Due to its broad context and business partnerships that HR often builds within an organization, you can find a variety of roles in human resources, from administrative to talent acquisition, talent development, or people analytics. As in other areas, they are distributed across several seniority levels, from Specialist/Trainee to Business Partner, Manager, Director, and CHRO (C-level role). Skills demanded by these roles greatly vary from role to role and range from work planning to detail or data orientation, empathy and sensitivity, communication, or analytical reasoning.

Within the administrative role, one can find the HR Generalist, Payroll functions, or Office Manager roles. These roles' goal is to administer workforce general information, such as headcount, structuring, process salaries, and guarantee the right workplace management.

In the talent acquisition roles, one can find the Recruiter, the Employer Branding functions, or the Onboarding Specialist roles. These roles aim to attract or find the right talent that matches the organization's needs and manage the process from candidate application to employee onboarding.

As the business progresses, so too must people and organizations develop. Talent development roles range from Learning & Development to Career Coaching or HR Business Partner. Their goal is to provide people with the right skills and perfectly match them with the right role within the organization so that work productivity is exponentiated.

Finally, an emerging field of work is growing inside HR that calls for more analytical and numeric skills - the People Analytics roles. Their goal is to gather and structure valid and reliable sources of information regarding the workforce so that strategic decisions are carried out by the management team to shape the business' future regarding their People.

Compensation and Benefits, Diversity and Inclusion, and Continuous Improvement roles can also be found in multinational organizations that have already done some work on developing HR impact.

HR is an evolving field of work, and disruptions in the way we work (such as automation, technologies, and workforce expectations) are escalating the importance of HR's role within an organization.