HR Isn’t Going Extinct. But the Old Job Description Might.

In June, Johnny Taylor, CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, stood on the SHRM26 stage in Orlando and told HR professionals that their function had “lost the plot” and faces “extinction.”

He backed it up with a story. In 2025 he asked 92 Fortune 500 CEOs whether they valued HR, merely tolerated it, or saw so little value that the company could live without it. Only 10% said they valued it. 30% said it had little to no value.

That is Taylor’s account of one meeting, not a survey, and it comes from the US. But I would not wave it away. Little of it surprised me. It is more or less the argument of Part II of my book.

“Reinvent itself or abolish itself”

Part II of my book, Employee Engagement, What Else?, is called The People Function. It opens with a line from Ignace Van Doorselaere, former CEO of Neuhaus: “HR faces the choice. Reinvent itself or abolish itself.” The book came out in March 2025, more than a year before the keynote.

I should add that I’m not an HR person, and I’m HR’s biggest fan. In the book I say so in as many words. HR is doing all it can, often with limited resources, and people are the heart of any organisation.

But being a fan doesn’t stop me from reading the numbers. In HR.com’s Future of the HR Function 2024 study, 30% rated HR’s ability to meet employees’ strategic needs at 8 or higher out of 10. For executives’ needs, the figure was 43%. Neither is a number to build a boardroom reputation on.

Where I would push back

Taylor said HR was “so focused solely on people” that it “sort of forgot where this is all going.”

I see it slightly differently. The problem was never too much focus on people. It was that the focus rarely got translated into the language the rest of the business speaks: customers, growth, cost, evidence. IT made that move in the 2000s and marketing in the 2010s, as I argue in the book. HR’s turn is now, and I suggest it should see itself as a marketing team with colleagues as its customers, start from what employees actually think, and bring data to the table before anyone asks for it.

Taylor’s own remedy sounds familiar: show the return on each person, forecast attrition before it happens, think like a business. I would call that a data-first People function. It is not less human. It is the version of human that survives a budget meeting.

It was never HR’s job alone

There is a second half to this, and it rarely makes the headlines. In the book I describe engagement as a shared responsibility: the CEO initiates it, HR owns it, managers drive it and everyone carries it forward.

So when a CEO says HR has little value, I would ask a few questions back. Who gave HR the mandate? Who gave it the data? Who showed up when the results came in? A function can lose the plot. It can also be handed a script nobody else is willing to read.

What HR needs in the room

The best thing HR can bring to an executive committee is a number the CFO respects. At Bravos, we measure the leadership view and the employee view separately and report the distance between them, set against comparable organisations in the UAE. For a People leader, that gap is an argument made of evidence rather than opinion.

Extinction may be too dramatic a word. But the old job description, administration first and strategy second, does look endangered. Reinvent or abolish, as Ignace put it. I know which one I am rooting for.

More in Employee Engagement, What Else?, in Part II, The People Function