US / The 5.6 M working in HR and Recruitment

Most don’t understand the why, how and what of what HR actually does. According to our friends over at LinkedIn, there are in nearly 2,000,000 LinkedIn profiles of active professionals who list their jobs and responsibilities as working in HR.

This is slightly different from the Bureau of Labor statistics report from 2010 that there are 5.6 million professionals in the United States who work in HR. Yes, you read correctly, the government says that there are 5.6 million people who work in HR. Question is who are these 5.6 million professionals working in the industry as HR is many things including recruiting, training, employment law, safety compensation, benefits and an HR generalist who does a little bit of everything.

One of the challenges with Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers and for marketers and sales professionals who are selling into the space is that human resources is specific and targeted, and yet others who don’t understand lump us into other categories. This is the exact same challenge I have when trying to explain to someone what I do as an HR professional. My work is many different specific yet complicated things that make it hard for outsiders to understand and extremely challenging for HR technologies, vendors and service providers to properly sell to practitioner in our space. Many vendors treat HR like a sales funnel focusing on generating as many leads as possible, cold calling them and enticing them with free conference swag they are giving away. Please for the sake of all that is right in this world, vendors, please qualify your leads.

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO “WORK IN HR”

• Recruiters aren’t always HR professionals and headhunters while they sometimes work with HR and corporate recruiters are completely different than HR
• Payroll may or may not be the responsibility of HR
• A Director of HR might not actually have any direct reports while an HR Manager might be the decision maker for buying products and services at a different ccompany
• VPs of HR and Recruiting are often separate job titles with very different and not often overlapping responsibilities
• Employees often have a corporate job title and a vanity title working for large enterprise companies. I once was HR Generalist IV but my vanity title was Senior HR Generalist.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

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