It’s easy to think of human resources (HR) as the department that steps in to handle onboarding or internal conduct policies. But if your hiring team’s only touchpoints with HR are to send offer letters and handbook updates, you’re leaving value on the table.
The best HR teams today are your partners in navigating workforce challenges, shaping company culture, and responding to market shifts that affect how your teams work. Your hiring team should bring them in early: when you’re restructuring a team, building out a new role, or even discussing automation that impacts workflows.
Let’s explore how to build a working relationship between your talent acquisition team and your HR team that’s grounded in trust, aligned goals, and shared accountability.
1.) Understand HR’s Unique Role in Business Operations
HR often gets lumped together with hiring or recruiting, but they are distinct (though related) functions. Before you can build a stronger partnership with HR, you need to fully understand what they do—and what they don’t.
Keep in mind that every business’s hiring and HR teams might allocate responsibilities differently, but here’s how they generally break down:
- HR responsibilities include managing:
- Compliance with employment laws
- Employee benefits and compensation strategy
- Onboarding processes and systems
- Training, development, and performance reviews
- Workplace policies, culture, and employee relations
- Hiring team responsibilities include:
- Writing and refining job descriptions
- Managing recruiting campaigns
- Interviewing and evaluating candidates
- Communicating with candidates
- Coordinating offer letters and negotiations
Before determining each team’s specific responsibilities, look at your current activities to see if there are any redundancies across teams. For instance, a potential red flag is when both hiring and HR teams send recruitment marketing messages to the same audience, which Jobvite says can confuse candidates with mixed signals. In this scenario, you might refine your processes so recruiting teams focus on external marketing and HR teams focus on marketing internal job openings.
2.) Hire Strong HR Talent Early and Often
In many organizations—especially small businesses and nonprofits with limited budgets—HR is brought in only after issues start to emerge. This reactive approach leads to burnout, gaps in compliance, and misalignment between leadership and employee needs.
Instead, hiring teams can actively support the growth of HR functions by being intentional in their recruitment strategy. They can tailor sourcing criteria to attract candidates with foundational HR skills and prioritize those who reflect and reinforce the company’s unique culture.
When hiring HR leadership, use these talent acquisition best practices:
- Write job descriptions that reflect your mission and HR approach.
- Use structured interviews that assess candidates’ experience in both policy and culture-building.
- Refine candidate-sourcing quotas and requirements to ensure HR hires can collaborate well with hiring teams.
To conduct this thorough analysis, you’ll need powerful tools at your disposal. Lever suggests using modern hiring software to collect and report on hiring data, unify marketing efforts, and schedule interviews.
3.) Establish Communication Standards and Cadences
Too often, hiring and HR teams operate in silos. Without a consistent communication framework, that division can lead to misaligned decisions, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
To foster seamless collaboration, work together to set a communication cadence. Start with a shared understanding of each team’s priorities and develop a schedule of meetings or check-ins that support transparency. For example, you could incorporate:
- Weekly or biweekly alignment meetings to review hiring needs, role changes, and internal policy shifts.
- Project-based Slack channels or shared dashboards for real-time updates on open roles, internal transfers, and onboarding logistics.
- Quarterly strategy sessions to align HR’s workforce planning with the hiring team’s sourcing and pipeline goals.
In addition to frequency, clarify what types of information should be shared and when. For instance, if HR is planning updates to remote work policies or diversity initiatives, hiring managers need that information early to accurately represent your organization during interviews.
4.) Align on Long-Term Workforce Planning
While filling open roles is a key priority for hiring teams, HR brings the broader lens of workforce planning, ensuring the company has the right mix of skills, roles, and team structures to meet strategic goals over time. When HR and hiring teams collaborate on long-term talent planning, the result is a proactive approach to growth, not just a reactive response to vacancies.
Work with HR teams to anticipate future hiring needs based on business goals, industry trends, and internal talent mobility. This might include succession planning for critical roles or flagging positions that could shift due to automation or organizational change.
Here are a few practical ways to integrate HR insights into your workforce strategy:
- Participate in cross-functional workforce planning sessions to understand broader organizational goals and how hiring fits into them.
- Use shared analytics dashboards to review attrition patterns, internal mobility trends, and helpful talent acquisition metrics (like time-to-hire).
- Coordinate talent mapping efforts to identify existing employees who could grow into more senior roles or pivot into new departments with the right support.
This level of strategic alignment ensures hiring efforts build sustainable teams equipped for the future. It also reduces hiring urgency down the line, as internal talent pipelines can be nurtured well in advance. By bringing HR into the conversation early and often, hiring teams can position themselves as stewards of long-term organizational success.
At the end of the day, hiring and HR teams want the same thing: to build a workplace where people can do great work and feel supported while doing it. That’s a lot easier when you’re not working in parallel, but in partnership—sharing insights, challenging assumptions, and helping each other think a few steps ahead. When you treat HR as a teammate instead of a checkpoint, you open the door to better hires, stronger teams, and fewer headaches down the road.
If you’re not sure where to start, try setting up a standing check-in with your HR counterpart or inviting them to help shape your next job description. Small steps now can lay the foundation for a more aligned, collaborative approach moving forward.
