Introducing the HR roles of the future

The start of the decade has been one of the busiest on record for human resources depart­ments, but by the mid­dle of the 2020s their make-up could look very dif­fer­ent, with a whole wave of future HR roles com­ing on stream.

Cognizant’s 21 HR Jobs of the Future report, pub­lished in May, acknowl­edges the scale of change ahead, observ­ing: “This is HR’s moment of truth to lead the organ­i­sa­tion in nav­i­gat­ing the future of work and pre­pare work­ers for the next decade.”

It sug­gests the need by 2025 for roles such as a chat­bot and human facil­i­ta­tor, gig econ­o­my man­ag­er, chief cli­mate response leader and human bias offi­cer.

Robert Hoyle Brown, vice pres­i­dent of Cog­nizan­t’s US Cen­ter for the Future of Work, says: “There are five core themes across HR’s jobs of the future: indi­vid­ual and organ­i­sa­tion­al resilience, organ­i­sa­tion­al trust and safe­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty and inno­va­tion, data lit­er­a­cy, and human-machine part­ner­ships.”

High­light­ing a cou­ple more exam­ples, he explains that human net­work ana­lysts would study the “nat­ur­al net­work” of how peo­ple come togeth­er and stay con­nect­ed using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and data ana­lyt­ics, while soft­er HR skills would be exem­pli­fied in roles like chief pur­pose plan­ners, who iden­ti­fy social caus­es, align stake­hold­ers and encour­age infor­ma­tion, ideas, con­tent and influ­ence to flow.

Nick Matthews, vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er, Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa, at Cul­ture Amp, an employ­ee expe­ri­ence plat­form, believes such change to future HR roles is rem­i­nis­cent of com­pa­nies appoint­ing chief risk offi­cers after the 2007–8 finan­cial crash.

“We’re see­ing the rise of new roles that would have been unheard of before: direc­tor of remote expe­ri­ence, chief well­be­ing offi­cer, and wel­fare and resilience man­agers,” he says.

“What might once have been deemed out­landish job titles now rep­re­sent a response to unprece­dent­ed cri­sis; organ­i­sa­tions’ deter­mi­na­tion to reach out to and sup­port their employ­ees.

“Today’s nov­el job roles such as direc­tor of remote expe­ri­ence reflect chang­ing com­pa­ny oper­at­ing struc­tures, sig­ni­fy­ing depart­men­tal func­tions have been rede­fined in recent years by bet­ter con­nec­tiv­i­ty, easy-to-use soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice solu­tions and new app-based busi­ness tools.”

People analytics key to future HR functions

Oth­ers believe a sci­en­tif­ic and data-dri­ven approach to tal­ent and recruit­ment will also change the HR depart­ment by 2025, giv­ing rise, for exam­ple, to the algo­rithm bias audi­tor and HR data detec­tive.

Dr Ryne Sher­man, chief sci­ence offi­cer at Hogan Assess­ments, says: “Research shows HR lead­ers are less like­ly than the typ­i­cal per­son to be data dri­ven. HR depart­ments that are able to break with the sta­tus quo and bring in ana­lyt­i­cal minds to build bet­ter and more effi­cient tal­ent man­age­ment sys­tems, will be miles ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion and well posi­tioned for suc­cess.”

Janine Cham­ber­lin, senior direc­tor at LinkedIn, agrees. “Data-dri­ven HR teams will also guide com­pa­nies on their future hir­ing needs based on new skill require­ments or skills gaps with­in their organ­i­sa­tions and hold busi­ness­es to account on diverse hir­ing,”
she says.

Diver­si­ty and inclu­sion could be an area where future HR roles will change fast. Bar­ring­ton Hib­bert Asso­ciates, spe­cial­ists in exec­u­tive recruit­ment with­in the finan­cial ser­vices sec­tor, has noticed more firms recruit­ing for diver­si­ty-spe­cif­ic roles with­in their HR func­tion and say it has esca­lat­ed expo­nen­tial­ly this year.

Voice plat­form Though­tex­change now has a head of anti-racism, diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion, a title that chief peo­ple offi­cer Dessalen Wood says was cre­at­ed because “we mean busi­ness”.

She explains: “Put the prob­lem in the title. Make it some­thing you can’t look away from, no mat­ter how hard the work to address it will be. Hav­ing a head of anti-racism, diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion does the one thing miss­ing from tra­di­tion­al diver­si­ty and inclu­sion titles, it acknowl­edges sys­temic prob­lems exist. It says to our employ­ees, our cus­tomers and the pub­lic, this is real and we are no longer going to look the oth­er way.”

Both humans and machines are the future of work

As the rise of AI and machine-learn­ing takes over parts of the busi­ness, Derek Irvine, senior vice pres­i­dent of strat­e­gy at human cap­i­tal man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy firm Workhu­man, pre­dicts a chief heart offi­cer will bring more human­i­ty to the work­place, treat­ing employ­ees as peo­ple, rather than num­bers.

“This new role requires not only peo­ple man­age­ment and devel­op­ment skills, but also an in-depth under­stand­ing of human behav­iour and a high lev­el of emo­tion­al intel­li­gence,” he says. “Can­di­dates may come from out­side tra­di­tion­al recruit­ing spheres, from a broad­er range of fields and expe­ri­ence.”

But if such tal­ent is to be sought else­where for now, is enough being done with­in HR to pre­pare new entrants for these future roles?

Ruth Cor­nish, co-founder and direc­tor of HRi, a mem­ber­ship organ­i­sa­tion for inde­pen­dent HR and peo­ple pro­fes­sion­als, believes cur­rent train­ing regimes and qual­i­fi­ca­tions will have to change.

“The Char­tered Insti­tute of Per­son­nel and Devel­op­ment qual­i­fi­ca­tion will need a com­plete over­haul. And there will be space for a new, more prac­ti­cal qual­i­fi­ca­tion, encom­pass­ing the role of tech­nol­o­gy, allow­ing HR prac­ti­tion­ers to hit the ground run­ning once they qual­i­fy. This will be a game-chang­er in the indus­try,” she says.

Cog­nizan­t’s Hoyle Brown also sees the change com­ing to future HR roles from the spread of out­side influ­ence and life­long learn­ing. “From his­to­ry to com­mu­ni­ca­tions, to com­put­er sci­ence, to eco­nom­ics to phi­los­o­phy, the future of work is a prism that cuts through seem­ing­ly every dis­ci­pline found in the mod­ern uni­ver­si­ty, to HR’s poten­tial ben­e­fit,” he con­cludes. 

“In fact, one of our jobs of the future is lit­er­al­ly called the uni4life co-ordi­na­tor. Ulti­mate­ly, the job of HR, today and in the future, will be to get that bal­ance just right to catal­yse the future of work for the com­pa­nies they serve.”