PR? HR? Close enough.

If you aren’t business savvy like I was at the beginning of this semester, you might get terms like PR and HR confused. Despite the similarities in sound, the two professions are quite different, but do work together to make a company function smoothly.  To explain the differences and similarities between the two, I will be comparing my experience and knowledge with public relations with my sister’s input on her profession in human resources.

To begin, the two professions do share a fair bit of similarities. For example, the education for both public relations and human resources is postgraduate programs, meaning that applicants must have already graduated a post secondary establishment with either a degree or a diploma. In addition, both human resources and public relations are team-based professions. Public relations work is rarely done solo, as multiple people are needed to run campaigns and meet deadlines - and that’s not to even mentioning that public relations really acts as a communicator between parties making it a profession heavily based on social skills and their interpersonal connections!

Human resources is similar to public relations as it can also act as a mediator of communication to all parties within an organization, they connect lower management to higher management and vice versa to resolve issues.

You could also say that PR and HR share the attribute of working with people, all be it in slightly different ways. Public relations are working with people within and outside an organization to improve communication and enhance, where as human resources is working with people to hire, and resolve employee issues.

Regardless of their similarities, HR and PR are quite different in terms of actual scope of practice. Public relations is essentially an extension, more encompassing version of marketing. Public relations’ practical scope includes getting coverage for services/products/the organization, off setting blows to the company image, and facilitating communication between employees, the general public, and media.

However, human resources manage all things to do with employee life. This would include things like recruitment, health and safety, performance reviews, employee benefits, and labour relations.

Thus, one could say that public relations is concerned with the passing of information between a number of parties, while human resources in concerned with the well being and performance of a very particular group- employees.

Before you go all out completely separating HR and PR in your freshly informed minds, the two professions do closely work together, like sisters (ha ha, get it?).

According to my sister, HR works with PR for recruitment purposes as the process does have a certain level of corporate image attached to it. Furthermore, HR uses PR to reach the masses about job postings through social media and so forth. But the partnership doesn’t end there! As we have learned in the passing week, employees are an essential part of an organization, and good communication is required so that employees feel good and know what’s going on around them. Thus, PR works with HR to effectively communicate to employees about all things related to the human capital (which is the HR’s department) within the organization so that the organization doesn’t fall into trouble with its front line of service over rights and misinformation issues.

There you have it folks, I hope you feel a bit more enlightened about the difference between the two very similar sounding acronyms.