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This past year was rough.
People pros navigated a cooling labor market, more return-to-office debacles, and record employee burnout. And as if all that juggling wasn’t enough, 45% took on more duties without a promotion or pay raise, according to a HR Brew survey.
Some 46% said they took on new responsibilities for career growth, but 35% said they did because their team didn’t grow with the growing demand of their organization, and 24% said they did because their team was downsized.
“[Our] HR strategy has changed, many additional responsibilities [were] added to [the] role,” one respondent told us. “Our HR director left, and it took six-plus months to find a replacement. We had to pick up everything she would have done,” another said.
HR Brew spoke with Laura Mazzullo, owner of East Side Staffing, about what happened to the people profession in 2024.
It’s not you. It’s everyone. Since she started recruiting for HR specifically in 2007, Mazzullo told HR Brew the HR industry has had three particularly bad years: 2008, 2020, and 2024.
“The last three years, I was busier than ever in [2021 to 2023], helping companies hire for their HR department and expanding teams, and it was a really beautiful time for HR people to, frankly, feel good about what they do and what they can contribute,” she said. But HR pros, she added, “they’ve [been] beaten down psychologically this year.”
Whether HR pros were unemployed due to layoffs, while others were overworked following the downsizing of their departments or burned out due to a lack of recognition, Mazzullo said the cause was the same: The market is bad. “It’s not a personal flaw. It’s really a market indicator,” she said.
The downturn HR experienced in 2024 is unique from those in 2008 and 2020, Mazzullo said, because it happened sooner than expected.
“I do think it’s that dramatic of a bad year, but…nobody’s really wanted to admit it while it’s happening,” she said. “Maybe people were just surprised that it happened so soon after Covid.”
Now what? Mazzullo recommended that HR pros try to not take the events of 2024 personally. Every downturn is eventually met with an upturn, and the best course of action is to prepare for it, she said.
“I have to remind myself, this is just simply a result of the market. As soon as the market is back, I will be needed. I know what I’m doing. I’m an expert in my space,” she said. “I have to give myself that pep talk, too. I think everybody needs to when there are market turns.”