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The Assistant Human Resource Consultant is how many HR practitioners get their start in HR, it's a dedicated resource to assist the HR team.

Often within this role, you’ll find you get some of the boring jobs such as data entry or processing forms, etc, while at other times you get called in to assist senior HR colleagues with some exciting projects.

All in all, like most junior roles this is your opportunity to learn as much as you can about HR as a whole, the different aspects of HR (recruitment, training, consulting, and remuneration, etc), and the interaction between HR and the wider organization.

Job Description (SAMPLE)

Title: Assistant Human Resource Consultant
Division: Human Resources
Reports to: Senior Human Resource Consultant

Position Summary

The Assistant Human Resources Consultant is responsible for supporting the wider HR team, with focus on providing front line support for Human Resource Consultants. Providing staff and managers quality information regarding organizational policies, referring matters to HR Consultants as required.

Duties & Responsibilities

1. Provide information to managers and staff in relation to employment contracts, leave allowances, salary rates, and HR business rules.

2. Ensure timely and accurate maintenance of HR records, including employee files.

3. Assist HR work units in the processing of applications and internal HR forms.

4. Assist in the development and interpretation of human resource data, to assist business units with workforce planning and operational matters.

5. Assist HR Consultants with recruitment and selection processes, including drafting job descriptions, and coordinate selection panel meetings.

6. Present prepared training materials for in-house training, in support of identified business units.

Selection Criteria

Often the duties and responsibilities will be followed by key selection criteria, I haven’t included these as this area will differ across countries and industries – and indeed the size of the organization will impact on the selection criteria. However they will be tied back to the duties & responsibilities.

Qualifications/Knowledge

Previous experience within an office environment, and/or high school diploma would be an advantage.

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By Brendan Lys

Operating at the intersection of Human Resources and Data Science, I leverage extensive specialist experience within Human Resources, with the methodologies and approaches of Data Science. This focus on the discovery of actionable insights from data, has been applied to areas such as: remuneration & benefits, workforce planning, recruitment, health & safety, diversity, and training. But what does the application of data science to HR challenges and opportunities actually look like. Within an HR framework the data we work with typically comes directly from our HRMIS, an advantage of using data science methodologies is that we can bring in additional data either held within the organization or from external sources - data which is out of reach from a pure HR analytics approach. Consider for example position descriptions, these contain a wealth of data that we typically ignore as its not in a analysis ready format. A side project I'm working on currently (April 2019) is using text mining on job descriptions to provide insights into which job family the position may fit into. The insights of my work have been enjoyed by organizations across a diversity of sectors including: Government (Australia and New Zealand), ASX and NZX listed companies, utilities, not for profit and higher education.