30 Essential HR Blogs Every HR Professional Should Read in 2020

Favorite Post: The Art and Science of Recognition: 5 Best Practices for Employee Recognition Programs

What it’s all about: The Bonusly Blog is about sharing fresh perspectives and insights on employee engagement, recognition in the workplace, the employee experience, company culture, and employee rewards. Since their team counts thousands of organizations as happy customers, expect expert advice on building better workplaces. You’ll learn about a wide range of topics, from how to address high turnover to examples of employee recognition in action.

Favorite Post: 9 Employee Retention Strategies that Actually Work

What it’s all about: Kazoo’s blog is all about the latest trends and best practices in employee engagement. Whether they’re covering the science of employee appreciation, tips for company goal setting, or first-day checklists for new hires, Kazoo offers actionable advice on a variety of HR topics. 

Favorite Post: The Problem with Points-Based Rewards Systems

What it’s all about: Blueboard’s blog inspires HR leaders to recognize their top people in a more authentic, meaningful way. Their HR insiders challenge the status quo by offering fresh perspectives and best practices from their suite of clients, with ideas you can steal with pride for your own programs. Beyond recognition and rewards, Blueboard covers a variety of hot topics affecting the complete employee lifecycle, from employer branding to building a qualified candidate pipeline, organizational empathy to performance management. You’ll also find their complete collection of webinar recordings and recaps, as well as love letters from their reward recipients (aww).

Favorite Post: Is it Possible to be Too Smart?

Favorite Post: 33 Amazing Employee Recognition Ideas You Need to Be Using

What it’s all about: Yes, we shamelessly included ourselves in this list. But let us explain!  This blog proves even “non-traditional HR blogs” can still be important ones for people who work in HR. The SnackNation blog helps companies improve culture, explore new workplace wellness ideas, and increase employee engagement. So if you’re trying to make your office an environment where people are happy and healthy, you’ve landed in the right place!

Favorite Post: The Ultimate Guide to Employee Engagement

What it’s all about: This company culture blog’s topics include employee retention, recruitment strategies, reviews, organizational culture, remote work, and even more. As an added bonus, this blog has a sense of humor, makes fun popular culture references,  and touches on some subjects other HR blogs might be afraid to cover, like strange co-workers.

Favorite Post:  What Makes Your Team Fail? Three Strategies to Avoid Disaster

Favorite Post: Employee loyalty is not a given, it has to be earned

What it’s all about: Every list of HR blogs needs one that’s all about employees. The Get Hppy blog turns out employee-centric content from a fresh perspective, answering all of your most pressing questions about employee happiness and pumping out tons of amazing ideas you can easily implement in your office.

Favorite Post: Your Guide to HR Career Paths 

Favorite Post: DEEP THOUGHTS: Are Great Places to Work Holding Back Talent Development?

Favorite Post: How to USE SEO Best Practices to Deepen Your Talent Pool

What it’s all about: Some of the best HR blogs focus on one topic…to help you become an expert on it. This one is all about recruiting, whether it’s job searching, sourcing, tactics, or technology. Each post explores the nebulous and constantly changing world of recruiting, so you can expect something new every time you land on the blog.

Favorite Post: Open Office Environments Suck and HR Knows This

What it’s all about: Laurie Ruettimann isn’t afraid to share her expertise on HR, even if it’s not exactly what you want to hear. This blogger is always direct, fresh, and honest, and shares post that really get you thinking about the way you work. Plus, with the range of topics she posts about, you’ll never be bored. One day it’s interview questions and the next day it could be writing a performance improvement plan.

Favorite Post: Cheering Foul Balls—Sometimes Effort Shouldn’t Count

What it’s all about: This blog brings all of the HR experts you may read on other blogs together to write a blog that….well, leaves out what you might read about in other Human Resources blogs. When recounting how the blog got started, FOT recalls the words of the original founders:

“We want to hire you to create a Talent Management blog for our new website. Like the HR Capitalist, but without all the boring HR stuff like legal issues and employee relations tactics – just the sexy stuff.”

So basically, you’ll find lots of interesting insights and commentary on HR and workplace issues…but don’t expect to be bored.

Favorite Post: Workplace Horror Stories

What it’s all about: The company behind the blog has been called “the job-hunting lovechild of e-Harmony and LinkedIn.” Good.co guides people in finding career matches with quizzes and articles that use the company’s Proprietary Psychometric Algorithm. Because other blogs on this list don’t have access to Good.Co’s proprietary data, you won’t find posts like theirs on any other site. Using this data, their posts explore gender equality, personalities, companies, trends, and more.

Favorite Post: What Companies Don’t Get About Work-Life Integration

What it’s all about: This blog covers the latest in employee happiness. The Fond company is all about helping offices find ways to give their employees perks, and their blog naturally follows that progression with tons of ideas on employee happiness and engagement.

Favorite Post: Working Dead: The Cost Of Low Employee Engagement

What it’s all about: This blog is all about achieving those good office vibes that everybody wants, but are often so hard to find. It covers employee engagement, company culture, performance reviews, and everything and anything else that influences the vibe of your office…using awesome illustrations and share-ready infographics. With a company goal of making workplaces better places, this blog produces more highly-focused content than many other blogs out there.

