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 the promotion? Today I’m going to tell you the five skills for human resource professionals that are in high demand. You need to get on your resume. As a cue and resource 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. I have gotten hundreds of HR and people professionals jobs by helping them to up-skill and revamp their resumes with these skills. Make sure you say – number five because that is the top skill I’ve seen. If you take a few classes to build it makes all the difference in getting the job or promotion. 

Building Skills for an HR Career

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, anything people-related even if your role isn’t straight-up. Human resources roles get exposed to those different processes in any way. The possible 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’s so many HR professionals on LinkedIn says SHRM CP or SHRM SCP in their profile? Well, that’s because employers look for SHRM Certifications and trust those. HR companies in this industry and that’s effective sure have their main certifications and they also offer 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 larger certification. See this whole page of all the specialty credentials, so you can peruse them yourself. 

Here are the top HR Career Skills You Need: 

1. 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. Here’s why one reason is to keep costs low companies sometimes like to hire someone who is a recruiter. Essentially someone who can full stack hire people and engage with them through their entire employee life-cycle. Having recruiting skills along with the other skills I will discuss in this article, will enable you to beat out all those other talented folks for these jobs. Secondly, 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 are 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 
• Candidate Evaluation
• Scorecards
• Applicant Tracking Systems
• Offer Generation
• Negotiation

If these areas sound unfamiliar then study up my friend to build this 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 there are more specific hard skills like sourcing and offer generation. That is highly attractive to employers. So, either build that skill or show employers that you have a strong grasp by enrolling in Sherm’s talent acquisition specialty credential. 

2. Total Rewards:

The fact of the matter is if you’re an HR you will be expected to have an understanding of 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 that HR is or the HR information system do they use. What else do they offer like tuition reimbursement or other benefits? 

Start asking questions know what a PEO is before walking into your next job interview. Sherm is, of course, a total hub for this information, there are tons of resources, including their foundations of compensation program which will break it down for you. 

3. Immigration and Employment Law

If they hire anyone who needs a visa or sponsorship or hires in multiple states or heck just hiring in one state is so darn confusing. They will want you to spearhead the H-1B process and protect the company for making any terrible missteps. 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. I beat one 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 of 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 specifically for HR professionals. 

4. Employee Relations

Employee relations is everything from being the intermediary between the employees and managers in creating policies around the employee. Issues like fair compensation, useful 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 to get drowsy. 

These policies have an incredible amount of work that goes into. 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. There is an engaging course called workplace coaching and mentoring where you’ll learn coaching techniques designed to effectively increase leader in organizational performance. If you can talk eloquently on that topic they are going to go dang this person is strategic. 

5. People Analytics

 The executive wants to see numbers, people analytic is so crucial. It’s how you collect data on your workforce. You can use that to inform major decisions and programs such as can you tell me, how much is your turnover last year? How far diverse can eats get in your recruitment pipeline. If your internal promotions have increased since implementing that leadership training two year s ago. Using HRS and performance management system to unearth this data will be crucial. Without data, you’re just another jump with a hunch. 

From my organizational psychology master’s program and that was very statistics heavy but you don’t have to enroll in a master’s program to learn this stuff. Jeremy does have a people analytics specialty credential that I highly recommend you get and that can really help you take your career to the next level. See, how to update your LinkedIn profile which is a full checklist of exactly what to do because once you build these great skills and certifications you better get that on your LinkedIn profile.

Conclusion:

In this article, we have discussed about the top 5 HR skills for your resume, as well as the best ways to learn those skills whether you are currently in a human resources role or not. These Human Resources skills are crucial to have a fruitful career path to land jobs and promotions. See below links as I discussed above.

Useful Links:

• Talent Acquisition Specialty Credential
• SHRM Specialty Credentials (People Analytics, California Law HR, Talent Acquisition, U.S. Employment Immigration, HR Department Of One, Inclusive Workplace Culture)
• U.S. Employment Immigration Specialty Credential
• California Law HR Specialty Credential
• Foundations of Compensation Program
• Senior Leadership Programs
• Workplace Coaching and Mentoring Program

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