You know your stuff regarding traditional HR duties, providing leadership within the human resources department, and coordinating with upper management. You manage the big picture, creating and directing strategies that support organizational goals.
So how do you condense all that interpersonal prowess into a compact resume format for recruiters and still show the scope of your strategizing abilities?
Don’t worry: We’ve worked with many HR professionals, helping them achieve their career goals. Our three human resources business partner resume templates and expert tips can help you, too!
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Professional Experience
Your skills list is the backbone of your resume, and you’ll build your experience points around abilities like employee onboarding and budgeting.
The trick for a specialized yet far-reaching profession like yours is clearly showing how your skills relate to your field. Getting specific about skills like creative problem-solving and interviewing is an ideal way for a human resources business partner to demonstrate scope.
Check out this list of skills for examples of how to be specific—and keep universal tips in mind, such as specializing your soft skills and using exact names of tech skills.
9 best human resources (HR) business partner skills
- Budget Development
- Employee Recruitment
- Problem-Solving
- Data Analysis
- Public Speaking
- Data Presentation
- Darwin Box
- ZingHR
- MS PowerPoint
Sample human resources (HR) 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 by streamlining the onboarding process or increasing employee productivity.
Talk about when you collaborated with the board to develop a strategy that boosted employee satisfaction rates or the time you revamped company policies to streamline workflow.
To back up your claims, provide metrics that quantify your impact, such as 12 percent decrease in time-to-hire!
Here are some solid ideas from our resume examples:
- 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 (HR) Business Partner Resume
- Be confident
- As an HR business partner in a guiding role, your resume writing style should exude confidence. Align with the company culture by reviewing the job description and adopting a similar tone as you demonstrate how you enhanced employee satisfaction and achieved budget savings.
- Give context to your experience
- Use experience points to illustrate the reasons behind your actions and the resulting impact. You can avoid redundancy if several key points rely on retention rates or similar metrics by highlighting improvements made to the cumbersome hiring process or the positive response to your streamlined benefits plan.
- Never mind the objective
- The resume objective statement, we mean! Use valuable page space to provide accomplishments examples instead of a generic objective. Show excellence instead of describing it by providing accounts about how you tackled an enormous hiring pool and boosted onboarding efficiency!
- Speaking of space . . .
- Keep it to one page while highlighting your ability to boost staff retention and workplace satisfaction rates. Use points with versatile context to make the most of your resume space.
- Prioritize readability
- You know from personal experience in HR that longer or difficult-to-read resumes get pushed aside in favor of sleek, easy-to-skim resumes. Keep your points about your employee training and policy clarification concise, and use clear, professional fonts to keep recruiters from passing you by during a time crunch!
Make your resume a perfect fit by customizing it for each job. Refer to the job description and reflect keywords, value statements, or skills that apply (think “employee training,” “ZingHR,” or “budget strategy.”)
Hiring managers review numerous resumes, spending little time on each. A concise resume ensures your key skills and achievements are quickly and clearly communicated, increasing your chances of making a solid impression.
A cover letter enhances your application, allowing you to provide additional experiences, such as how you improved employees’ work environment or company budget, making it an excellent place for “overflow.”
