HR Generalist Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for a HR Generalist position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a HR Generalist may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of a HR Generalist and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that both employers hiring for a HR Generalist and those who list the position of HR Generalist on their resumes predominantly feature HR Generalist and Human Resources Experience as the most common and important terms, respectively. But the list quickly begins to diverge with resumes showing Compliance, OnBoarding Management and Employee Relations Management at positions three, four and five, while job listings show a different pattern. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to HR Generalist jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be a HR Generalist or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of HR Generalist positions. The top three keywords make up 44.92% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how HR Generalist, Human Resources Experience, and Compliance shares stack up against the share from resumes. Employee Relations Management, Recruiting and MS Office represent an additionally healthy share of the employer HR Generalist job postings with their combined total of 25.59%. At 29.49%, Communication Skills, OnBoarding Management, HRIS, and Performance Management appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top HR Generalist skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of HR Generalist positions. The top three keywords represent 39.23% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how HR Generalist, Human Resources Experience, and Compliance match up to employer job descriptions. OnBoarding Management, Employee Relations Management, and Recruiting represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for HR Generalist with 29.95% of the total. At 30.82%, HRIS, Performance Management, MS Office, and Customer Service appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top HR Generalist skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in HR Generalist job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of HR Generalist on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for HR Generalist positions. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within HR Generalist job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Employer job listings tend to list Innovation or Communication Skills as requirements in HR Generalist job descriptions; however, candidates mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a HR Generalist position may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the position of HR Generalist tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Detail Oriented, Labor and Employment Laws, Human Resources Experience, HR Generalist, Collaboration, MS Office, Employment Law, Compliance, HR Policies, Employee Relations Management, HRIS, Recruiting, Performance Management, Facilitation, OnBoarding Management, Documentation, Terminations or Customer Service in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a candidate you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as a HR Generalist.

Employer job listings infrequently list Benefits Administration, HR Management, Scheduling or ADP HR as important skills or qualifications in HR Generalist job descriptions. Nevertheless, candidates mention them much more commonly in their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a HR Generalist position may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as a HR Generalist. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!