HR Jobs: A General Overview

Disclaimer: This article is based on my experience in the industry and what was taught to me during my PGDHRM at XLRI Jamshedpur. Opinions expressed are personal. Many elements discussed here are highly subjective in nature, my purpose here is to give an overview to all HR aspirants and students.

For those who have not yet entered a B-School for an HR course, HR appears very fancy. Due thanks to the venom out there on LinkedIn and Facebook, every person thinks that all HR does is create rangoli, organize birthdays and slack when everyone else is working. The problem with this notion is many join HR thinking it will be that relaxing job and they are up for a rude shock when they see the complexities involved both during their MBA and post their job. Also, HR roles, in general, are very different in nature. A person working in IR will be doing a far different kind of work than a person in L&D or a person in compensation and benefit.

As many of you have asked me to provide a brief overview of what are different kinds of HR roles and what are the pros and cons of them, I thought I will write an article on the same. Please note that this is a simplified version, many organizations have a very different designation and hierarchy and can merge multiple roles into one.

 Broadly, you can be working in any of the below-mentioned 3 roles once you graduate with an HR degree.

Generalist/HRBP: A generalist HR or HR Business Partner is an execution-based role i.e. individual HRBP will partner with both the line managers and HR Specialist to executive different HR Agenda. This is what we can call a front-facing role i.e. you will be interacting with employees directly, you will be following up with line managers for various tasks like goal setting, training, engagement score, etc. You will be the one organizing those infamous birthdays and picnic. You will also be the SPOC for most important functions i.e. PMS, compensation, transfer, etc. You will be the one who will bring the bad news, you will be telling ‘we will let you know a lot because many problems are highly subjective in nature and you have to seek exception approvals to help the employee.

You will have dual reporting i.e. to the unit you are HRBP of and to the central HR functions also i.e. the CoEs. You will be executing lots of things for both of them and you will be chased by many people for data. Naturally, you will always be in friction with most central HR team especially if you are physically separated from them i.e. manufacturing units or telecom circles where you will have a significant workload from your unit, and at the same time, central HR will be chasing you to conduct some events and send some data. How you manage these conflicts will what evolve you as a person. Let us briefly look at the major Pros and Cons.

Pros:

1)     It’s an exciting role, there will be a lot of firefighting, something will always be running, you will never be bored and learn a lot.

2)     It’s a great entry-level HR job, HRBP roles also make it easy to switch as your resume can open doors for all generalist roles and those CoE roles where you have worked a lot.

3)     You will be able to see the impact your work is creating, many times you will be able to bring a change very fast and get an appreciation for it.

4)     Also, it is good to know about the business in general, as your goals will be highly aligned with those of business and you will be interacting with business leaders a lot.

5)     You will evolve much more as a person as you will be dealing with many employees and their unique cases which are not fitting into what the policies are saying.

6)     You will have the chance to genuinely help someone in the company if you put in enough effort.

7)     It also gives you a great idea about different flavors of CoE fields and you may choose your specialization later.

8)     You will have the independence to design your own events and execute them, you will be able to see the results very fast.

9)     Some HRBPs are able to move to line functions completely like sales, production, etc.

10)  A CHRO is a generalist role, so technically you are a mini CHRO of a small unit on an execution level

Cons:

1)    Things can go out of control many times, workload may increase drastically if you are running separate agendas for line and central HR

2)    As you are the face, you will be facing a lot of heat. All the angry employees will barge into your office and shout at you for various problems

3)    You may not be able to help everyone due to strict policies and you will feel bad about it, sometimes employees will vent their anger on you. You will be answerable but not empowered i.e. you still need to break out bad news yet you can’t do anything to change that.

4)    Some tasks may not be sophisticated, you might need to do trivial work like managing pest control, housekeeping, or even toilet cleaning.

5)    Even in day to day office, you have to go through HR jokes and mockery daily. It gets overwhelming for many entry-level HRs to continuously get ridiculed by their peers.

6)    In general, HRBP role will have more workload and more stress than central HR roles

7)    Many HRBPs work 5.5 or 6 days a week basis where they are posted.

8)    You will be SPOC for many things, you might be executing some event or task on someone’s behalf, you will be doing all the work, sending the data, and eventually, someone else will take the credit by showing the data. Many times, conceptualization is appreciated more than execution.

9)    You have to follow up a lot. Follow up for interview schedule, interview feedback, goal setting, training requirements, engagement, and many other things, and that too with many stakeholders. Often, you will miss your targets as others are not cooperating and you will face the heat of it.

10) Most of your deliverables will be dependent on a lot of other factors apart from your own individual effort and thus you may feel helpless many times.

