How to Get into Human Resources After College: Your First Steps

You finish your degree, open a job board, type “HR jobs”, and your excitement drops instantly. Every listing seems to ask for two or three years of experience, knowledge of five different tools, and a track record you simply don’t have yet. It is no surprise so many graduates search for how to get into human resources and come away thinking the field is closed to them.

It isn’t. You do not need a perfect résumé, an HR-specific degree, or a relative in management. What you need is a clear plan, honest self-assessment, and the ability to present what you have already done in a way that makes sense to hiring managers. This guide is written for typical people, not HR insiders. We will walk slowly through what HR actually is, what companies are really looking for in junior candidates, and how to get into human resources without starting your education from scratch.

What is Human Resources?

Human Resources is the part of a company that looks after the people who work there. HR teams don’t build products or sell services – they hire the right people, onboard them, manage pay and benefits, support managers and make sure the company stays compliant with labour laws.

On a normal week, HR might be writing job ads, screening candidates, running interviews, preparing offers, handling onboarding paperwork, coordinating training and helping resolve conflicts. When you learn how to get into human resources, you’re really learning how to help a business make smarter decisions about its people.

Understanding what HR really does

If you ask ten people what Human Resources is, you will probably hear ten different answers. Some will talk about payroll, others about hiring, someone will mention “the people who fire you”, and a few will say “the department that handles complaints”. All of those touch the truth, but none of them tells the full story.

At its core, HR is the part of the business that connects people and strategy. HR teams help make sure the right people are hired, trained, supported, paid correctly, and given a fair, safe environment to work in. On any given day, an HR professional might be posting a job ad, helping a manager deal with a conflict, updating salary data in a system, or preparing a report for leadership about why employees are leaving.

This variety is why it is so important to understand the landscape when you think about how to get into human resources. There is not one single HR career. There are recruiting-focused paths, operational paths, training and development paths, analytical paths, and leadership paths. You do not have to fall in love with every piece of HR to belong in the field. You just need to find the corner of it that matches how your brain and personality work.

Why an HR degree is optional, not mandatory

A common belief is that if your diploma does not say “Human Resources Management” on it, you have already failed the first test. In reality, HR departments hire people from psychology, business, sociology, law, communications, education, and even engineering. What matters much more than the label on your degree is whether you can handle the human and organizational side of the work.

Think about what HR really requires: listening carefully, handling confidential information, staying calm when people are emotional, paying attention to detail in contracts and systems, and balancing empathy with fairness. If you have worked in retail, hospitality, student leadership, or any job where people depended on you, you have already practiced parts of this without naming it.

So when you see a job ad and wonder how to get into human resources with the degree you already have, remember this: companies do not care only about what you studied. They care about whether you can understand people, learn systems, follow rules, and support the business. You can demonstrate that from many starting points.

Finding the HR stories hiding in your experience

Most graduates look at their background and see “just a café job” or “just a student club”.

HR managers look at the same things and see potential, if those stories are told clearly. Part of learning how to get into human resources is learning how to translate what you have done into language that sounds relevant.

Suppose you worked in a busy store during university. You might have helped train new staff members, explained policies to customers, and handled those difficult moments when someone was angry or upset. That is not “just serving people”. That is onboarding, communication, and conflict resolution in a very real environment.

Or imagine you were part of a student organization. Suppose you interviewed new members, assigned tasks, or mediated disagreements in a group project. In that case, you have already done a simpler version of what HR and people operations teams do every week. You may not have used the words “talent selection” or “performance feedback”, but you have lived them.

To move closer to HR, you rewrite your experience with that lens. Instead of saying “helped with events”, you can honestly say you coordinated volunteers, matched people to roles, tracked who showed up, and made sure everything ran on time. That is the kind of sentence that quietly proves you are already thinking like someone in HR.

Shaping your CV and LinkedIn for an HR path

Hiring managers are busy. When they open your CV or LinkedIn profile, they are reading it with a question in mind: “Can this person fit into my team without a huge amount of hand-holding?” Your job is to make the answer feel like “yes”.

A strong starting point is a short profile line at the top that makes your direction obvious. Something like: “Recent graduate focused on starting a career in Human Resources, with experience coordinating student teams, training new staff, and handling day-to-day operations in customer-facing roles.” It signals that you are not applying to everything at random. You have chosen a path.

