Gen Zers born in 2000 will have their quarter-life crisis this year. If that doesn’t make you feel old, just think about how much HR has changed over the span of their lifetimes.
When Liz Bronson started her HR career as a recruiter in the early 2000s, her days consisted of a lot more phone calls—and paperwork. “So much is different,” she told HR Brew, “and so much isn’t.”
Since then, HR pros have ditched many (but not all) paper processes, and as they’ve done so, the function has evolved. But its values have remained the same, said the VP of people at pool service software firm Skimmer and co-host of the Real Job Talk podcast for mid-career professionals. “I had a mentor back then, who told me, ‘If you do the right thing by your people, you’re doing the right thing by the company.’ I still stand by that today,” she said.
Flash back to the 2000s. Those early years, Bronson said, were characterized by copious amounts of paper: printed-out résumés, handwritten interview notes, and employee documents tucked away in massive filing cabinets. And nearly everything was manual.
“Back then, people had rolodexes on their desks,” she said of the pre-applicant tracking system days. Recruiters tracked every candidate and open role on paper or in Excel spreadsheets on old-school desktop computers.
The perception of HR was also different. Employees tended to view their people leaders as disciplinary figures who only spoke to them when they were in trouble. She also remembers her peers in HR business partner roles being regarded as “paper pushers,” unimportant to business strategy. While the sentiment among employees does somewhat persist today, as the function has evolved, it’s become less prevalent, and leadership has relied more heavily on people leaders’ expertise and guidance.
HR pros didn’t have a way to describe the “candidate experience” and “employee experience,” she said, and what they involved varied from company to company. “There was definitely care,” she said, noting that keeping candidates “warm” and taking care of employees have long been important. “It wasn’t as branded as it is now.”
What’s changed? Nowadays, HR tech has made it so that most people teams have applicant tracking systems, automated payroll, and human capital management software not only reducing paperwork, but streamlining processes. And following the introduction of LinkedIn in 2003, Bronson said, talent pros could suddenly learn everything about a candidate’s career with the click of a button.
“LinkedIn is our Rolodex,” Bronson said. “It’s so integral to the experience of corporate America today…If you told a recruiter who has five years of experience to recruit without the internet, they couldn’t.”
With extra time on their hands, HR strategies got more creative. Advanced people analytics helped make employee engagement more quantifiable and trackable, allowing HR to measure the “quality of new hires,” or employees’ performance in their first few months, and whether their employees report having friends at work. And, in recent years, people pros have started more intentionally focusing their attention on shaping company culture.
“I don’t think HR was as concerned with culture [back then],” Bronson said. “I don’t remember us talking, as an HR team, about what’s the culture here at our company…I don’t remember corporate values early in my career or things like that.”
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She said “softer” trends, like company culture, became a focus for HR as millennial and Gen Z employees entered the workplace, bringing with them new expectations. This also ushered in a new way of thinking about perks and benefits, resulting in pet bereavement leave, time-off for mental health days, and meditation apps.
To that end, HR pros have also had to up their communication game, she added. While good communication skills have always been integral, it’s now “a bullet on the job description.”
“Now, absolutely, we have to be thinking about communication, and thinking about how we message things, and making sure that our employees understand why things are happening,” she said.
The last two decades have seen HR go from “transactional to strategic” and from “reactive to proactive,” said Laura Mazzullo, founder of East Side Staffing. While these trends have ebbed and flowed, she said the overall trajectory has gone in a positive direction.
“There’s a pendulum that swings, where sometimes we’re really in a good direction, meaning we are moving towards HR and TA being incredibly valued, and appreciated, and understood, and sometimes we’re in a market where it’s really undervalued and underappreciated,” Mazzullo said. “So, overall, in 20 years, I’ve seen it go in a good direction.”
HR will continue progressing from here. There’s been a movement in recent years from businesses caring exclusively about the bottom line to adopting a more people-centric mindset. As this trend progresses, Mazzullo told HR Brew she hopes companies continue to see their people pros as strategic business partners, while recognizing there’s still work to be done.
“I heard this yesterday, somebody said to me, ‘Oh, we’re going back to the office, and I’m head of HR, and the CEO didn’t even ask me. They just made that decision,’” she said. “That stuff that used to happen 20 years ago. I’m surprised it’s happening again.”
To make this a reality, HR pros will have to shift their mindsets too, Mazzullo said.
“HR people feel like they’re not worthy of receiving help. They feel like they should be able to do it all,” she said “People will continue to value HR and see the impact of HR, but if HR pros don’t see that, then it’s not going to move forward, so we need more confidence in HR.”
While recruiter layoffs, DE&I rollbacks, and RTO mandates—among myriad other changes—may have HR pros feeling like the function is “sliding back” into the years of yore, Mazzullo said they should continue pushing forward.
“HR people can help keep it going forward by being confident, by explaining how valuable it is, and why we need to keep some of that going,” she said. “But they can be chameleons…and just like obedience, that’s not going to be useful, so I think we need to see the HR people being confident enough to drive the change.”
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
