- Today’s CHRO is a strategic C-suite leader who guides executive decision-making and drives innovation, especially in times of uncertainty and workforce disruption.
- Eye-opening new research by The Josh Bersin Company paints a picture of who the CHRO is and how they got where they are today, following one of four distinct paths.
- As AI reshapes job functions, HR leaders must be proactive in their own upskilling and career planning.
In recent years, we’ve seen the role of chief human resources officer (CHRO) evolve from rule enforcer to key business leader.
Today’s CHRO plays an important part in shaping talent strategies and technology investments, while also weighing in on broader organizational decisions. It’s a role that is as complex and essential as ever in helping businesses navigate through the current tumultuous times.
Right now, organizations are grappling with imbalances within the labor market, including frontline worker shortages and white-collar worker layoffs and reductions.
AI is impacting every job function within a business, including but not limited to HR roles.
Additionally, employee engagement is at an all-time low, and four in 10 (42%) CEOs don’t see a future for their company if it stays on its current path, according to a 2025 PwC survey.
These are all challenges that HR leaders can help tackle, but first they need the right structure and tools.
“We know innovation is critical,” said Rebecca Warren, Director, Eightfold Talent-centered Transformation team, in a recent SHRM webinar, “but with all of these things happening, it’s hard to know where to even start.”
Kathi Enderes, Senior Vice President Research and Global Industry Analyst with The Josh Bersin Company, believes that a good place to start is recalibrating the HR model to focus on a systemic approach, meaning a department that’s evolved from service delivery and become a trusted consulting arm.
“We need to think about a different HR operating system with different skills and capabilities of the HR team, a changed organizational structure and a changed service delivery model,” Enderes said. “We need more cross-functional teams and fewer silos between HR and the business overall.”
Enderes adds that today’s CHROs and HR leaders must be conversant in HR technology and understand what AI agents and AI assistants can do for them.
Recently, Enderes joined Warren to share insights from a new report by The Josh Bersin Company about the evolving role of HR and the CHRO. They discussed what it takes to become a top-performing executive who helps drive business success.
Read on for some of the top takeaways from the conversation.
Related content: Kathi Enderes shares how the CHRO role has evolved from a rule enforcer to a strategic partner.
Systemic HR is redefining careers
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when HR teams were seen primarily as a back-office operation that handled compliance, administration, hiring, and payroll, along with mergers and acquisitions, exits, and support functions within the company.
Today, however, talent teams are shifting toward a mindset of systemic HR, which views the workplace as an interdependent system, not a set of disconnected parts.
“The profession itself is extremely complex and extremely high-value,” Enderes said, adding that the role of HR is changing. “With systemic HR, the CHRO really becomes this kind of C-suite executive who is thinking about the business outcomes overall, they’re weighing in on business strategy, business consulting. But then they also have to coach the C-suite as well. That’s something nobody else on the leadership team has to do.”
To better understand who CHROs are, Enderes and her team have been studying the profiles of 20,000 HR leaders around the world and found that they frequently describe their roles using adjectives including multifaceted, challenging, strategic, transformational, partnering, leader, architect, and complicated.
“You have to stand up for what’s right for the business and for your people,” Enderes said.
She shared the example of updating back-to-work policies. While CEOs may want people to return to offices, if the data shows that their employees don’t want to come back, organizations forcing returns could risk losing top talent to other businesses with more workplace flexibility.
The CHRO can help guide discussions like these to work for all parties.
Related content: Kathi Enderes shares how the role of the CHRO has evolved over the past 30 years.
Understanding the path to CHRO
The rise of the CHRO has been rapid, and it’s clear that the role is increasingly valued across organizations.
Research by Stanford found that 13% of CHROs stand among the top five highest-paid executives in their businesses. That’s a rise from 0.5% 30 years ago, and the pay gap between CHRO and CEO has closed by 50%.
While there’s significant diversity among CHROs — including their backgrounds, educations, and career paths — there’s also a lot of commonality.
Based on the analysis of those 20,000 CHRO profiles, here’s a glimpse of the numbers:
- They skew female: 69% of CHROs are women.
- They’re more advanced in their careers: 43% are 50 to 59 years old.
- They’re highly educated: 66% have a master’s or doctorate.
- They’re global: 53% have international experience.
- They come from varied work backgrounds: 24% have non-HR business experience and 41% have talent management experience.
- They don’t reflect a shared educational path: Only 15% majored in HR, and common majors run the gamut, including political science, accounting, finance, economic, law, psychology, and sociology, among others.
It’s clear that CHROs follow four distinct paths to arrive at their position, with one particular route — the career CHRO — being the most common.
Those pathways include the following:
The career CHRO: This is a person who moves from company to company in higher and higher roles within the HR profession until they’re hired as a CHRO. Then, they may move around to larger companies and continue to stay in the CHRO role. Among all companies surveyed, 73% of CHROs are career CHROs; among high-performing organizations, 74% are career CHROs.
The company CHRO: This is a person who stays at one company and works their way up within the HR function. Among all companies surveyed, 17% of CHROs are company CHROs; among high-performing organizations, 12% are company CHROs.
The business CHRO: This is a person who might come from a role in marketing or sales before taking on the HR function. Among all companies surveyed, 8% of CHROs are business CHROs; among high-performing companies, 12% are business CHROs.
The operations CHRO. This is a person coming from another area of the business, such as operations, administration, legal, or compliance. Among all companies surveyed, and among high-performing companies, 2% of CHROs are operations CHROs.
Related content: Learn more about supercharging your career with HR Career Navigator.
Talent intelligence empowers HR leaders’ career growth
While there are many different paths to HR leadership, one thing is clear: continually learning, building skills on the job, and connecting with mentors is essential. And those are actions that workers must be intentional about.
“If you’re not figuring out a way to learn something new every day, that may be a mistake because the world is changing fast,” Warren said. “You’ve got to make sure that you’re continuing to feed your brain, giving yourself new things to think about, and continuing to expand how you think about things.”
AI-driven tools can help guide that learning, Enderes added. Recently, The Josh Bersin Academy partnered with Eightfold to develop a free tool called HR Career Navigator, which provides AI-driven recommendations to empower HR professionals to become the CEO of their careers based on their skills, experiences, and goals.
“It’s a really personalized tool to help you with your own career,” Enderes said. “You go in and you upload your résumé and tell the system what you want to do, and it gives you recommendations and next steps, including suggestions of programs and courses, and even what mentors to connect with on the platform.”
With HR Career Navigator you can:
- Map out your career.
- Receive personalized career pathways.
- Receive personalized skill building recommendations.
- Connect with new members.
HR’s moment to lead, learn, and grow
In today’s world where AI is rapidly evolving and organizations are facing continual economic and workforce disruptions, HR leaders can play a powerful role building the right workforce, identifying the most effective technology and bringing humans and technology together to accomplish an organization’s goals.
To do these things well and add value to the organization, they must continue to challenge themselves and find opportunities to grow.
“Whether you want to be a CHRO or a senior HR leader, or maybe you’re looking at other careers, really be clear about where you want to go, decide where you want to go, and take every minute of the day to learn,” Enderes said.
Watch “AI, skills & career growth: What it takes to lead in today’s HR landscape” on demand now.