HR Specialist job description
94 verified openings in HR Specialist
Human Resources Specialist is the title BLS itself uses for occupation 13-1071, so the pay on this page belongs to the whole family, not any single desk. Five other profiles on this HR job board quote the same line: HR analyst, HRIS analyst, recruiter, generalist, and business partner. It put the median at $75,940 in May 2025 and the tenth-to-ninetieth spread at $47,180 to $128,720, across 912,430 jobs nationally. The definition behind the title is short. A specialist recruits, screens, interviews, or places people inside an organization, and may carry work in several other human resources areas on top of that.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
A specialist hired under the plain title tends to get the whole employment cycle: explaining policies, procedures, and employment law to the people they affect, hiring and the paperwork behind it, and keeping records of hires, terminations, leaves, transfers, and promotions current in the system of record. Employee relations lands here too: harassment allegations and workplace complaints are the specialist's to address. New employee orientations open the cycle, exit interviews and termination paperwork close it, and benefits administration, background checks, and pre-employment testing fill the middle. Staying current on EEO and ADA requirements underpins all of it.
Common Skills and Technologies
What the profile rewards most is plain communication: speaking, listening, reading closely, and writing well, ahead of anything technical. The software splits between systems of record and the daily kit around them, Workday, Oracle HRIS, and applicant tracking platforms on one side, and Excel, Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, and Kronos Workforce Timekeeper on the other.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Asked what a new hire needs, 47 percent of O*NET's respondents said a bachelor's degree and 25 percent a master's; high school is next at 14 percent, an associate's degree at 7, and the few remaining points scatter among other answers. O*NET rates it Job Zone 4: employers expect experience or training layered on the degree. From here, careers fan out into the specialties the line contains, recruiting, analytics, and HRIS work, or upward toward human resources manager.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 13-1071.00 Human Resources Specialists, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/13-1071.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 13-1071, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.