Below that, every job or activity you list should include one or two sentences that hint at HR skills.

Think about times you had to explain something awkward or important to someone.
Did you look after a new person and help them settle in?
When did you keep track of shifts, notes, or tasks so the rest of the group could get their work done?

When you deliberately answer those questions, you are no longer just asking how to get into human resources – you are showing that you are already halfway there.

You do not need to stuff your CV with complex HR jargon. What you need is clear, concrete examples that make it easy for a recruiter to picture you updating employee records, scheduling interviews, answering basic questions, or supporting a manager.

If you want more ideas on how HR-related skills look in practice, you can read articles about HR consultants, recruiter skills, or HR managers’ salaries on CareersMomentum and borrow wording that honestly fits your own background.

How to get an HR job without experience

Getting an HR job with no direct HR title on your CV looks impossible at first. Still, employers mostly care about proof that you’ve already worked with people, processes, and responsibilities. Instead of writing “no experience”, dig out the situations where you organised schedules, trained someone new, solved a conflict, or kept sensitive information accurate.

While you’re applying, treat HR as a project. Take a short online course on HR basics or recruiting, ask one or two HR professionals on LinkedIn how they got into HR, and rewrite your CV in HR language. That combination – real stories plus a bit of targeted learning – almost always beats another generic “entry-level HR” application.

Ways to get HR experience without an HR title

If junior HR roles are hard to find in your city, focus on getting HR-like experience wherever you can. Internships in HR or talent acquisition are the obvious first step, even if they’re short or part-time. A few months helping with onboarding, interview scheduling, or maintaining employee records already gives you more to talk about in interviews than most graduates have.

Volunteering is another underrated route. Student organisations, charities, and small community groups all need help recruiting volunteers, tracking hours, organising events, and handling fundamental conflicts. That work doesn’t use “HR” in the title, but the skills are almost identical.

You can also move into HR from the inside. If you’re already employed, tell your manager that you’d like to grow into HR and ask to help with people-related tasks – onboarding new colleagues, documenting processes, coordinating training sessions, or gathering feedback after events. When you later talk to the HR team about an internal move, you’re no longer “someone who is curious about HR”, you’re the person who already proved they can handle HR-type work.

Learning HR basics without another degree

You do not have to return to university to understand the foundations of HR.

In fact, many people who figure out how to get into human resources do it through a mix of short courses, self-study, and learning on the job.

There are a few areas where a little structured learning goes a long way: understanding what an employment contract usually includes, what “onboarding” really means, why labour laws matter, how a basic HR system (HRIS) stores information, and how a simple recruitment process flows from job posting to job offer.

Short online courses, YouTube tutorials, and introductory modules from platforms like LinkedIn Learning or Coursera can give you this foundation in weeks, not years. What matters is not collecting certificates for decoration, but being able to talk about these topics in a calm, simple way in an interview.

If a hiring manager hears you describe, in your own words, how a new hire moves from offer letter to first day, or how important confidentiality is when handling employee data, they will recognize that you have done more than type how to get into human resources into a search bar. You have taken the time to understand what the work actually involves.

Do you need HR certifications to start?

Big certifications like SHRM-CP or PHR look impressive, but they’re not required for your very first HR job. For most graduates it makes more sense to get any hands-on experience first – an internship, assistant role or volunteer work – and then add a certification once you know you want to stay in the field.

If your budget is limited, start smaller: a short online course on HR fundamentals, recruiting or employment law is enough to show employers that you’re serious about building a career in human resources.

Choosing the right entry-level roles

Not all HR job titles are created for beginners.

Some are genuinely entry-level, and some quietly expect you to have already spent a few years in the field. A big part of how to get into human resources quickly is aiming at the right roles instead of aiming at ones that will only frustrate you.

Titles like HR Assistant, HR Coordinator, Recruiting Coordinator, People Operations Assistant, or HR Intern are designed to be starting points. In these jobs, you are often responsible for practical tasks: scheduling interviews, checking forms, updating records, answering simple questions, and making sure processes run on time.

That might not sound glamorous, but it is exactly how many HR careers begin. You are close enough to see how decisions are made, but not yet expected to make those decisions alone. You are trusted with real information, but you have support around you while you learn. If you do this well, you become the person everyone knows they can rely on, and that reputation matters when opportunities appear.