Favorite Post: ADA and Accommodating Peanut Allergies at Work

Favorite Post: Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive

What it’s all about: This blog’s primary writer, Bob Sutton, is also author of the bestselling book, The No Asshole Rule, which tackles workplace negativity head-on. Just like his book, Sutton writes this blog for business and HR leaders who want to examine the deepest issues lurking in their offices, and more importantly, do something about them. While other HR focused blogs often revolve around the opinions of the writer, Sutton commits to an evidence-based approach to his advice. 

Favorite Post: Fired Up

What it’s all about: In addition to the usual topics on HR, Christopher writes about overall self-improvement habits that carry over to the workplace, no matter what your profession. If your office’s HR team sent daily inspirational emails, they would probably sound a lot like Christopher’s posts.

Favorite Post: 4 Easy Steps to Creating the Company Culture Your Employees Crave  

What it’s all about: The Insperity blog has one main goal: to be a trusted provider of new ideas and business best practices for people creating, leading and transforming business. Their blog posts provide in-depth advice from Insperity’s experts whose authority comes from careful analysis, study and extensive industry experience. They cover a wide range of today’s most talked-about HR and business improvement topics and questions.

Favorite Post: EEOC Weighs in on Employer Wellness Programs

Favorite Post: Hiring Is About To Get Really Difficult!

What it’s all about: Tim, who was kind enough to share some wisdom on employee engagement with us, is a 20 year HR pro currently serving as President of HRU Technical Resources. He’s insanely knowledgable on recruiting and his writing style is very genuine. Plus he’s a pretty funny guy (he claims to be the “World’s foremost expert on Hugging” on his twitter bio). This is one blog you MUST bookmark if you’re serious about HR. 

Favorite Post: A Simple Process to Turn Fear into Power

What it’s all about: The Tiny Buddha blog is not specific to HR, but it makes it onto our list for one very good reason: every HR manager (and every person really) could use a little more zen and positive thinking in their lives. This blog gives readers a fabulous dose of mindful positive thinking…just what they need to manage a positive workforce.

Favorite Post: 100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers and HR

What it’s all about: Dr. Nguyen’s blog digs deep into psychology to help readers understand and deal with what happens in their offices every day. The blog is split into three main focus areas:

1. Industrial-Organizational Psychology, and how new theories can be applied in the workplace
2. Occupational Health Psychology, and the general well-being of workers  
3. Organizational Behavior, namely how people behave at work

They separate themselves from other HR blogs through their commitment to presenting scholarly information, and their promise to only cite the most credible sources.

Favorite Post: 23 employee motivation statistics to silence naysayers

Favorite Post: How to Measure Recruiting Performance

What it’s all about: The tagline for upstartHR is “making HR better, one HR pro at a time,” and that’s exactly what every post aims to do. This blog covers ideas, tips, best practices, and even book reviews, and the author hopes that both new HR professionals and HR veterans will have plenty to take away from his blog. In short, each post will inspire you to keep your passion for HR going strong.

Favorite Post: Avoid These Trust Diminishing Potholes at Work

Favorite Post: Great culture? Look to the cows

What it’s all about: The chic, user-friendly design of the posts make this one of the glossiest HR blogs out there. And in addition to looking like your favorite magazine, ‘a’ Magazine produces consistently amazing HR content as well. The blog’s goal, in their own words, is to:

“Help anyone in any role be an a-player, contribute to an a-team and bring their a-game.”

In blog content speak, this translates to great articles on leadership, engagement, insights, and more.  

Favorite Post: Ask a Hiring Expert: How to Build a Hiring Process

What it’s all about: The CareerPlug blog is focused on helping non-HR people hire better; we’re talking anyone from small business owners to franchise operators to people who have never even heard the term “candidate experience” before. If hiring isn’t your primary job duty, CareerPlug is the blog for you. In fact, they require every one of their employees to become certified Hiring Experts so you don’t have to be. The advice they share is practical and actionable, all taken from their proven hiring playbook they’ve spent years perfecting.

Favorite Post: Yes, Short-Termism Really is a Problem

What it’s all about: While HBR isn’t technically a blog, it is a website publishing expert posts that anyone in business should read. This non-blog ended up on our best human resources blogs list because it epitomizes intelligent online discussions about business, including HR topics like generational issues and leadership development.

Favorite Post: Performance Management Trends of 2019

What it’s all about: The Clear Review blog is headed up by a team of human resources experts who value simplicity above all else. Dedicated to straightforward, jargon-free content, CEO and Founder of Clear Review, Stuart Hearn, publishes regular posts on anything relating to performance management — including how to engage employees, how to avoid burnout and the importance of great employee-employer relationships. They also publish a yearly post detailing the emerging performance management trends for the upcoming year.

Favorite Post: 60 effective performance review phrases

What it’s all about: It’s a great time to be in Human Resources. As more HR leaders get a seat at the table and People and Culture become the catalyst to business success, everyone wins. The Culture Amp blog brings clarity to what it means to be a successful HR and People leader today with forward-focused content on employee engagement, performance, diversity and inclusion, wellbeing, and more.