With over a decade of experience in the recruitment industry, I personally feel that Human Resource candidates are the most interesting people I ever interacted with.
This article is written by Shirley Zhou - Team Leader, HR Practice. She has over 12 years of recruitment experience hiring HR talents for Industrial & Manufacturing, Retail & FMCG and Healthcare sectors.
3 Unique Perspectives of Human Resource Professionals
HR to Recruiters
To us recruiters, HR is our contact window. However, one HR could be too harsh and too nice at the same time leaving recruitment consultants confused and puzzled.
Many of times, we find it difficult to manage such changes. Gradually, we will judge HR as being too difficult to deal with, but it might not always be the case.
HR to Employees
To employees, HR department are the bearers of good news. It can include announcing policies. regarding merit increase, flexible benefits, etc. On the other hand, the HR department is also the one constantly keeping their eyes on your daily behaviors, your performance rating, etc.
Don’t you think the HR department is a little bit mysterious and scary?
HR to Company
To company, HR take on the role as a “Housekeeper”. An excellent HR team can help accelerate the business significantly through coordinating different departments to work together.
However, during organization restructuring, companies will have complaints on HR team. More often than not, they will always be the first department to suffer from these changes.
With different kinds of personality and character in the eyes of different stakeholders, how does a qualified HR candidate look like? How do we manage HR candidates if they are of different personalities? To be honest, I am still trying to get a clear picture on it but let me share some of my personal insights with you.
HR candidates are human beings.
Humans are the most complex living thing in the world as every one has our own character. Having different emotions and personalities is what makes everyone human. After all, HR has got to deal with different stakeholders at work and it’s really tough to wear different hats every day.
HR’s skills are mostly interpersonal and related to people communication.
As it is not very technical-driven, it can’t be easily assessed as qualified. Certifications can’t justify that as well. Hence, our recruiters’ instinct and experience will really play a huge role to assess the capabilities of HR candidates.
Having empathy and placing ourselves in HR’s position, will enable us to understand HR candidates better. From my interactions with HR candidates, they are really deserving of our respect as they are hardworking, ambitious and have good intentions to help companies and employees.
Last but not least, some of them are really cute and they could be your mentors and life-long friends. Hence, do treasure these HR candidates.
Shirley Zhou – Team Leader, HR Practice has over 12 years of recruitment experience hiring HR talents for Industrial & Manufacturing, Retail & FMCG and Healthcare sectors. She has a solid track record working with MNCs, local companies and start-up enterprises on HR function including HR generalist, TA, C&B and TMOD covering Manager to Director level positions in China market.
