Data Insights from Bersin’s New Definitive Guide to Human Resources

“Today,” write analysts Josh Bersin and Kathi Enderes, “we expect our HR teams to build a compelling employment brand, attract highly skilled individuals in a tough labor market, and continuously train managers and teams to drive productivity, and help the company drive well-being, collaboration, and innovation.”

That begs a serious question: “How can HR keep up?” 

Josh and Kathi pose this simple yet provocative question in the introduction of The Josh Bersin Company’s latest report, The Definitive Guide to Human Resources: Systemic HR.™ The 64-page guide is packed with valuable insights, including the results from an original survey of over 1,000 organizations and a detailed four-level maturity model outlining the journey from transactional compliance to systemic HR. 

In this post, you’ll get a close look at just a few of the report’s many insights — namely those derived from LinkedIn data, made possible through our partnership with The Josh Bersin Company. 

Read on to learn more about what the typical HR professional looks like today, which roles are rising in the HR function, and what the convergence of skills across HR domains means for the future.

Profiling today’s typical HR professional

First, let’s look at who the average HR professional is today. As of 2023, the average HR pro is a college-educated Millennial woman who has been at her current company for less than two years.

It’s critical to remember that this is only an average: a single composite figure standing in for 7.5 million individual LinkedIn members who have roles in HR and who themselves make up a rich diversity of experiences and identities. For instance, while a narrow majority (51%) of HR pros are Millennials, that also means 49% are not: 28% are Gen Z, 18% are Gen X, and 3% are Baby Boomers. 

But while the profile of the average HR worker hasn’t changed too dramatically in recent years, the same cannot be said about that worker’s roles, responsibilities, and skills, as we’ll see in the next sections. 

The roles seeing the greatest growth in HR

The variety of roles and skills held by HR professionals has expanded significantly in the last few years. In 2017, the HR talent pool on LinkedIn represented about 300 skills and 200 roles. Five years later, those figures had ballooned to over 400 skills and 250 roles, increases of 33% and 25% respectively.

Among the roughly 50 new HR roles, many are strategic leadership roles, such as director of employee experience, head of diversity and inclusion, and head of organizational development. This reflects the growing influence and increasing complexity of the HR function. 

However, you’ll see a more mixed picture if you look at the HR roles with the fastest-growing demand, as measured by paid job postings on LinkedIn.

These fast-growing roles tend to be more focused on administration and compliance — functions that are “mostly associated with the lowest level of HR function maturity,” according to the study. 

In stark contrast, the roles with falling demand tend to be more consultative and cross-functional, like HR business partners (HRBPs) and strategic advisors, along with general recruiters. Notably, demand for these roles actually spiked around 2022, about two years after the pandemic began, before declining precipitously over the next year or so. 

Given what the report says is the immense strategic value of HRBPs, this decline may signal that progress toward systemic HR is slowing. “Systemic HR is a mindset shift, thinking about every practice and strategy in the HR function in a fundamentally different way,” according to Josh and Kathi. “Thus, it may not be surprising that advanced practices are only adopted sparsely.” 

Different domains of HR increasingly converge

In LinkedIn’s analysis of the roughly 250 HR roles, we looked at how similar the top skills were from one role to another. By mapping out this “skills similarity” metric between HR roles, we identified six key clusters organized around shared skill sets.

The six clusters break down roughly as follows:

1. Talent Acquisition (top skills include recruiting, sourcing, and interviewing)
2. Talent Management, EX, and HR Tech (top skills include employee engagement, human resource information systems [HRIS], and HR management) 
3. L&D, DEI, and Culture (top skills include training and development, change management, and leadership development)
4. Total Rewards (top skills include compensation and benefits, benefits administration, and employee benefits design) 
5. HR Services Generalist and HRBP (top skills include HR management, HR policies, and HRIS) 
6. Payroll (top skills include payroll administration, payroll processing, and payroll taxes)  
   

While it’s interesting enough to see these roles and skills mapped out, the most important takeaway is actually about how these clusters have changed over time. 

Compared with five years ago, today’s clusters show significantly more overlap with one another. In other words, there’s a growing similarity between the skill sets of various HR roles, even as the number of those roles has increased. 

According to Josh and Kathi, this reflects a really positive development. “The HR function is moving into a more cohesive state where it can function as a system,” they write. “When HR people understand the work of other HR domains, they can collaborate better across functional silos.”

Final thoughts

Though the profile of the typical HR professional hasn’t changed much, their roles, responsibilities, and skills have — and will continue to keep evolving. 

It may be more accurate to say their roles have expanded: As we’ve seen, the overall number of skills and job titles has increased, but that doesn’t mean the roles are growing apart. On the contrary, the skill sets across distinct groups of HR roles increasingly overlap with one another. 

And yet, given the rising demand for administrative talent and falling demand for strategic partners, the HR function still has a long way to go and to grow to become truly systemic. 

These have been just a few highlights from The Definitive Guide to Human Resources: Systemic HR, which details how organizations progress from transactional to systemic HR. Hear more about it at today’s LinkedIn Audio Event, and learn more about Josh and Kathi’s work here. 

Methodology

This analysis measures a talent pool of 7.5 million HR professionals across all roles – including 400 skills and 250 roles – to determine demographics, skills, role clusters, and role trends over time. For role trends, paid job postings were used and roles were grouped, resulting in a more succinct list. The data was then normalized to the earliest time frame. For the cluster analysis, role clusters were statistically determined based on the 15 top skills for each role. For this part of the study, the HR talent pool was studied over 12 months (September 2022 to August 2023).

Gender identity isn’t binary, and we recognize that some LinkedIn members identify beyond the traditional gender constructs of “male” and “female.” If not explicitly self-identified, we have inferred the gender of members included in this analysis by classifying their first names as either male or female or by pronouns used on their LinkedIn profiles. Members whose gender could not be inferred as either male or female were excluded from that metric. Tenure is defined as the number of years a member stayed at a company before leaving, illustrating when a member is most likely to switch jobs.