Skills required for marketing and HR in MBA.

What inspires someone to build a career in human resource management?

• Presently I am working in an IT firm, but I want to change my career and want to get into HR. There are a few things that make me think I am the right person for the HR job: I am outspoken, I try to understand the situation well, and I behave well in tough situations. I was going thru some portals, which made me think whether or not my decision to pursue a career in HR is right. As per them, if you are outspoken, then you must go into marketing and sales, and communication skills are very much required in every field. For the rest there were justified answers. So presently I am confused whether opting for HR is the right decision. What inspires people to build up a career in HR and what qualities does one look for?

• Answer:

  There's a certain type of person who does well in HR. Let me talk a little about the difference between what makes someone good in sales, and what makes them good in HR: (Note: I've done both.) If you want to be really good in sales, you need to be hungry. You need to be the kind of person who will do whatever it takes to close. Some of my best sales agents have been a little bit 'fuzzy' about the rules and policies. They know when you can bend a little as long as the balance sheet works out in the company's favor in the end. A person who is good at sales is not only well spoken, but ambitious and unafraid of risk. Great sales people like commission and incentives in their pay structure.... They believe in themselves and they see such things as a way to maximize their earnings. They will gamble with their own paycheck based on their faith in their ability to do their job well. HR is not anything like the above. HR does not know when to bend the rules, they ARE THE RULES. They live and breathe in the world of rules, reconciling potentially conflicting state and federal employment laws with company policies. HR are the people who protect the employee's job by telling a manager "you can't fire them because of the rules." HR's job is not to take chances, HR's job is to minimize risk and liability. Very few people in HR work on any kind of incentive structure and I've always hated working in places where recruiters are incented based on how many bodies they can pack in a new hire class (seriously, you get the worst new hires this way.) Now, both Sales and HR need people skills. You're going to be handling people and affecting their lives all day long. As a HR manager or recruiter you may be pitching your company to prospective candidates and make no mistake, it can feel like sales when you're guiding a candidate around the office and thinking "I like this guy, I hope he feels that it's worth leaving his current job to come here.... how can I make sure to land this talented person?" But it isn't sales. Being well spoken and enjoying interacting with people and opportunities to work with people is an asset. If you're hungry and driven... go into sales. If you like working through the tangled complications of policy and law, go into HR.