In the era of hunting for the best tech professionals in the market and retaining them long term, businesses are in dire need of an HR partner. Human Resources, also known as HR Operations, or HR Ops, helps companies follow their strategy and make businesses more effective by managing and engaging top specialists.

Playing an intermediary role in the relations between business and professionals, HR serves a company’s mission, but meets the needs of the new hires and already retained specialists who transform even the most audacious business ideas into reality. The annual revenue in HR Tech industry is predicted to grow from the estimated $62.6 billion in 2022 to $91.8 billion in 2026. This tendency clearly shows the need companies have for HR Operations roles and responsibilities, as well as their functions.

HR Operations’ Functions and Duties

Human Resources Operations is often mistakenly associated with the supporting department for the business’ needs. However, it plays a much more important role, taking part in a company’s growth and competitiveness. By building the core team of professionals who make a company work, HR directly influences its success and development.

Here are a number of core responsibilities of HR Operations, which are not exhaustive and can deviate from business to business.

Talent Acquisition and Recruitment

The journey to find the most experienced developers in the market starts with understanding the business strategy. Only after the analysis of a company’s goals is done, HR Operations moves to tech recruitment and staffing services. The main steps include finding suitable candidates, initiating background checks, screening candidate’s resumes, setting up interviews, and managing the recruiting process.

Depending on the urgency of filling in the position and the qualification of a potential candidate, recruitment can change its duration and the number of steps. For example, while some companies prefer to scrutinize the candidates’ technical skills and prolong the interview to five and more steps (which is not always a good idea), others confine to one to three interviews. That’s why it is especially important to have clear communication and cooperation between Human Resources and the business.

If a company prefers moving HR functions from internal processes to outstaffing model, this stage remains more or less similar. Outstaffing vs. in-house recruitment processes put people in the heart of their activity, focusing on the modern practices to find and retain the top talents.

Training and Onboarding

This function receives more and more focus recently. Some companies still omit onboarding services, concentrating rather on talent hunting and acquisition. But the data show that this is one of the key factors in talents retention, as the companies with well established onboarding manage to retain 58% of their team members in the next three years. Good onboarding programs help new hires integrate quicker into a company’s working process and even perform better during their first milestones.

Training and onboarding not only include legal paperwork, such as signing contracts or filling in personal details. Their key role is to introduce new specialists to the business, their new roles and a company’s expectations. HR functions include preparing the working environment for a new hire so that they feel motivated, involved, and appreciated.

Compensation and Benefits

This administrative task is fully covered by HR Ops roles and responsibilities. Compensation is one of the main contributors to a professional’s well-being, which explains the importance of setting it up correctly and timely. In addition to managing payrolls and bonuses, HR Ops takes care of health insurance plans, calculation of hour rates and sick leaves, and other benefits administration.

The process not only entails administrative tasks, such as tax and benefits calculations, payrolls processing, but also the strategic and analytical tasks. HR takes part in compensation strategy, analyzes the market for the similar positions and the competitiveness with other businesses in the industry. It also establishes satisfaction surveys and regular check-ins among specialists to ensure a company remains an attractive employer. Human Resources can also advise clients on bonuses and benefit programs that are highly spread in the market.

Legal Compliance and Safety

Whether a company’s operations are limited by one country or multiple legal entities, Human Resources Operations always ensures the work follows all legal requirements. Keeping records and documentations is not its only duty. HR makes sure a company’s activity abides by local and international laws. The examples include, but are not limited to, hiring specialists of other nationalities or from different countries, monitoring employment laws (e.g. working hours per week, national holidays), taking part in resolving legal disputes on the claim of specialists, involvement in employee relations.

Retention Policy

With the high volatility of the market, finding suitable candidates is one of HR’s main tasks. But it’s even more important to make people stay, offering decent working conditions and focusing on retention techniques.

