Introduction
Competencies are basic qualifications necessary to achieve human resources goals. In the human resources field, actual knowledge of human resources processes is the only discipline-specific competency.
Businesses consider necessary HR competencies as communication skills, negotiation skills, qualified recruitment, and strategic improvement of the perception of human capital value, human resources knowledge, effective training, ethical business practices and integrity. Communication skills – written and verbal – are basic competencies all human resources staff must have. Communication is fundamental to serving the needs of internal customers as well as external customers.
Within the context of HR, internal customers are current employees and external customers are applicants, job seekers, former employees and human resource services providers such as outsourcing agents.
Literature Review
Core competencies of a human resource manager are the attributes essential to success in this position. Human resource managers who hold certain core competencies have a competitive edge over those that don’t and give the business they work for a competitive advantage in their industry.
- Negotiation Skills: Effective human resource managers have communication and relationship skills that allow them to negotiate win-win situations for the company and the employees they hire. Whether large or small, each business has certain constraints on its budget for salary, benefits and placement for employees. Workers too, have certain needs and minimums that must be met.
- Qualified Recruitment: In human resources, qualifying is the process of narrowing down potential applicants to the prospects that can best fill all open and future job opportunities.
- Effective Training: The human resources department is often responsible for creating the training programs that help employees fulfill their daily job functions, advance to other positions within the company or respond well to company changes and industry shifts.
Human Resources core competencies:
- Understand the business: HR people need to deeply understand the market their organization operates in. They have to intimately know their products and services, their cost structure and the Campbell 4 customers and their needs. On top of these data, it helps, if they know their customers from first-hand experience.
- Assessment skills: This is the core competence of successful HR managers. Still today, many hiring experts have not had a formal training in this field.
- Talent Management: HR professionals have to be able to answer as they manage the talent in their organization. The most successful learning experience is provided when potentials are given an opportunity to manage an important project, take on a leadership role or are involved in a turn-around situation.
- Influencing: HR professionals will not be able to contribute, if they are ineffective influencers. Most of them, however, have never learned how to influence others.
- Emotional Intelligence: the five competencies are: self-reflection – knowing ourselves, self-regulation – controlling ourselves, motivation – being responsible for ourselves, empathy – relating to others, social skills – building relationships with people on different levels.
Competencies
The Core of Human Resource Management Competencies in various forms have been in existence from the early 1960s and are at the moment enjoying a rediscovery. In and of themselves they are quite a simple concept.
A competency is the knowledge, skills and abilities required to be successful in a job. Unfortunately, despite this relatively simple definition and obvious requirement for job success, the application of these ideas to all aspects of the management of people is difficult to grasp by both line trained managers and human resource personnel. Competencies are related to the job, not the person. It is the requirements for the job they must be determined first. It is important to also note that while we speak of a job this is for the convenience of writing and not implementation.
By this I mean that the definition applies to a group of jobs or a whole range of jobs. For example, airline pilots regardless of what aircraft they fly or what airline they fly for have similar job related knowledge, skills and abilities that are required to be successful in that job. Therefore for certain competencies, once determined, they can be applied to all pilots. An exaggerated example of this might be that an analysis determines that pilots must not be color blind. Therefore, no pilot applicant that is color blind can be hired. To ensure that this is universally applied there is means to determine that condition through recognized tests.
