While you certainly know your stuff when it comes to traditional HR duties, you spend most of your time leading others in the human resources department and coordinating with senior company leaders. You manage the big picture, creating and directing HR strategies that support organizational goals.
Yeah–that’s a lot! So how do you break down your prowess into bite-sized pieces for recruiters while still showing your full scope of abilities on your resume?
Don’t worry: I’ve worked with plenty of people in HR to help get them where they want to be. And these 3 resume examples (plus seasoned tips) can help you, too!
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Professional Experience
Get ready to feel inspired by your own skill set! Your skills list is the backbone of your resume, and you’ll build your experience points around these core abilities.
The trick for a specialized yet far-reaching profession like yours is to be clear about how your skills relate to your field. Getting specific about skills is an ideal way for a human resources business partner to demonstrate scope concisely.
Check out the list of skills below for examples on how to be specific–and keep universal tips in mind, such as specializing your soft skills and pulling in exact names for your tech skills.
9 Best Human Resources Business Partner Skills
- Budget Development
- Employee Recruitment
- Problem-solving
- Data Analysis
- Public Speaking
- Data Presentation
- Darwin Box
- ZingHR
- MS PowerPoint
Sample Human Resources Business Partner Work Experience Bullet Points
Your experience section is a gold mine for recruiters to see how you built upon your skills to make a difference in your field. You want your points to be concise, but still demonstrate the full impact you’ve had as a human resources business partner.
Talk about the time you collaborated with the board of directors to develop a strategy that boosted employee satisfaction rates, or the time you revamped company policies to streamline workflow.
Speaking of satisfaction rates, you’ll need to provide metrics that quantify your impact. Any time you make a claim to success, you need to back it with data!
Here are some solid samples:
- Held quarterly 1-1 meetings with underperforming staff to provide encouragement and guidance, improving productivity by 43% and retention rates by 21%
- Overhauled job descriptions and developed over 17 types of questionnaires for new hires, increasing qualified applicants by 56%
- Implemented new employee onboarding techniques, achieving 91% pre-employment form completion rates within 72 hours
- Interviewed 210+ applicants for 16 positions, filling all roles within 23 days and decreasing onboarding time by 39%
- Updated performance strategies and management-employee meetings, increasing employee retention by 31%
Top 5 Tips For Your Human Resources Business Partner Resume
- Use a confident tone
- It’s imperative for someone in a guiding role like yours to display confidence in your resume’s writing tone. Just make sure you keep it tasteful and appropriate by checking back over the job description and matching the tone you find there.
- Give context to enrich your experience
- Use your experience points to show why you did what you did and how it helped. This will help you avoid redundancy if several of your best points depend on retention rates or similar metrics!
- Never mind the objective
- The resume objective statement, I mean! You should almost always use your valuable page space to provide strong examples of your accomplishments, instead of introducing yourself with a separate section. Show your excellence instead of describing it!
- Speaking of page space . . .
- Keep it to just one page! Or even less, if you can manage it while still showing the scope of your abilities. Use points with versatile context to make the most of your resume space.
- Prioritize readability
- You probably know from personal experience that longer or difficult-to-read resumes get pushed aside in favor of sleek ones that are easy to skim. Keep your bullet points concise and use clear, professional fonts to keep recruiters from passing you by during a time crunch!
Frequently Asked Questions
- How can I make sure I stand out?
- One of the best ways to stand out is to make your resume a perfect fit by customizing it for each job. While some people find the idea daunting, it isn’t so bad: Simply refer back to the job description and reflect any keywords, value statements, or skills that apply to you.
- Why is brevity so important?
- For a human resources business partner resume, you want to show how effective you are at communicating clearly. After all, you need to demonstrate your ability to present improvement strategies and data reports to a variety of company audiences so that recruiters can see your prowess for themselves.
- How about a cover letter?
- A cover letter is a great way to add value to your application materials! As long as it provides extra in-depth information instead of repeating your resume, that is. And since you want to limit your resume length, this is a great place for any “overflow” experience points.
