Of all the support functions in an organization, HRM (Human Resource Management) is one of the most critical. Alongside finance, it’s tasked with making sure organizational policies and procedures are actually implemented, and that employee grievances are properly addressed.
A typical HR manager’s job spans the full employee lifecycle — everything concerned with the people side of the organization, from the moment an employee joins to the moment they leave or retire. That means hiring, training, appraisals, payroll, and exit interviews all fall under one function.
As the services sector (IT, financial services, BPO) has grown, people have become organizations’ key assets, and the importance of the HR function has grown right along with them. This has also made HR a genuinely attractive career path in its own right.
| Lifecycle Stage | What the HR Manager Does |
|---|---|
| Hiring & Staffing | Works with line managers and placement consultancies to source, shortlist, and interview candidates |
| Compensation & Benefits | Fixes salary and benefits based on role fit and budget after the interview stage |
| Performance Appraisals | Evaluates appraisals with line managers and decides pay hikes and bonuses |
| Grievance Handling | Gives employees a confidential channel to raise pay, benefit, or manager-related concerns |
| Exit Interviews | Conducts a frank final discussion to capture what worked and what didn’t for a departing employee |
Managing the Employee Lifecycle: Entry to Exit
Hiring is done in conjunction with line managers, who periodically specify the kind of recruits they need and how many. Once that request reaches the HR manager, the search for potential recruits begins — often outsourced to a placement consultancy rather than handled personally.
After shortlisting, the interview stage follows. Depending on the organization, the HR manager either delegates candidate assessment to a staffing team or handles it directly. Within large corporate structures, distinct operational specialisms—or human resource Centers of Excellence (CoEs)—typically manage each of these lifecycle milestones independently.
Once a candidate is selected, fixing salary and benefits becomes the HR manager’s job. This means determining the fit between the role and the candidate and deciding on a compensation package appropriate to the role and the budget available.
The HR manager is also involved in the final stage of appraisals — increasingly, evaluating appraisals made by the manager of the relevant business unit rather than running the process directly. This determines the size of pay hikes or bonuses, in close coordination with line managers.
Employees who are unhappy with their pay hikes or benefits can bring grievances to the HR manager, including confidential complaints about their own managers.
Finally, the HR manager conducts exit interviews — typically on an employee’s last day — as a frank discussion of what worked and what didn’t during their time at the organization. These conversations are a genuinely valuable source of insight into how the organization is actually functioning.
Staffing and Workforce Planning in Practice
Staffing and hiring remain one of the areas many HR managers still struggle to fully master, largely because demand and supply for talent rarely stay in balance.
During periods of high demand for a particular skill set, it’s common for line managers to hand HR managers aggressive hiring targets for the quarter. When a specific skill is in especially short supply, organizations can end up hiring anyone with even elementary knowledge of it — filling positions without much real strategic planning, which does more harm than good in the long run.
The more effective approach is for line managers and HR managers to jointly forecast demand for specific skill sets ahead of time, rather than reacting to shortages as they appear. In practice, this includes a few complementary strategies:
- Forecasting demand and supply for key skill sets before hiring targets are set, so headcount decisions are grounded in actual need rather than panic.
- Filling roles internally first by identifying employees in other divisions who want a change in role, an approach that has worked well in large organizations.
- Using compensated overtime from existing high performers as a bridge during temporary spikes in demand, rather than over-hiring for a short-term need.
Downturns call for a different playbook. Rather than expanding headcount, HR managers shift toward protecting the workforce they already have while still controlling costs:
- Utilizing Performance Improvement Plans to objectively address performance deficits, which facilitates data-driven talent alignment and ethical offboarding rather than arbitrary downsizings.
- Reducing new recruitment instead of downsizing, so existing employees can be redeployed elsewhere in the organization rather than let go.
- Prioritizing redeployment over termination wherever a role can reasonably be shifted to another part of the business.
The Changing Role of the HR Function
Many people still picture the HR manager as someone who mainly handles complaints, shows up at appraisal time, and is otherwise in the background — a holdover from when HR managers were seen as little more than labor officers focused on payroll and disputes.
That picture is increasingly out of date. In recent decades, HR has become genuinely proactive: rather than waiting for a crisis and reacting to it, HR professionals anticipate issues before they surface, often through regular one-on-one meetings that surface grievances and gather feedback early.
| Old Perception of HR | Modern Reality of HR |
|---|---|
| A “labor officer” focused on payroll and disputes | A proactive partner anticipating issues before they escalate |
| Reactive — waits for a complaint or crisis | Preemptive — regular one-on-ones surface concerns early |
| Seen as administrative overhead | Seen as a genuine, in-demand career path |
That shift has made HR a far more attractive specialization than it once was — business schools have seen rising demand for HR-focused courses and a growing share of graduates choosing HR as their specialization.
The role has also picked up a lighter side. In many organizations, especially in IT and BPO, HR now plans offsite events designed to give employees space to brainstorm and connect outside the office — activities substantial enough that larger organizations often staff them separately from day-to-day HR operations.
FAQs
-
What are the main functions of an HR manager?
Hiring and staffing, fixing compensation and benefits, managing performance appraisals, handling employee grievances, and conducting exit interviews — covering the employee lifecycle from entry to exit.
-
How does an HR manager handle hiring?
By working with line managers to define hiring needs, often using placement consultancies to source candidates, and either personally or through a staffing team assessing candidates at the interview stage.
-
How should HR manage staffing during a hiring boom?
By forecasting actual demand for specific skills rather than hiring reactively, filling roles internally where possible, and using compensated overtime to bridge short-term spikes instead of over-hiring.
-
How should HR manage staffing during a downturn?
By slowing new recruitment instead of laying staff off outright, redeploying employees internally where possible, and using performance improvement plans as a first step rather than direct terminations.
-
Why has the HR function become more strategic in recent years?
Because the growth of the services sector has made people an organization’s key asset, pushing HR to move from reactive administration toward proactively managing engagement, retention, and culture.
