Who is the HR Manager: role and responsibilities

The Human Resources Manager (HR Manager) has a very important role in ensuring the functioning of an organisation and the management of its resources.

Until a few years ago, the role of HR Manager was purely administrative, focusing mainly on activities such as managing salary payments, defining company benefits and bonuses, and managing the basic relationships between the organisation and its resources. Nowadays, the role has evolved into a much broader job with cross-cutting and more structured activities.

Specifically, the duties of a Human Resources Manager are:

Managing communication between company and employees

This not only involves keeping track of the relationships and communication between the two parties, but also dealing with grievances, being a point of reference for all employees and therefore providing support in times of need.

Besides this, there is the administration of all processes related to disciplinary actions, both at the bureaucratic level as through mentoring or counselling, in order to improve or terminate the employment relationship. This also includes functioning as a mediator between the company and trade union demands, which is a fundamental task of an HR Manager.

Selection and recruitment

The HR Manager oversees the entire recruitment process. This includes:

• Proactively searching for talent
• Managing relationships with external agencies in charge of searching for possible candidates
• Selecting profiles in line with the position
• Organizing interviews
• Hiring process: in addition to carrying out bureaucratic operations, it also requires the development of the right strategy for placement of the resource and the management of mentoring processes.

Resource management

A Human Resources Manager has to ensure that all resources are deployed as efficiently and effectively as possible: the HR Manager is therefore also involved in the planning and management of promotions, role changes, departmental moves and any other movement of resources. The HR Manager plans and manages promotions, role changes, departmental moves and any other resource changes. He/she is also in charge of defining training needs and courses, and deciding which resources to involve.

Financial management and payrolling

Although this role has undergone major changes in recent years, the financial management aspect still remains very important requiring the Human Resources Manager to:

• Establishing the gross annual salary of new hires
• Establishing benefits and bonuses
• Managing the payroll and benefits
• Managing absences
• Monitoring contract renewals and expiry dates
• Supporting budget planning
• Taking care of the financial aspects of HR operations (e.g. reducing expenses, managing travel costs, …)

Promoting the corporate culture

The Human Resources Manager has to be a reference point for the company’s employees by ensuring that the company culture becomes a strength and not an obstacle for the organisation. To do this, an HR Manager must be able to gain the trust of company resources by cultivating stable, professional relationships.

Among the activities necessary to strengthen the corporate culture are corporate events: the HR Manager should be responsible for the supervision and overall organisation of any type of company event, whether purely recreational, training- or education-oriented.

Strategic support

The Human Resources Manager should be supportive of both the company and the employees. Having a clear and complete picture of both financial and personnel management aspects, the HR Manager assists the governing bodies in defining company objectives so that realistic and achievable targets can be set.

If you are a Human Resources Manager and you want to get the most out of your team, discover our corporate training offer, or write to us for a consultation!