(k) plan, a life insurance policy, or other perks.
When you work in HR, there’s a good chance you’ll be responsible for keeping track of these benefits. You might even be tasked with setting some of them up, so it’s in your best interests to familiarize yourself with these programs in advance. It’s also likely that you’ll enroll new employees in the programs when they become eligible.
Some members of the HR team will also liaise with suppliers and brokers to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Communication with the accounts payable department is also key, since they’ll need to know which portions of a bill needs to be charged to the employee, and which should be charged to the organization.
Final Thoughts
Enrolling in a trade school will go a long way toward jump-starting your career in the HR field. It takes time to acclimate to any new job or experience, but if you’ve already received hands-on training, you’ll be more confident when it’s time to take on these duties. Better yet, your trade school education will give you the edge over other applicants, something you’ll come to appreciate even more when you’re comfortably ensconced in your exciting new career.
Want to Learn More?
Now that you know how to start a career in human resources, it is time to learn more about the Interactive College of Technology. At the Interactive College of Technology, we offer Human Resources Management training that can help you get started in a new career or advance your current one. You’ll get hands-on training, industry recognized certifications, and real-world experience prior to graduation! We also offer continuing education courses to refresh and build on your current skills.
Let’s take the first step together! Contact us now to learn more.
