The current growth of HRBPs or the Human Resources Business Partners (HRBPs) function and their impact on businesses cannot be overlooked. With new age complexities of the business world and the increasing need of organizations to attract, develop and retain talent have given birth to the HRBPs function. Although this function has been there for the last good 8 -9 years, its prominence got a fillip since the CXOs/CEOs realized that having extra pairs of hands in retaining and developing talent and curb attrition.

Having said that there is a grapevine in the industry circles that "anyone can do the job of an HR" and we did see a flurry of non-HRs donning the hat of HR in a few organizations. I will not attribute this misunderstanding to the absence of credible HR but to the popular belief that you don"t need to have a technical repertoire to play a credible HR role.

The same disbelief gave birth to the new breed of HRBPs who understand that in order to have a credible voice in the people side of business, they should live, breathe, and sleep the business on a day to day basis. HRBPs understand thoroughly and work alongside business heads to tackle the everyday challenges with regard to the managing people.

In the current VUCA world, the understanding of business is no longer a desired skill for the HRs, but a much-needed imperative.

HRBPs have come to realize that having basic vanilla skills of HR operations is no more a success mantra in the evolving talent market. It"s assumed anyone who are trying to play the role of HRBP have prior expertise in one or more specialized HR competencies. So, one of the only differentiating factor between a good and great HRBP is your business and stakeholder skills.

Having a thorough business knowledge including the day to day pain areas will enable the HRBPs to play a strategic level role with the Business heads. Leaders will come to appreciate and respect the people partners when both speak the same language and also ensure that the HRBPs understand the priority areas for businesses that requires immediate attention.

Retention or managing talent is directly proportional to the comfort zone created by Human Resource functions and employees. We as HRBPs will not be able to have empathy unless we are aware of the challenges. Building a comfort zone with employees will form the base on which proactive measures will be taken to retain and develop talent instead of reactive ones.

Knowledge of business will allow the HR to offer an alternate strategy to Business owners either on workforce management or talent development etc. Instead of the tag of business partner the current situation demands the HRBP to play the role of business solver and give pragmatic advise for talent challenges and this can only happen once you understand the complexities of business. We as HRBP need to question the status quo instead of just being an order taker for the respective Business units.

Attracting Talent to your setup is much easier when you understand the business dynamics. You need to understand the external threats and opportunities in order to create a sustainable strategy for your setup to attract new talent into the system. This can be from best practices from your closet competitors or mass redundancies in your industry etc. which can enable to get the best talent at a competitive cost.

Although it goes without saying that a sound HRBP need to have specialization in one of HR areas along with great command over communication and conflict resolution skills but having a detailed understanding of the complexities of the business enables him/her to play the role of strategic advisor to the business which is the need of the hour for the growth of this function in current Talent market.

Mr. Kinkar Sarkar is the Senior Manager - Talent Management for Lets Transport