Business & entrepreneurship · Organizing & Managing
Human resources professional: what the job actually is
Hiring, paying, training and sometimes letting go of the people an organisation depends on, inside rules that exist for good reasons.
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The work
What this job actually is
- Looking after the part of an organisation that is made of people: finding them, bringing them in, paying them correctly, keeping the records, and dealing with it when something goes wrong between them.
- A lot of it is rules. Employment standards, health and safety, human rights and pay equity are all real legal obligations, and HR is usually the department that has to know them well enough to say no politely.
- Small organisations have one person doing all of it. Large ones split it into recruiting, payroll and benefits, learning, and employee relations, and those feel like four different jobs.
- You sit between the people who work there and the people who run it. You are paid by one side and trusted, with luck, by both, and that position is uncomfortable more often than anyone admits at the start.
- You will handle information about other people that you cannot tell anyone, including your friends at the same workplace. Discretion is not a nice-to-have, it is the product.
A Tuesday
What a normal day looks like
Not a good day or a bad one. The ordinary version, which is what you would actually be living.
- 8:30 — Open the hiring inbox. Sixty applications for one posting, and you can already tell which nine are worth a proper read.
- 9:00 — Screen résumés against the actual requirements, not against your gut, because someone may later ask you to explain every no.
- 10:00 — A manager asks whether she can change an employee's hours. The honest answer is 'it depends', and then you spend twenty minutes finding out on what.
- 11:00 — Interview a candidate. Half of this is listening for what they do not say, and the other half is making sure you ask every candidate the same questions.
- 12:00 — Lunch at your desk, because nobody at the next table is allowed to hear what you were just discussing.
- 13:00 — Onboarding for the new person starting Monday: the laptop, the forms, the benefits enrolment, the welcome that makes the first day not terrible.
- 14:00 — A closed-door conversation with an employee who is upset about how a colleague speaks to them. You take notes, you do not promise an outcome, and you do not take a side yet.
- 15:30 — Payroll cut-off. One wrong number is someone's rent, so you check it twice.
- 16:30 — Update a policy that everyone is supposed to have read and nobody has.
- 17:00 — Go home carrying two things you are not permitted to mention.
Honestly
Who loves this, and who should not do it
The second list is the useful one. Nearly every careers page leaves it out, which is why nearly every careers page reads like an advert.
- You are the person other people tell things to, and you can keep them to yourself without effort.
- You can be fair to somebody you personally find annoying.
- You like rules when they exist to protect people, and you do not mind reading the small print to find out what they say.
- You are steady in other people's conflicts rather than energised or frightened by them.
- You want a job that exists in nearly every kind of organisation, not just one industry.
- You need to be liked by everyone. HR is regularly the department people blame for decisions that were made above it.
- Delivering bad news makes you ill. Layoffs, terminations and discipline are part of the work, and you are often the one in the room.
- You want to see something you built. Success in HR is mostly an absence: nobody quit, nobody sued, payroll was right.
- You hate paperwork and policy. A large share of the day is documentation that exists in case someone later disputes what happened.
- You want a hot job market. Job Bank's Ontario outlook for this group is Limited, which means openings are not plentiful and you will compete for them.
The route in
How you actually get there in Ontario
Know that the job itself is not licensed
Job Bank lists this as not regulated in Ontario, so nobody needs a licence to work in HR. What it does ask for is usually a university degree or college diploma in human resources management or a related field, and some employers want the professional designation as well.Do a college or university programme
Ontario colleges run human resources programmes, and ontariocolleges.ca says graduates may be eligible for accreditation through the Human Resources Professionals Association. A business degree with HR courses is the university version of the same road.Earn the CHRP if you want the designation
HRPA is the body that grants the Certified Human Resources Professional designation in Ontario. Its page lists the steps in order: coursework in nine subject areas, a CHRP knowledge exam, an exam on Ontario employment law, and an online Job Ready Program. You also have to be a registered HRPA member before you start, and you keep up continuing professional development afterwards.Start in a support role
Most people enter as an HR assistant, coordinator, recruiter or payroll clerk, and move sideways into the specialty they turn out to be good at. A co-op term or a summer in an HR office does more for your first job than another course.
