Why is HR needed? Who is this and what are the roles?
In this article I want to share my vision of what roles there are now in HR, why people from the company’s side behave differently during interviews, and what other tasks they have. In short, let’s talk about what this “third wheel” is for and what else he does.
Who is HR
Let's start from afar. HR is a very general concept, it is “human resource management”. And this is not just paperwork…
When grandmothers on a bench near my house ask: “Baby, what do you do?”
I first answer: “HR”
They: “By whom?”
Me (hand-face): “Personnel officer”
They: “Oh, I see…”
Since the time when everyone involved in human resources could be dubbed “personnel officer,” the economy has changed. Yes, in the work book everyone indiscriminately writes “employee specialist” or “personnel specialist”. But in human resource management many different functions have appeared. Colleagues realize themselves through work and you can help them with this, guide their self-development, motivate them and monitor their professional development. Plus IT has its own specifics. As a result, processes are fragmented, many different roles are distinguished, but even the HR market itself is confused, not to mention an outside observer.
Globally, I would highlight two areas:
Personnel officers are engaged in registration of hired employees – personnel records management (orders for admission, transfer and dismissal, sick leave, vacations, maternity leave, military registration, etc.). From company to company, the tasks are approximately the same – follow the letter of the law. Only the internal routine is different. For example, the circle of people who coordinate vacations and the number of circles of these approvals.
HR functions are more about people. His areas of focus are communication, motivation, adaptation, engagement and retention. But since there are no uniform standards here and each company sets priorities in its own way, in fact, HRs everywhere are engaged in very different tasks.
Next I will talk about HR, leaving those involved in office work outside the scope of the discussion. Their function is clear.
Hiring
The basic function of HR is the search and registration of employees. When a business grows, teams need to be expanded. A crisis can bring down any other functions – training, development, team building and corporate events, but not hiring. Even if the company is not expanding, there may always be a need to replace an existing person who has decided to leave.
In hiring, functions are most actively divided between people. And the larger the company, the stronger the fragmentation. Large businesses assign separate roles to:
Searching for a candidate – this is what researchers do. They are looking for contacts of IT specialists for the project.
First contact with the candidate. At this stage, sourcers are involved, who evaluate all resumes found and contact those who meet the requirements.
The candidate for soft skills is interviewed by one of the recruiters.
The candidate is also transferred to a technical interview by a recruiter, but not necessarily the same one as in the previous paragraph.
Returning from a technical interview – similarly, another recruiter can handle this.
Communication between the technical interview and the offer – in addition to the recruiter, one of the management levels can also be involved here.
Sending an offer.
For many years I myself have been asking myself why the process has become so fragmented in IT. Perhaps the reason for this is the strict requirements for candidates. And their flow is huge. Because hiring fuels business, every company is looking for ways to get as many relevant people into their hiring funnel as possible and “process” that volume of information as quickly (and cheaply) as possible. Everyone is experimenting with processes. Some of the stages are not even visible to the candidate, but these experiments reach him too. Previously there was one interview stage, but now there can be three or more, and this changes the selection system.
Even we (although the company is relatively small) have separately:
researchers
sourcers who only search for candidates;
recruiters to whom sourcers bring ready-made contacts. They guide a person through the stages of interviews, assessing his soft skills, and ultimately lead him to communicate with technical specialists. They are present at these interviews to help organize everything, take another look at soft skills, and at the same time better understand who exactly the team is looking for;
people who conduct further communication with candidates after they have passed the technical interview. It would seem that if the candidate has approached, why hesitate? But preparing an offer and checking the security system takes some time. But the market is competitive and the candidate is probably being interviewed not only with us. Therefore, the main task during this period is to be in the shortest possible connection with the candidate, to bring him to the end of the funnel and the coveted offer. In our company, this task is solved by a recruiter, and sometimes by one of the future managers.
And this is the current state of the process. It is not a fact that tomorrow it will not change and some role will not disappear or a new one will appear.
During interviews, an IT professional has to deal with people of various roles. Perhaps some of these characters in individual companies really stupidly follow the prescribed process and contribute nothing of their own. Roughly speaking, if in company N the process implies that you must simply get approval from HR to access a technical interview, he works like a therapist in a city clinic – “gives a referral.” Extra body movement. Perhaps this is a mistake in business processes or the remnant of some failed experiment. Or the position of HR in the company was taken by a person who does not understand what this role is and why the business needs it, but wants to feel his importance by turning the processes over to himself. If N is growing rapidly at this moment, the manager simply does not physically have time to track and control what is happening at each stage.
From the point of view of resource management tasks, this should not be the case. The process is not being divided in order to introduce unnecessary authorities. There are also few good recruiters, as well as IT specialists who are ready to interview. And practice shows that out of 100 candidates, about 20-30 respond, and about 5-10 are ready to talk with a recruiter, and about one or two candidates for the Senior position will perform well in a technical interview. A huge amount of “cold” communication is a routine that is easier to transfer to researchers and sourcers, leaving only the most relevant candidates for the recruiter and especially the interviewing IT specialist.
