It is impossible for any HR professional to be trained in all the different areas of a business they must hire for—particularly if they are responsible for technology roles that have very niche requirements. This is just one of the multitude of challenges HR professionals face in today’s workplace. HR professionals must also set an example as model members of the team, be well-versed in the latest employment law and help create the right culture. But there are a few things HR professionals can do to ensure they don’t get overwhelmed, and instead, become an invaluable gem within the heart of their organisation. Here are our top 5 tips for HR professionals in 2019.

Understand your people:

First and foremost, make sure you understand your people. HR’s role begins with empathy. Get familiar with your employees – their personal lives, milestones and work anniversaries, roles, calibre, strength, weaknesses, comfort and discomfort, etc. Value the diversity and learn to develop a balance in it. This is an investment you need to make from day one as it will help you in the long run when it comes to creating the right culture, increasing employee engagement and productivity, and achieving the overall goals.

Recognize your role in today’s modern business:

Today the HR team is recognized as a strategic partner by management, and their focus is more on employee engagement, talent management, fostering innovation, breaking stereotypes and developing a collaborative culture. Understanding the strategic definition of your role and then connecting these to the business plan will assist you in delivering everything the C-suite is asking of you.

Be technology savvy:

Understanding the technological know-how has become a must, especially for an HR professional. You need to incorporate an end-to-end software in the organization through which you can operate your payroll, systemize the attendance, employee information, taxes, scheduling and more. This will help track most of your important processes and save the investment of time that otherwise is given for organizing and processing.

Use niche search-based recruiters for those hard-to-fill roles

This is probably a no-brainer for most HR professionals tasked with lining up qualified candidates for a particularly specialist role like a Netsuite programme architect or Salesforce.com developer. Finding scarce candidates that will suit your company can be nearly impossible if you don’t know where to look. Even the most mature, well-connected HR professional isn’t going to be able to source candidates as well as a specialist search-based recruitment firm who can use their existing network to find candidates who may not be actively looking for a job. So don’t see using a recruitment firm as giving up, see it as a necessary step to getting the right people.

Widen your skill-set:

Make every effort to increase your expertise. This could be through e-learning, sector based seminars, training courses or simply taking up projects that are complementary to the HR profile. This will not only give you exposure to different verticals but ensure that you keep growing. Schedule skip level meetings every quarter with the top management, this will help you understand if you are in track when it comes to your management’s vision of the organization and also your profile.

About Oliver Parks

Oliver Parks Consulting offers search-based recruitment solutions to the technology sector, specialising in the ERP, CRM, CMS, ECM, BI and Open Source Technology spaces. The firm’s multilingual consultants operate in narrowly-defined niche market segments, enabling them to gain extensive knowledge of the people and companies operating in each technology.  Oliver Parks has a proven track-record with more than 100,000 candidates worldwide and more than 300 clients globally.