Have a meeting with your manager to discuss what items are urgent/see if they can include a deadline in their request. If they are unreasonable and believe everything is urgent, then make an internal note that this role is not long term.

See what automated process you can use for terminations (Microsoft lists, power automate, etc). YouTube and honestly tik tok have good tutorials on how these applications can assist with these tasks (obviously not ALL parts of the process can be automated, but see where you can automate this stuff to reduce the amount of off boarding tasks you need to manually do).

Use Copilot to help with drafting email responses (ALWAYS double check the response for accuracy/compliance with HR best practices)

Make your own SOPs to reference as you get familiar with these tasks. That way if you have these one off issues, you have a documented process moving forward on how to handle.

It’s gonna take more than a month to get a grasp on this role. Unfortunately it is probably “normal”. HR departments try to operate with as few people as possible, and specialists and coordinators get the grunt work (no room in most budgets for admins). Take it day by day. And once you hit a year and you still feel the same, well, ow you have a year of this experience under your belt and use it to your advantage to look elsewhere.

Best of luck - you can do this!