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.
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