Where this comes from: HRPA — CHRP: Certified Human Resources Professional · HRPA — Application process · Job Bank — Human resources: requirements in Ontario · ontariocolleges.ca — Human Resources programmes
The money
What it pays in Ontario
Job Bank's own figures, quoted rather than summarised, with the period they describe — so you can tell how old they are and go and check them.
- $25.48
- Low (hourly)
- $39.90
- Median (hourly)
- $62.02
- High (hourly)
Ontario, NOC 11200. Reference period 2023-2024, last updated by Job Bank on 19 November 2025. Wages vary a lot by region inside Ontario and by how long you have been doing it — the low figure is roughly where you start, not what the job is worth.
Source: Job Bank — Human resources professional wages in Ontario
Where it is heading
The outlook for the next three years
Job Bank publishes a three-year outlook for every job in every province. It is the closest thing to an honest forecast, and it moves, so read it as a weather report rather than a verdict.
Limited2 out of 5 stars
- Employment growth will lead to a few new positions.
- Not many positions will become available due to retirements.
- There are a moderate number of unemployed workers with recent experience in this occupation.
What that rating means: how many openings Job Bank expects in Ontario for this kind of work against how many people are likely to be looking — not whether it is a good job. A “limited” rating means more competition for each opening; it does not close the door, and it can change before you are ready to walk through it.
- 53,850
- people work in this job in Ontario
- 75%
- are women (48% across all jobs)
Source: Job Bank — Human resources professionals job prospects in Ontario (NOC 11200). Outlook updated by Job Bank on 10 December 2025; read by us on 5 October 2026.
Before you leave school
Things you can do now
- Take business, law, and any course that has you write and defend a position in your own words. HR is mostly being clear and fair on paper.
- Run something with people in it: a club, a team, a student council committee. The first time you have to mediate a disagreement between two friends is a better introduction than a textbook.
- Ask your school or a family friend whether a local employer will let you spend an hour with whoever does their hiring. You are asking how they pick, not for a job.
- Learn the basics of your own rights at work. Ontario's government publishes plain guides to employment standards, and reading one makes you instantly more useful.
Test it
Do this before you decide anything
Reading about a job tells you almost nothing. This is designed to be done alone, this week, for free.
Screen five people fairly, then explain why
About 60 minutes- Find a real job posting for any entry-level job that interests you and copy out the three requirements that actually matter.
- Write five short made-up candidate profiles of your own, each a few lines long, with different mixes of skills and one with a gap that is not obviously a problem.
- Rank them against the three requirements only. Then write one plain sentence per candidate explaining your ranking as though they might read it.
- Look at your list and ask whether any of your reasons was really about how you imagined each person would be to have lunch with.
What it tells you. If you liked the puzzle of being fair on paper, and caught yourself in a bias and found that interesting rather than embarrassing, HR may suit you. If you wanted to skip to hiring whoever felt right, or the idea of having to justify every no was exhausting, this job will feel like that every single day.
Better than any article
Questions for somebody who does this job
Most people say yes to a teenager who asks good questions. These are the ones that get real answers rather than encouragement.
- “What part of your week would surprise somebody who thinks HR is mostly hiring?”
- “What is the hardest conversation you have had to run, and how did you prepare for it?”
- “Did you need the CHRP to get where you are, or did it just help?”
- “How do you stay on the side of the employee and the organisation at the same time?”
- “What does somebody with no experience need to show you to get an interview?”
- “Which part of the job would you give away if you could?”
Could you own one of these?
The part other career sites never mention
Yes, in a narrow way. HR consulting, recruiting and payroll services for small employers who cannot afford a full department are real businesses, and Job Bank lists HR consultants as working without a licence. They are built on years of experience and a reputation for being discreet, so most people get there by working inside an organisation first.
Not sure this is the right list to be reading
Start from yourself, not from the job.
Future Finder is free, takes about ten minutes, needs no account and stores nothing. It will tell you which kinds of work you lean toward, and which of these pages are worth your time.
Parent of a teenager weighing this up? Career coaching for teens gets them talking to people who do the work, anywhere in Ontario.
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Wages and training requirements change. Every figure on this page is linked to the body that publishes it, and the review date above says when we last checked. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.