Recruitment, employee management, and people analytics. The modern HR stack.
Every HR team runs on an HRIS. BambooHR is the SMB standard, Workday dominates enterprise. Learn employee records, onboarding workflows, time-off management, and reporting. This is your operating system.
LinkedIn Recruiter is where you find candidates. Notion is where you track your pipeline, candidate notes, interview scorecards, offer tracking. Build a sourcing system that actually works.
HR is a communication role. Slack is where you answer employee questions, run culture channels, and coordinate with managers. Loom is how you record onboarding walkthroughs and policy explainers that save you hundreds of repeat conversations.
Employee handbooks, policies, offer letters, process documentation. Google Docs for collaboration, Notion for the internal wiki. Every HR professional needs to write clearly and keep documentation current.
Engagement surveys, pulse checks, exit interviews, onboarding feedback. Typeform for beautiful surveys people actually complete. Google Forms for quick internal polls. Data-driven HR starts with asking the right questions.
Track hiring metrics, attrition rates, time-to-fill, diversity data. Google Sheets for dashboards and reports. ChatGPT to draft comms, summarise feedback, and speed up policy writing. Data literacy separates modern HR from old-school admin.
HR professionals who share insights on LinkedIn get recruited themselves. Post about hiring lessons, culture building, people ops trends. Your personal brand IS your portfolio in this field, show you understand people AND systems.
HRIS. Paid
Sourcing. Paid
Wiki & tracking. Free
Comms. Free tier
Video updates. Free tier
Documentation. Free
Surveys. Free tier
Analytics. Free
AI assistant. Free tier
Certifications signal you're serious. CIPD Level 5 is the gold standard in the UK, SHRM-CP in the US. They're not mandatory for entry roles, but they fast-track you past the competition and open doors to senior positions.
Modern HR is data-driven. Know your attrition rates, cost-per-hire, eNPS scores. If you can pull insights from spreadsheets and present them to leadership, you're already ahead of 80% of HR candidates.
The best HR professionals combine empathy with operational rigour. You need to care deeply about people while building scalable processes. Show both in your interviews, a story about helping someone AND a system you built.
You'll handle sensitive conversations, redundancies, grievances, performance issues. Practise active listening, clear writing, and difficult conversations. This is the one role where soft skills genuinely matter more than technical ones.
£28-55K UK / $50-90K US
Mid-level HR / People Ops roles. Senior People Partners and Heads of People at scale-ups earn significantly more. HR Business Partners with data skills command top-end salaries.
Find the exact tool stack for your target role, step by step, no fluff.
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