If your long-term goal involves remote work, flexible hours, or international companies, you can keep an eye on remote HR roles as well. Just be honest with yourself: sometimes the best first step is a nearby office job that gives you strong foundations, and the remote option comes a little later.

Using networking as a real tool, not a buzzword

Networking has a bad reputation because many people imagine forced small talk in a noisy room.

For someone who is genuinely interested in how to get into human resources, networking can look very different. It can be as simple as having real conversations with people who already do the job you want.

One of the easiest ways to start is on LinkedIn. Search for people with titles like HR Assistant, HR Generalist, or Talent Acquisition Coordinator in your region. Look for those whose paths feel similar to yours: maybe they also studied something outside of HR, or worked their way up from an entry-level role.

Then send a short, respectful message. You do not have to beg for a job. Instead, you can write something like: “I’m finishing my degree and trying to understand what the first year in HR really looks like. Your career path looks similar to what I’m hoping for. Would you be open to a 15-minute call so I can ask a few questions about how you got started?”

Some people will ignore you. Some will say no. But the ones who say yes can change everything. Someone might walk you through how they landed their first HR job in your city or which companies are actually open to juniors.
Another person could tell you what their own hiring manager really looks for in a CV.

And if you make a decent impression, there’s a good chance they’ll remember your name when their team quietly starts looking for someone junior.

Infographic from Statista showing the number of social media users worldwide rising from 2.73 billion in 2017 to a projected 6.05 billion by 2028.

Staying patient when applications are rejected

Even with a good CV and new knowledge, it is rare to land the first job you apply for.

Hearing nothing back or getting polite rejection emails can make you think you are not cut out for HR. This is where many people quietly give up and enter a different field, even if HR still interests them.

It helps to see the process more like a long-term project than a single yes or no moment. When you treat the search as a longer project instead of a single yes-or-no moment, it gets easier to breathe.
Each time you adapt your CV and cover letter for a specific role, you get a bit sharper at explaining who you are and what you can do.

Even an interview that ends with a polite “no” usually teaches you something you can use in the next one.
A short online course, a twenty-minute chat with someone in HR, or an honest rewrite of your CV all feel small on their own, but together they stack up and quietly push you closer to your first real offer.

If you find yourself losing motivation, return to the basics: remind yourself why you were interested in this work in the first place. Maybe you like solving people problems, you care about fairness, or you find it satisfying to put structure into chaos. Those reasons matter, and they are part of what will carry you through the part of how to get into human resources that no one advertises: the persistence phase.

Seeing the longer HR career path

It is easy to obsess about that first job title and forget that HR is a ladder, not a single step. Many people start as assistants or coordinators and later become generalists, specialists in recruitment, compensation, or learning and development, or eventually HR managers and business partners who sit at the leadership table.

You can explore these later steps in more detail by reading about how much human resource managers make, what strategic HR looks like inside large organizations, or how HR supports remote employees and global teams. Doing this does not just give you information. It also gives you a mental picture of where your own path could go.

When you understand that the job you get in your first year is not your final destination, you feel less pressure to make it perfect. You focus instead on whether it will teach you something real, give you real responsibilities, and place you around people you can learn from.

Bringing it all together

There isn’t a secret shortcut or hack that guarantees you an HR job straight after graduation. But there is a pattern you can actually follow. People who successfully figure out how to get into human resources don’t rely on luck – they build momentum step by step.

First, they understand what the job really involves, not just the buzzwords in job ads. Then they look at their own experience and pull out the parts that already sound like HR: training new people, dealing with tricky customers, organising schedules, keeping things running when everyone else is stressed.

Next, they learn just enough of the basics – contracts, onboarding, HR systems, simple employment law – to talk about the work without guessing. They focus on entry-level roles where that mix of people skills and basic structure actually matters: HR Assistant, Coordinator, recruiting support, people ops.

And finally, they treat applications like a process, not a lottery ticket. They tailor their CV, write honest cover letters, follow up when it makes sense, and talk to real HR people instead of waiting for an algorithm to notice them. Some weeks it feels slow. But each application, each conversation, and each small skill they add makes the next “yes” more likely.

If you approach the next few months this way, you’re not just reading about how to get into human resources – you’re actively moving toward it. The path might not be straight, and it definitely won’t be instant, but it will be real. And once you’re in, everything you did to get there becomes part of the story that helps you support the next person trying to make the same leap.