Specialist/Center of Excellence: These are generally central HR functions that are working on only a single HR field and mostly focusing on conceptualizing and executing on a central level or aiding the generalist in execution. Depending on the company’s size and how evolved HR function is, there can be multiple HR CoEs working in the central office. Some companies have a very lean HR structure and they club multiple CoE fields into one. The most common functions are :

a)    Compensation & Benefits: As the name suggests, they are the one deciding your salary and benefit part. The main tasks will be to benchmarking different company salaries, market trends, improving the non-monetary benefit parts, deciding the salary breakup structure in short all monetary and non-monetary benefits are governed by them.

b)    Performance Management System/Rewards: PMS revolves around the annual increment cycle i.e. the yearly salary increments, bonuses, PMS structure, PMS execution, rules, and guidelines etc. Some organizations merge PMS and Comp & Benefits as both deals with salaries.

c)     Talent Management: TM is a function that governs how the employees are to be unskilled, enriched or moved. They can have various cadre-based programs aiming at specific designations and conceptualize programs to judge their current potential and performance and decide their career path.

d)    Recruitment: Deals with workforce management and hiring. May have different functions like hiring, campus relations, onboarding, etc.

e)    Operations: Operation was a very strong field earlier due to a lot of physical record keeping. It deals with the internal data of employees in the organization and also manages various government compliances like PF, pension, insurance etc.

f)     Learning & Development: Deals with all kinds of learning programs like technical, functional, behavioral etc. They work closely with HRBPs in the execution of the training programs.

g)    Employee Engagement and wellbeing: It need not be a separate function in many organizations and sometimes it is linked with any of the above-mentioned functions. They deal with calculating the current engagement score and organizing various events and programs to increase the engagement level.

h)    Employee Relation/Industrial Relation: The role has a much prominent presence in manufacturing units that deal with contract laborers and blue color workers. They also take care of the long-term settlement with labor unions.

There can be some very niche roles also in some organizations like diversity, HR analytics, People Management, Happiness Department, HR for HR etc. but in most organizations, these are clubbed under some prominent CoE with only a few initiatives taking place every year.

Pros:

1)    If you are interested in only a part of the HR fields like L&D or TM, you can get into only that area and skill yourself to become a specialist.

2)    In many organizations, CoE has fewer tight deadlines and thus a relatively better work-life balance as they are preparing initiatives over a year.

3)    They are more aligned with the latest trends and technology like HR analytics or the use of AI/ML

4)    Since they sit in the central office, they have greater visibility with senior leaders and CHRO

5)    If an organization has multiple sites, they get to travel frequently to implement the programs

6)    They don’t have dual reporting so they don’t have conflict in work, they can focus on the task at hand.

7)    Most of these roles are based in the head office which is located in metros like Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and Hyderabad, unlike some generalist roles which may be far off from cities.

8)    The tasks are very sophisticated in nature.

9)    They don’t have to face the wrath of angry employees and line managers

10) They can focus more on creative work and conceptualize newer initiatives.

             Cons:

1)    You may struggle if you are put in a department you don’t like i.e. if you are interested in L&D but you are put into recruitment.

2)    If you don’t have much idea about what you want to do in HR, you will miss the different exposure you get in a generalist role and hence you will always be confused.

3)    Some HRs want to work in a front-facing role dealing with employees, they feel a specialist role is a backend job.

4)    You will be following up with generalist HR a lot, many CoE roles became limited to just pushing guidelines and then taking execution level data from HRBPs significantly weakening their learning.

5)    Lesser probability of job switching if you are looking from jumping from 1 CoE role to some other CoE role in another company. Many times, you have to wait for an internal transfer.

6)    Some CoE find their work highly repetitive and monotonous in nature and feel they are left behind in learning and skilling compared to their HRBP peers.

7)    It will be difficult to move to a line role like sales, production or analytics.

8)    You will often by accused by your HRBP peers that your work is just collecting data and making PPT in short you will face ridicule from HRs also.

9)    You will become a part of internal HR politics many times wrt promotions and transfers.

10) Some niche CoE roles might reduce your exit options in the long haul.

HR Consulting: This is an area with which I have not interacted closely with so I will limit my opinions here. My knowledge in this area is based on interaction with my peers and what they have told me about their stream. Consulting is a very polarized profession, those who love it really love it to core and enjoy the thrill it provides, those who hate it feel it is the most non-value-adding job over. In consulting, you are mainly hired by a client to consult them on a pain area. It may be to benchmark their comp structure and fix it, implementing a more robust and objective PMS, designing an L&D plan, basically, you will be working as a CoE for different companies.

Pros:

1)    You get to work with multiple clients on multiple projects thus increasing your scope of learning

2)    Many of them are traveling jobs thus you experience the working of many companies closely and can travel to different parts of the country even the world.

3)    During the early years, it is possible to switch to a good HR role with a good package.

4)    It’s a good option for those, who hate the traditional front-facing job of HR as mostly you will be interacting only with the client SPOC.

5)    You can become self-employed and start your own practice once you have established sufficient contacts

Cons:

1)    Many people feel they are missing the real-life action as they are just analyzing data and creating PPTs.

2)    HR consulting roles are generally paid a little lesser than general consulting roles.

3)    The more time you spent in this role, the tougher it becomes to move to core HR jobs.

4)    The growth and increment are also relatively slow than other core HR roles.

5)    The work hours can be very long and you might end up working on weekends also.

I hope I am able to cover the basics in this post. As I said, I have very limited years of experience, and people who are more experienced can add more valuable insights that can benefit all the readers. Looking forward to a constructive discussion with all of you. Thank you for reading.