5 HR Career Skills You Need on Your Resume!

You want to give yourself the edge as a human resources professional, but which skills matter? Which ones will land you that career-defining job or promotion? Today, I'm going to tell you the five capabilities for human resource professionals in high demand that you need to get on your resume. As a human resources professional myself, I am here to give you the most up-to-date and actionable career and job-search advice.

The five skills I'm going to tell you today are the keywords that employers look for on your resume. So let's first discuss how do you build skills for an HR career? One way is to get involved with anything around employee engagement, community building, training, hiring, firing, performance management, anything people related. Even if your role isn't just straight up the Human Resources role, get exposed to those different processes in any way possible. The second is to skill up using courses and books. Certifications are a great way to learn new skills and have something to legitimize your expertise to employers, but you need to get the right certification. Have you ever noticed that so many HR professionals on LinkedIn say SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP in their profile? Well, that's because employers look for SHRM certifications and trust those the most. SHRM has its main certifications and offers specialty credentials available for many of these in-demand skills. These credentials are a great way to show your area of expertise along with your dedication to the profession and can be a stepping stone to the more substantial certification.

Skill number one, talent acquisition. I know what you may be thinking. I'm not a recruiter. I'm more of a generalist, but recruiting and talent acquisition skills are still super useful. And here's why. One reason is to keep costs low; companies sometimes like to hire someone who is a recruiter/human resources professional hybrid. Essentially, someone who can full-stack hire people and engage with them through their entire employee lifecycle. Having recruiting skills and the other skills I will discuss in this article will enable you to beat out all those other talented folks for these jobs, and second, your career might hit a bit of a ceiling if you don't get TA experience. If you've only ever touched the other HR disciplines and they're looking to promote someone to oversee all functions of HR, you better know your stuff when it comes to recruiting. Talent acquisition skills include sourcing, building a recruiting process, talent evaluation, scorecards, applicant tracking systems, offer generation, and negotiation. If these areas sound unfamiliar, then study up my friend. To build the skill, recruit for any organization you're a part of, even if you're recruiting volunteers for a charity event. Find any way to touch some of these skills, but more specific hard skills, like sourcing and offer generation, are highly attractive to employers. So either build that skill or show employers that you have a firm grasp by enrolling in SHRM's talent acquisition specialty credentials.

Also, candidate recruitment processes changed a lot in past years, The rising of applicant tracking systems and utilizing the AI and machine learning in recruitment optimized this process a lot. Qpage is one of the best recruitment automation software in the market, which will help the recruiters in every aspect of recruitment. With the helpful features like candidate matching and resmue phrasing. So you need to know a little bit about working with such software.

Skill number two, total rewards. The fact of the matter is that if you are an HR, you will be expected to understand benefits and compensation and the other incentives provided to employees. There is so much to learn here, and often it is easiest to learn this on the job. But one way to go about it is to study what your company does. What do they use to provide benefits? What HRIS or HR information system do they use? What else do they offer? Like tuition embarrassment or other benefits. Start asking questions. Know what a PEO is before walking into your next job interview. SHRM is, of course, a total hub for this information. There are tons of resources there, including their foundations of the compensation program, which will break it down.

Skill number three, immigration, and employment law. If they hire anyone who needs Visa sponsorship or higher in multiple states or heck, just hiring in one state is so darn confusing. They will want you to spearhead the H1B process and protect the company for making any terrible miss steps when it comes to employment law. Now, you don't need a law degree, and the good news is that you will work with lawyers who specialize in this, so it's a little less intense than it sounds, but being informed, knowing the right next step for any legal situation that comes up is highly valued in any HR professional. I would seriously advise on a full-on specialty credential for this one. SHRM has one focused on us employment immigration and then another one for California HR law. So dive into those if they make sense for your situation. Now, the next two skills are so darn crucial, and I beat someone out for an HR job because the employer said that I had a skilled number five, and they didn't. One thing you might be noticing is that all these are hard skills. When HR requires a lot of soft skills, such as strong leadership and communication skills, hard skills will give you a strong foundation, and a killer resume and soft skills will take your career to new heights. Make sure to check out SHRM's leadership workshops where they are crafted, especially for HR professionals to advance their careers with a well-rounded approach.

Skill number four, employee relations. Employee relations is everything from being the intermediary between employees and managers to creating policies around employee issues like fair compensation, valuable benefits, proper work-life balance, reasonable working hours, and others. It's all about being the peacekeeper and coaching others through complex situations. The first step here is to start reading company policies and get familiar and consider why certain choices were made when writing these different policies. Though I'm warning you, do not read these late at night because you may start drowsy. But these policies have an incredible amount of work that goes into them. And then, if you are not able to get direct HR mediation experience, look for other areas in your work or life where you can act as a mediator and a coach and look to flex those skills more. There is an engaging course called workplace coaching and mentoring, where you'll learn coaching techniques designed to increase leader in organizational performance effectively. If you can talk eloquently on that topic, they are going to go, dang, this person is strategic.

Skill number five, people analytics. Executives want to see numbers. People analytics is so crucial. It's how you collect data on your workforce and then use that to inform significant decisions and programs, such as can tell me how much of your employee turnover last year was the regrettable loss? How far diverse candidates get in your recruitment pipeline? If your internal promotions have increased since implementing that leadership training two years ago, using HRIS and performance management systems to unearth this data will be crucial. Without data, you're just another chump with a hunch. You don't have to enroll in a masters program to learn this stuff and surprise surprise, SHRM does have a people analytics specialty credential that I highly recommend you get and can help you take your career to the next level.