HR Business Partner - Retail

The main purpose of an HR business partner is to use HR capabilities to accomplish company-wide goals, so the duties and responsibilities of an HRBP may vary depending on those goals.

An HRBP supports business managers by aligning HR activities with organizational strategy. They help solve business issues through the people side of the business.

A few key areas HRBPs should become well-versed in include:

1. Change management: Accelerating change in order to meet business imperatives.

2. Organization engineering: Understanding how organizations work and best practices for success.

3. Culture management: Driving the culture and ensuring everything the company does aligns with its culture.

4. Marketing: Leveraging employees as brand ambassadors and a powerful source for recruiting.

Critical skills someone could develop to excel as a human resources business partner are:

Business Acumen :

- This involves a strong understanding of the business functions and priorities, and centers around the understanding of and dealing with business risk or opportunity. An HRBP should know their business' competitive advantage, competitors and their product(s), technology, and market share.

Strategic Leadership :

- All the required competencies to be an HRBP include thinking about big picture changes for the organization and how to tactically achieve them. Effective strategic aptitude assessments are critical to success in the role.

HR Understanding :

- An HRBP should have a deep understanding of HR processes and activities. This is a basic requirement to provide the business with advice and to implement plans. They should be able to connect business challenges to HR activities and outcomes.

Analytical Skills :

- As someone who is responsible for analyzing and creating plans to meet goals, it would only make sense that the HRBP needs to be able to use dashboards and reporting to analyze data and provide insight and takeaways from that data.

Stakeholder Management :

- An HRBP promotes HR initiatives to the C-suite within an organization, so they need to possess excellent stakeholder management. Stakeholder management is the process of maintaining good relationships with the people who have the most impact in the workplace. Communication and collaboration with these individuals is a vital part of getting them "on board" with a strategic initiative.

- The core of strategic HR is aligning HR functions with the business. The alignment process includes thinking about the business as it relates to recruitment and retention, learning and development, engagement, and performance management.