Human Resources For Beginners

Clarify the concept of strategy as an organization's long-term direction, aligning resources to a changing environment for market, customers, stakeholders, and competitive advantage, with implications for HR.

The HR strategy aligns human resource management with the business strategy, defines strategic objectives and action plans, and ensures coherence and integration with stakeholders across the organization.

Develop an overarching human resources strategy and targeted sub-strategies for talent resourcing, management, training, rewards, and employee relations to attract, retain, develop, and engage people.

Frame organizational structure as a framework for getting things done and align it with the organization’s strategy, including the information technology strategy, to direct activities toward missions and goals.

Identify the employee life cycle as a core HR model and explore the stages from hiring to exit, highlighting the HR activities organizations must track.

Explore the employee life cycle from recruitment to exit, covering onboarding, induction, development, performance management, training, and learning and development to close competency gaps.

Explore how organizations retain employees through engagement, total rewards, and career development. Learn onboarding, offboarding, voluntary and involuntary exits, exit interviews, and how the cycle restarts.

Explore how technology guides the employee life cycle from recruitment to offboarding. Utilize talent acquisition and onboarding software for recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and offboarding.

Transforming HR through technology streamlines processes and reduces administrative burden by automating routine tasks, enabling real-time data access and attracting and retaining global talent.

Explore how human resource management uses a strategic approach to managing people by establishing formal policies and procedures that enable competitive advantage.

Define the difference between HR policies and procedures, showing policies as guiding principles that set expectations and direction, and procedures as the step-by-step methods to follow them.

Understand how human resource policies and procedures align with corporate values and strategy, ensure consistent human resource decisions, and minimize inequality in employee treatment.

Formulate HR policies and procedures to ensure consistency, avoid favoritism, and align with corporate values across the entire employee life cycle—from hiring to development and exit.

Explore recruitment and selection policy, including internal or external recruitment and application and assessment procedures, and examine learning and development, reward, and performance management policies governing training, compensation, and recognition.

Discover the common sections of an employee handbook, including company history, mission, code of ethics and conduct, and how HR policies guide expectations from hiring to exit.

Review your HR policies and procedures to outline essential topics and create a concise employee handbook that aligns with employment laws and presents summarized versions for easy employee reading.

Review HR policies, procedures, and processes to identify improvement areas and ensure compliance while aligning HR programs with organizational performance.

Explore focus areas of an HR audit: compliance audits and best practice reviews, plus function specific checks of personnel records, payroll, skills, and performance, with audit trails in HR software.

Determine the audit focus and stakeholders, decide internal or external auditors, gather payroll and records data, review for policy and compliance gaps, and align timing with maturity.

Discover how an HR budget allocates funds for all HR activities within a financial year, and compare incremental HR budget with zero-based budgeting.

The HR budget covers talent acquisition, recruitment costs per hire, learning and development, compensation and benefits, and potential severance during rightsizing, plus diversity and inclusion, engagement, and safety.

Discover how employee satisfaction surveys capture employees' views, attitudes, and perceptions to reveal the pulse of the organization, its benefits, and the employee satisfaction index.