What is Human Resource Management? Meaning, Objectives and Rewarding Career Opportunities

What is Human Resource Management? Meaning, Objectives and Rewarding Career Opportunities | Human Resource Management | Emeritus

As small businesses turned into enterprises or organizations employing a large number of people, the process of employment also became structured and standardized, which is referred to as human resource management or human capital management in the corporate world.

What is Human Resource Management?

Managing human resources is an integral function for any organization, and involves tasks such as recruitment, hiring, allocating and managing employees. Typically, the department that undertakes these and other employee-related tasks is known as the HR department. The HR department formulates work-related rules, and policies determine the salaries to be offered to each employee and pay them on time.

While in the earlier ages, the emphasis used to be on extracting maximum work out of employees, now human resource management has become an ethical and highly skilled professional. Though the primary goal of the HR department is to hire the personnel needed to run the organization and manage them well, they are also responsible for employee welfare, compliance with labour laws, remuneration and taxation etc. in the modern era. There are specific professional courses for HR roles that impart the necessary work-related, procedural, behavioural and technical knowledge to people entering the HR field.

The HR department in large companies handles a number of tasks such as:

  • Human resource planning
  • Carrying out job analysis
  • Recruitment process
  • Job interviews
  • Induction, and training of new recruits
  • Allocating work-related tools and resources to employees
  • Payroll management, appraisals
  • Career planning and Employee benefits management
  • Ensuring discipline and adherence to company policies
  • Employee work-life balance initiatives
  • Employee counselling and dispute resolution
  • Compliance with laws and regulations related to labour and taxation for employees etc
  • Ensuring workplace safety and fair play

The Importance of Human Resource Management

Human resource professionals are the people that bind the organization together and ensure that work continues smoothly, and everyone is aligned with the organization’s goals and values. Strategic human resource management can yield great results for companies. If we look around, the best-performing businesses all over the world are also usually those that keep the employees happy and engaged. Therefore, to effectively carry out their responsibilities, and hire as well as manage personnel in a way that business growth is ensured, the HR personnel need to be well qualified and should have attended human resource management courses offered by universities, as well as various other educational institutions.

It is often said that a company is worth what its employees are. That’s why HRM is considered to be as crucial for a business’s success as technology, sales and marketing or operations departments are. HR managers need to hire and manage the workforce while offering adequate compensation, appraisal and growth opportunities to ensure that talent attrition is minimized.

How Does HRM Work?

The human resource department functions through dedicated and adequately qualified HR professionals who undergo human resource management courses before joining an organization. While in smaller companies, there could be one or a few HR personnel, in large enterprises, it is a full-fledged department with its own hierarchy and Chief Peoples Officer or HR Director etc.

Similarly, for startups and SMEs, HR generalists would be there to manage everything from recruitment to payroll management, appraisals and formulation of company policies. Whereas, in large enterprises with hundreds or thousands of employees to deal with, there would be specialists with each person dedicatedly handling a given role. For instance, there would be different people managing recruitment, payroll, employee benefits, taxation, compliance, training, technology, employee safety, wellness, compliance and so on.

The segregation is done to ensure that adequate personnel are deployed to take care of every need. However, despite the different positions and KRAs, the roles of HR personnel tend to overlap at times and are all geared toward ensuring the seamless functioning of business processes.

Objectives of Human Resource Management

There are four key categories in which we can distinctly place the HRM roles:

Social Objectives

We live in a dynamic world, and the ethical and social obligations of companies undergo changes with the change in the social environment. This is where each company has to put in place measures that address the social needs of the employees, and the organization. These also include legal obligations such as offering equal opportunities or equal pay for the same work.

Organization’s Objectives

There are various tasks performed by HR to enhance organizational efficiency. Hiring people, training them, providing refresher training and employee retention fall under this category.

Business Objectives

Allocating the right human resources, tools and technologies, space, materials, and financial budgets to different verticals with an aim to ensure that the business is able to run to its full potential, come under this category.