According to recent surveys, business’ focus on employee retention is one of the top priorities in 2023, which headlines the list, followed by recruitment process and company culture. Retaining not only allows professionals to stay at their job positions for longer time, but also saves a company’s costs and reputation.

One of the main focuses of HR Operations is monitoring the people’s engagement and satisfaction, and providing talent management services. By organizing surveys or gathering feedbacks, HR can see the gaps and find areas for improvement. One of the effective methods is milestone talks, which has a great influence on specialists’ lifecycle in the company. It serves as a bridge between specialists and the business, ensuring professionals’ concerns and desires are addressed.

What Makes Human Resources Operations Successful?

Taking into account all HR Operations’ roles and responsibilities, it’s not surprising that successful and developing companies invest in HR and operations, which will benefit the business in the long run. According to the recent study by Accenture, 89% of CEOs who participated in the survey admitted the importance of assigning HR the central role in the whole business process. However, companies still have a lot to do to create favorable conditions for HR’s smooth functioning.

There is always a fine line between roles and responsibilities of HR and its real possibilities supported by business. To become a real driver of the business’ growth and development, Human Resources needs to work hand-in-hand with the company’s strategy and receive a green light from a company’s executives.

Strategic Alignment

HR best practices cannot be isolated from a company’s mission and vision. The successful outcome of the HR’s activities directly depends on its alignment with the business strategy. Business strategy and talent strategy are interdependent, and understanding a company’s direction and lowlights in the process put the HR in the forefront of innovation and a company’s growth. When Talent Acquisition department sets goals in accordance with the business strategy, it increases the chances to find suitable candidates, manage specialists’ expectations, and follow the current trends.

HR also takes a role of a strategic partner. By understanding a company’s requirements, it can help identify the needed skills, implementing programs to develop and acquire them. Such approach increases a company’s competitiveness and resilience in the fluctuated market.

Well-Defined HR Operations’ Roles

Even if a company is small, assigning all HR tasks to one person might be very risky. Due to the complexity of HR duties, the whole process should be divided into separate segments, each of which would be led by a responsible HR specialist.

Not only is it important to clearly define who does what, but also to set boundaries of HR Operations’ roles. Each specialist brings value to an overall workplace culture, while understanding the own roles improves a company’s final performance. When the roles are defined correctly, the specialists can focus on successful implementation of their duties, bringing value to the business, and quickly closing the existing gaps.

Timely Administration and Management

Timely administration of the ongoing tasks is important both for the business and for the future tech specialists. When the HR proactively reacts to the business’ needs, they quicker find missing professionals and fill the vacant positions right on time. At the same time, timely administration of payrolls, legal requirements, and benefits programs directly influence the overall satisfaction of specialists and their retention.

If the process is not aligned and delays happen all the time, there is a high risk the tech specialists will turn to the companies with more stable workflows and predictable processes. Payroll administration and benefits programs are particularly sensitive areas.

Technological Advancement

To remain efficient and bring value to the business, HR cannot omit adoption of new technologies. The market evolves and the new trends speed up, which in turn dictate the need to adapt if a company wants to remain competitive and generate growth.

Some of the examples of HR becoming tech-savvy include using big data for recruiting, adopting AI features to create talent pipelines, automating candidates’ screening, managing payrolls, building reports on the overall performance, and implementing tools for learning management. 80% of businesses report to use software for HR. Massive investments in the adoption of technologies and automation of the processes predict HR software industry to grow by 600 million U.S. dollars in 2023. An ideal combination of human experience and technology capabilities leads to brilliant results and contributes to HR’s strong performance management.

If you’re looking for the top tech specialists in the market, get help of Outstaff Your Team professionals. The experts in the industry will help you find the best solutions for your new project.

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by Maria Shepeta
on December 7, 2023. Share on LinkedIn Post on Twitter

Maria is a writer with 7 years of experience in wide-ranging areas. Passionate about tech and innovation, she enjoys diving deep into the research before mastering the art of the word. In her articles, she combines the best practices with the extensive knowledge to bring to the surface what really matters.