Required Reading: Here Are Our Top Five HR Blogs

It should come as no surprise that we read a lot of HR blogs and news sites to bring you our newsletter and deep dives. It’s what we do here. And we want you to be able to, as well.

So, to that end, we thought it would be a good idea to dig into our top five HR blogs and sites that can keep you informed and provide some insights into what we’re reading every week and/or month. We will even put a reading frequency amount for each site so you can see how often we check in.

Let’s kick it off.

Like the name suggests, HR Dive is filled with . . . dives. The site primarily focuses on news and research, but the most valuable content they offer is when they take a deep dive into current events.

For example, one of their most recent deep dive articles focuses on workplace bullying, specifically showcasing nine ways HR can curb the issue. This is an interesting piece because there have been SO many articles lately about poor workplace culture.

HR Drive takes strides to examine these threads and pull them together in a longer, more thought-provoking piece, which is why it’s the first on our list. They also stay current on laws, company news impacting HR, and many other things.

Reading Frequency: Daily

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is always a go-to source for us for obvious reasons. They are THE leaders in the HR space (but you probably already knew that).

If you need to know just about anything regarding HR practice, strategic tips, and complex, hands-on HR instructions, SHRM is where you should turn. But, fewer people actually follow their news wing, which is equally important.

SHRM News is a great place to get tips and tricks from experts in the field. They take more of an educational stance than HR Dive, too. For example, they commonly have listicles that go over various issues from wage problems that come from daylight savings time ending, open enrollment trends, and many others.

They’re also really great at breaking down extremely complex HR issues into easily digestible articles. If something happens in the news that’s HR-related, you can bet that SHRM already covered it.

However, given that most of the content is evergreen (meaning that the articles offered there can be read any time instead of needing to be read immediately) it has a lower frequency than HR Dive.

Reading Frequency: Weekly

If you’re looking for full-blown research news, nothing compares to Phys.Org.

This site pulls together tons and tons of press releases from academic institutions all over the world. To get the most out of the site for HR, we recommend favoriting the ‘economics and business’ section, which will pull only articles related to those topics.

While it may seem like these topics are too broad and general, they really aren’t at all. In fact, most of the articles are directly aligned with the HR function with news focusing on employment, strategy, and a slew of great insights to help inform initiatives at your own organization.

If you’ve ever wondered how news sites get their information, it’s likely that it came from a site like Phys.Org or other PR sites. It’s basically a repository of news that doesn’t contain many analytical articles by editors. This makes it a prime source to get news straight from a source’s mouth. You can also find contact info in most of these articles to reach out to the researchers/institutions that have published the releases.

The one downside to this site is that it really depends on when academic publications put out new articles. This means that there isn’t new content every day for you to consume. We’ve found that early in the month is a prime time to take a look at these sources because news comes out faster. However, we recommend reading more often than that because it can be impossible to know exactly what drops when.

Also, while we suggest you pay special attention to the economics and business side of things, skimming the other sections of the site – such as the ‘social sciences’ section – can also lead you to some great organizational psychology articles and other things.

Reading Frequency: Weekly

These two sites both come in at number four because they operate in very similar ways by pulling articles from a bunch of different sites and listing them on their home page.

This is great because it works like a web-based newsletter. There are teams of people at each site that do all of the digging around the internet to bring you the best thought leadership content around. You can tell where this content comes from by looking at the citation under the header image. This can help you understand where the content is coming from and whether or not it is worthwhile for you to read or not.

Human Resources Today, for example, gets a lot of content from Cornerstone OnDemand, Visier, and others. HR Morning seems to get most of their stories from guest writers with a few staff writers thrown in.

In summary, both of these sites are great to pay attention to. They offer insights from working HR professionals and writers. Most articles are tips and tricks and things of that nature. Think like a journalist while reading these sites, though, meaning that you have to understand that some of these are sponsored and/or bias. Despite this very small shortcoming, we highly recommend checking in on these sites on a semi-regular basis.

Reading Frequency: Bi-Weekly

Last but not least, we have Human Resources Executive and Entrepreneur, two established publications that have been around for quite some time.

To be fair, we would also add in NY Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes to this section, too, but they are more general than the two listed.

These sources are great for journalistic stories that seem to take a bit of a deeper look into issues that the other sources here. They also have the brand power to pull in some great writers and thinkers in the HR space.

With all that said, we tend to skim these publications once or twice a month to see what’s going on and stay informed. As you can probably tell from the other sites we listed towards the top, we tend to traffic sites that allow us to go straight to the source. In fact, like we said up above, Phys.Org or other sites like it are generally where journalists get their information for the stories that end up on other more newspaper-like sites. So why not just go there instead?

The value of these more traditional publications is their expert opinion on the news. We love seeing what people have to say.

Reading Frequency: Intermittent

We hope that this list helps you understand where we get out info but also just how many resources are out there to keep you at the cutting edge of HR and business in general.

There are many, many, many other sites out that there that we missed, including a ton of HR blogs by some great writers.

Happy reading!

Josh Hrala

Josh is an HR journalist and ghostwriter who's been covering outplacement and offboarding for over six years. Before pivoting to the HR world, he was a science journalist whose work can be found in Popular Science, ScienceAlert, The Huffington Post, Cracked, Modern Notion, and more.