Personal Objectives

Employees have their own personal goals to achieve while they work for any organization. Offering them the right opportunities, career development or skill enhancement support, and ensuring employee satisfaction through various employee-centric programs is a part of the personal objectives that HRM has to take care of. Precisely, the HRM objectives are:

  • Enabling the achievement of organizational goals by hiring, deploying and managing quality talent
  • Optimum usage of each employee’s skills and abilities
  • Imparting proper training to all employees as per their job profiles
  • Building and ensuring that there is a positive employee experience through job satisfaction and work-life balance, that motivates the employees to put in their best efforts
  • Timely and effective communication of company policies, procedures, rules and regulations to all the employees
  • Ensuring implementation and adherence of ethical, legal, and socially responsible work practices and company culture
  • Effective change management to deal with any external factors that might affect employees or the continuation of the business. For instance, the COVD-19 outbreak

Rewarding Career Opportunities in HRM

As business activities grow, and organizations all over the world focus on employing more people with diverse skills, the need to fill different HRM roles is also growing rapidly. There are numerous HR job profiles ranging from top leadership to entry-level, that offer employment opportunities for individuals who have done professional human resource management courses. These include the following.

Chief Human Resource Officer (sometimes designated as Chief Human Capital Officer or Chief Peoples’ Officer in modern organizations) – CHRO is at the very top of the ladder in an organization’s HR department and is responsible for strategic human resource management, formulation of policies, succession planning, talent management, change management, reviewing organizational performance, company culture, and also hiring and compensation of top-level leadership and board members etc.

Director Human Resources – As a part of the top management, the Director would be responsible for all HR department activities and policies. Employee compensation, hiring strategies, benefits, employee engagement, health, and safety measures, and establishing training and development facilities for the employees are all a part of the HR Director’s purview.

While the above two are leadership roles and generally filled only with highly experienced HR professionals who have qualifications as well as a proven track records in the corporate world, there are various mid to entry-level positions as well. These include:

Hiring Manager/Recruiter – The hiring manager’s role is to find the right talent and fill the available vacancies by hiring the right candidates. Modern recruiters are well-trained and technically proficient people themselves. They would be people who have completed a good HR management course and have some experience in the field.

Trainers – Trainers are people who take care of imparting the necessary soft skills and job-related skills and knowledge, and empowering new hires to perform their roles correctly and efficiently.

Payroll Managers – They are responsible for calculating and paying salaries, other deductions such as taxes, and provident fund, and also paying other benefits and incentives to all the employees.

HR Generalists – The role of an HR Generalist is to provide guidance, support, and help in the implementation of the organization’s policies, take care of the documentation, compile and analyse data, employee engagement and general query resolution of the employees as well as to be the communication coordinator between the management and the workforce.

HR Analysts – This profile requires excellent skills and is available in large companies where a lot of HR challenges and tasks need to be carried out. HR analysts evaluate a company’s processes, identify challenge areas, find the causes, and use data-driven insights to help the management in overcoming those challenges. An HR analyst has to be highly qualified and well-versed in strategic human resource management practices, and an expert in HR metrics and analysis of the same.

Courses for HR Professionals

In the era of digital education, the importance of continuing education and skill development for employed professionals as well as young entrants to the corporate world has led to easy access to HR courses online. There are world-class courses for HR roles from the top leadership to the lower management. From the basic to advanced HR and Leadership & Management courses, Emeritus offers all learning options online.

Founded in 2015, Emeritus is an internationally acclaimed career learning and development brand. We are committed to teaching the most advanced and futuristic HR skills to individuals, companies and governments all over the world. There are advanced HR management courses, short-term courses, long-duration human resources courses, certificate programmes, boot camps and senior executive programs to acquire new skills and transform their lives, companies and organizations.

Emeritus India offers a unique model of teaching through an innovative curriculum, state-of-the-art technology, and hands-on instruction from senior faculty, mentors, and coaches. These unique and highly impactful courses benefit over 250,000 students across 55+ countries, each year.

The learning opportunities that we offer range from an introduction to human resource management to advanced HRM courses for leaders. Enrol for the best human resource course online to advance your career growth as an HR professional.

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