7 essential skills for HR managers

HR management is complicated. After all, humans are an extremely complex ‘product’ to manage. To be successful, a HR manager must possess a variety of varied personal attributes and skills, the most important of which we’ve listed below.

Communication

In order to meet the role’s demands, a successful HR manager must be a strong communicator. HR professionals are expected to be able to communicate at a company-wide level – this means anyone ranging from shareholders to employees, potential employees and upper-level management. What’s more, they must be adept at communicating through different mediums, ranging from emails to social media.

Negotiation

They say negotiation is an art, well, to be a top class HR manager you need to be akin to Picasso. In HR you play the middle man, so you must completely understand each party’s positions and then bring about a resolution that satisfies each side’s needs, which is not always the easiest task.

Organisation

HR, by its nature, demands that professionals are extremely organised. Your ability to work to deadlines and prioritise tasks is essential, as is your personal efficiency. After all, the documents a HR manager deals with are of vital importance, so they must be correctly filed and easily locatable at a moment’s notice.

Dedication to Continuous Improvement

A key focus of a HR manager’s role is to ensure that the company they work for is always striving towards perfection. As well as ensuring employees and managers are given the right conditions to work to their best, an HR manager must also see that a company adopts relevant technology and procedures in order to aid productivity.

Multitasking

Multitasking is an essential part of an HR manager’s skill set. An average day will see an HR professional juggle many issues ranging from recruitment to dealing with wage disputes or employee resignations. The nature of HR means that most issues will be extremely personal and a priority to the person involved, as such, you will be expected to oversee vastly different cases simultaneously.

Discretion and Ethics

Due to the nature of the information they’re privy to, it’s essential an HR manager can be relied upon to operate in complete discretion, and never divulge anything information to unauthorised personnel. A successful candidate must also have a strong moral compass, after all, there may come a time when you have to push back on requests from top level managers to ensure that fairness prevails. Are you strong enough?

Conflict Management

For a company to be at its most productive there has to be a collaborative working environment, yet sometimes colleagues, or even whole departments, don’t always see eye to eye. Here, an effective HR manager will solve the situation by having the ability to resolve any disputes in a civil, professional manner and will restore workplace harmony.

Do you have what it takes?

If you feel you possess the personal attributes mentioned in this article, the role of HR manager could be for you. If that’s the case, ensure you speak to the team at Portfolio CBR.

Author Bio:-

Adam Maidment is a content writer for Portfolio Payroll, the only payroll recruitment agency recommended by the Chartered Institute for Payroll and Pension Professionals. Their services specialise in recruiting for job roles such as payroll administrators, officers and managers.