The smaller the company, the less fragmented the functions. Unfortunately, this does not mean that when interviewing for a small company, you will never come across someone who simply “gives direction.” Everyone experiments with processes, especially since a small company has to compete for personnel with a large company. Everyone can make mistakes. However, here you have a better chance of meeting a universal specialist with an adaptive approach.
All the rest
We are constantly faced with that part of human resource management that concerns hiring and document flow. But the rest of HR’s work is invisible and very dependent on the practices in a particular company. This part is easier to show with examples.
Let's say a colleague comes and says he wants to update his hardware. His expectation is that now they will tell him “OK” and he can buy. It would seem, what does HR have to do with it? But an “ok” from your immediate supervisor is just the tip of the iceberg. In practice, this is also a business process with its own stages – HR estimates the required budget (and allocated in principle for this program – it is unlikely that business plans include updating all equipment every year), goes with this data to the manager and coordinates everything, based on needs – there is no other way. And outwardly everything looks as if HR was not there.
It's a similar story with conferences. Colleagues simply post a link to an upcoming event that they want to attend, and HR Googles the cost of tickets from the employees’ city of residence, the price of visiting the event itself, the hotel for the duration of the event – assesses how much this is consistent with the allocated budget, and goes to coordinate with the budget manager.
HR people are more involved in communication with the team. They go to internal events to understand who is interested in what and is motivated, whether there are any difficulties in communication, etc. Invisibly, HR participates even in one-on-one meetings between an employee and a manager, because it is he who must remind several times in advance that such a meeting should take place, set a time, prepare feedback about the employee (or ask colleagues – the same manager – to collect the necessary data). He cannot conduct the meeting himself, since he is not so immersed in the technical details of the work, but he can easily do all the preparatory work so that the manager can communicate with 10+ team members and not drown in logistics.
All this work is not visible. And, to be honest, if it were visible, the processes in the company were a nightmare – 10 formal approvals for taking a vacation instead of a regular email and hellish bureaucracy if suddenly, for personal reasons, you need to take a vacation earlier than six months after employment.
“Engagement,” “adaptation,” and “training” sound like words about nothing in an IT environment. But these are the same invisible processes that work in the background and require significant labor costs. For example, we are now paying for tuition. But the question is not simply to call the speaker to tell something. The goal is to make learning useful. That's why we conduct surveys, ask one-on-one questions, experiment with different formats of events, and collect feedback afterwards. And all this is measured and controlled by HR analytics. And it is HR that collects data, and management decisions are made based on it.
As with recruiting, this area can have its own distinct roles from HR. For example, my classmates are now working in a large company in the financial motivation department. They work out and analyze KPIs for all employees. To a greater extent, these are analysts and financiers. Companies of this size have event managers for organizing events, separate teams that manage vacancies only in the IT sector or only in manufacturing, and even corporate universities with their own organizational structure, which are also full of dedicated roles.
It is curious that the boundaries of areas of responsibility between specialists within HR are very arbitrary. Each company (of those that distinguishes these roles) puts its own set of responsibilities into the titles. Therefore, it is impossible, roughly speaking, to become a narrow specialist in financial motivation and not have an idea of what other areas of human resource management look like.
It is clear that in a small company there will not be any departments dedicated to activities in honor of professional holidays. There simply cannot be pure functions here. But these issues will also be resolved by someone – most likely HR together with the immediate supervisor. And in very small companies, HR is more like an HR generalist who takes on approximately all functions. True, we have to admit that each of them turns out to be less developed – the resources of one person are not infinite.
In general, working with people is an unpredictable thing. And HR, be it one person or an entire department, stands between a business that needs numbers and more or less relevant forecasts, and a team where there are a lot of different accidents, including external ones. Nobody expected the events of 2020 and 2022. These are external circumstances that an individual HR could not predict. But they affected people, their daily routines and plans for the future, and made HR people tear their hair out.
The global task of HR is to listen, see sentiments, understand trends, help existing processes, and analyze possible problems. Participation in the processes gives hope that tomorrow there will be no sudden changes in the team – none of the key employees will quit one day. This means the business risks are slightly lower. This risk management looks like HR being involved in creating the atmosphere and creating the company culture. This is partly true (in fact, it’s just a fancy name for managing personnel risks). True, this cannot be spelled out in detail in any job description.
Personal impression
The division of functions and specialization is quite interesting. But personally, I prefer small companies where there are no regulations for every small action. But there is maximum flexibility, which correlates very well with the general task – to keep it all afloat so that I cannot be seen or heard.
Yes, sometimes I lack objective data. When you have less than fifty employees and less than half of them participated in the survey for various reasons, you cannot use analytical tools. But on the other hand, I know the team better in person and communicate more closely with each colleague. I like that due to the flexibility of the company, we can help them make their lives more comfortable.
Author: Marina Velikikh, Maxilect.
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