The Human Resource Management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities, and key among them is deciding staffing needs, recruiting and training the employees, ensuring high performance, and making sure that the personnel and management practices conform to regulations.
Although the HR has always been perceived as a less important support function in an organisation, this perception is undergoing a huge change and is now viewed as a critical function as organisations have learnt the importance of managing their human resources. People are the most important resource in any organisation and effective management and development of the workforce is crucial to its success. It is this reason, for the growth of HRM   as a discipline, and almost all B schools today offer HRM as a specialization option. Many people are eager to start career in HR, as it is a fast growing field with many lucrative opportunities. Any organisation, which depends on its human capital for success, would need an HR department. HR is the key of building long term capability of the organisation.
Realigning work across departments so that productivity is at the highest and all resources are used to the optimum is a key challenge. Managing people in this dynamic industry reflects that, attracting , managing , nurturing talent and retaining people has been the single most critical issue in place of the enormous opportunities the market has spun.
ROLE OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGERS
HR mangers have to work closely with all the personnel in the workplace to ensure a suitable environment for everyone. The most important duty of a HR manager is to know the legality of hiring, training and disciplining employees.They can be called as human engineers who manage all the human related issues. HR managers recruit employees, determining what positions are needed and identifying the qualified people, interviewing them and training them and educating them about the company policies and procedures.
CAREER PROSPECTS
All the organisations tend to hire professionals in HR for carrying out their functions effectively. The recruitments are varying depending on the nature of the job and there is also a large  exercise like the campus recruitment done by various organisations and depending on the brand of the institute the demand for HR professionals keeps rising. In HR you can either be a generalist or play  a specialist role in areas like, recruitment, training and development, compensation and benefits, organisational development.
EMERGING TRENDS
As the world is changing at a rapid rate, the people with knowledge of the hour, ability to network and has unbridled ambition is chosen. He is propelled by an urge to experiment for the benefit of the organisation and be more creative. this has led the companies to take measures on three fronts. Firstly, companies create an environment where talent can blossom, secondly, they put in a system that helps unleash an employees potential and third, they build a reward and recognition system that makes it worthwhile for people.
This trend shows that HR is no longer just a recruitment cell and it has a lot of value addition that adds value to the overall business. The scope of HR is a limitless one, but one needs to know and keep in mind that criticality of these functions largely depend on the nature of the market, the business it is operating in and also the size of the business. 
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