smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

I regard soft HR as: ‘the skills required to manage and engage employees beyond the purely administrative level’ and I think of hard HR as everything that is left.

So if you were dealing with a redundancy situation, both hard and soft skills would be called for, that is both the legal and paperwork side would constitute the hard HRM while the people skills required to manage the communications element would be classed as soft HRM. The distinction is academic though, because a good HR manager will demonstrate both hard and soft skills almost seamlessly.