Is your small business starting to grow at a pretty rapid pace? If it is, you’re going to need to begin bringing more employees on board to help you out.
When you do, you’ll also want to hire an HR manager to oversee everything from your hiring process to your employees’ benefits packages. With more than 150,000 HR managers currently working throughout the country, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to track some candidates down.
But when you’re choosing HR managers to work for your small business, you should be picky about who you ultimately decide to go with. You can avoid many of the most common HR issues by hiring the best possible candidate that you can find.
With so many options for HR managers out there, this might not always be easy. But you can get the job done by making some key considerations.
Here are the important things that you should consider when choosing HR managers.
Experience
If your business is still on the smaller side, you might think that you can get away with hiring someone who is still relatively new to the HR field to work for you. But you’re going to be making a big mistake if you do this.
You should always set out to hire one of the most experienced candidates you can find when choosing HR managers. They should have a wealth of HR management experience so that you don’t have to worry about them learning the ropes on your watch.
Read Also: 5 Tips for Streamlining the Employee Onboarding Process
You shouldn’t be shy about skimming through the resumes that different HR manager candidates send in. If they don’t seem to have enough experience, you should knock them out of contention and focus on the candidates who have been working in the HR field for quite some time now.
Education
In addition to taking a look at how much experience that HR manager candidates have, you should also hone in on the education section of their resumes. You want to hire an HR manager that has earned an HR degree in the past.
There are, of course, some excellent HR managers out there who don’t have their degrees in HR. You can also work in the HR field with something like a communications degree.
But generally speaking, you’re going to want to choose an HR manager that has been trained to perform the various HR tasks that you’ll need them to do. This will, again, ensure that you don’t end up with an HR manager that has to learn different aspects of the HR world while working for your small business.
Skills
In order to be an effective HR manager, a person needs to have certain skills. If they don’t have these skills, there is a decent chance that they’re not going to last for very long as the head of an HR department.
So, which skills should HR managers have? Some of them include:
- They need to be sympathetic to the needs of other people
- They need to be able to make quick decisions on the fly
- They need to be capable of communicating clearly with others
- They need to be formal when serious situations arise
- They need to be able to lead very large groups of people
When you’re choosing HR managers for your small business, you should interview as many good candidates as you can and ask them to list the skills that they think make them a good HR manager. If you don’t hear all of these skills come up at some point, they’re not going to be the right option for you.
You should also come up with theoretical situations for your HR manager candidates and find out how they would respond to them. This will tell you a lot about how they would use some of the skills we just mentioned while on the job.
References
At the bottom of an HR manager’s resume, they should include some references to companies they’ve worked with in the past. You should be quick to call up at least one or two of these references to see what they have to say about a person.
Those in the HR field are typically great about selling themselves during interviews. They’ll make themselves sound like the best people for the jobs that they’re applying for thanks to all of their HR training.
But you can really get to the bottom of what an HR manager is going to bring to the table by speaking with those they’ve worked with in the past. You ideally want to get glowing reviews back from their past employers so that you feel confident in the idea of hiring them to work for you.
You might also be able to go through the process of reading online reviews for different HR managers. Websites like LinkedIn can provide you with reviews that people have left for HR managers over time.
Accomplishments
HR managers tend to have huge impacts on the companies that they work for. They play a big part in lots of different things that companies do, and as a result, they’re often able to accomplish a lot while they’re on the job.
With this in mind, you should have HR managers who have applied to work for your small business rattle off some of their biggest and best accomplishments for you. In a perfect world, you want to hear about how they:
- Revamped the benefits packages at their last company to save both their company and the company’s employees money
- Created sexual harassment training courses at their last company
- Got their last company more involved in making a difference in terms of certain social causes
The more that an HR manager was able to accomplish at their last job, the better you’ll feel about hiring them to work for you. You’ll know that you’re getting access to a go-getter that’s going to do everything in their power to create a great culture within your company.
Salary
Before choosing HR managers to work for your small business, you should be aware of the fact that most HR managers make very good money. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage of an HR manager is almost $125,000.
Because of this, you’re going to need to be ready to spend a pretty penny to hire an HR manager. But you might be able to make this more manageable by comparing manager costs and hiring the manager that is willing to work for the most cost-effective salary.
That is not to say that you should simply hire someone without much HR management experience to work for you because of their low salary demands. But it is to say that you might not be able to hire a grizzled HR veteran who has been working in the field for 30 years now thanks to their high salary demands.
You should go into your search for an HR manager with an ideal salary range in mind. You should then set out to find someone who is going to be able to do a fantastic job while bringing home a salary that fits well within your budget.
Technology
The HR industry as a whole has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade or so due in large part to all of the technology that has popped up in it. There is lots of HR software available today that HR managers need to know how to use.
While you’re choosing HR managers, you should ask candidates how comfortable they feel using technology as part of their jobs. You should also ask them to break down some of the ways in which they’ve used technology to their benefit while working in HR in the past.
