Take a Listen: What Will HR Look Like in 2025?

Employers spend a lot of time and energy on the entire employee lifecycle from sourcing to onboarding straight through retention, engagement and exit interviews. In this podcast, Ira Wolfe, president of Success Performance Solutions, explores what human resources (HR) might look like by 2025 and even 2030. With automation and artificial intelligence emerging, HR professionals will need to address the ethics of using these tools in employee recruitment and retention. They will need to take the lead. HR professionals will have fewer repetitive, low-skill tasks to complete in the future, shifting to a greater focus on analysis and strategy. But HR also must provide the soft skills like empathy and compassion that are necessary to build relationships with employees, he says. To keep up with this exponential change, Wolfe says, HR professionals need to become more comfortable with technology: Don’t ignore it, because training and development will evolve with the principles of sharing and community found in social media. As technology begins to identify poor performers or those job candidates that won’t stay over the long term, HR will need to examine the ethics of those decisions, especially if those decisions discriminate against certain groups and could possibly run afoul of regulations. Rather than buy off-the-shelf software, he advises that HR take the lead on guiding the development of programs to ensure that empathy, compassion and the human element are not lost in the decision-making process. HR also needs to be at the forefront to prevent future legal implications, especially as public policy and regulations lag behind advancements in technology.

Listen to the full podcast on HRDailyAdvisor.HLR.com, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast app.