Ep 819: Who Gets The Biggest Job In HR?

0:00Many TA leaders see CHRO as the ultimate career destination. The route to that job though is changing, and the qualities that companies are now selecting for are not the ones that most HR career paths develop. So how do you position yourself for a top job that's being redefined? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Cyber, the professional network for cyber security. If you're hiring for cybersecurity roles, you'll know that they are more complicated and time-consuming than more generic requisitions. The briefs are full of acronyms. Filtering through candidate pools is incredibly complex, and outbound response rates are a fraction of what you see elsewhere.

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1:36There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine than in all the ages of history.

1:51Hi there, welcome to episode 819 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. The job of the CHRO has never been more demanding, and the way that organisations decide who gets that job is changing fast. Appointment volumes have fallen sharply, boards are rethinking what they value in an HR leader, and the profile of the people winning the top seat looks very different from even two years ago. Experience of having done the job before is no longer the deciding factor it once was, which has implications for everyone with ambitions for the role. So what are companies now looking for when they appoint a CHRO?

2:34My guest this week is Olivia Sharp, a partner at executive search firm Eaton Bridge Partners, where she leads searches for chief people officers and heads the firm's research into CPO hiring globally. In our conversation, she shares what the data reveals about experience versus potential, the skills that now define the role, and how TA leaders can position themselves for the top job. Hi, Olivia, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do. Of course I'm a partner at an executive search and interim management business called Eton Bridge Partners.

3:16I'm a partner in our HR and chief people officer practice and I also head up our board practice. We specialise in executive appointments permanent and interim across C-suite and senior level roles and we also have a growing consulting division which focuses on transformation and change agendas for organisations. Personally I lead executive search mandates for chief people officers, HR directors and board level appointments. My background's a little bit unusual considering what I do because I used to be an HR director and now I'm on the other side of the table. And a lot of my work today sits in that intersection between leadership, organisational performance and governance.

3:59I also spend a bit of time researching trends in leadership talent, which is what led to the report that we're talking about a little bit today. And at heart, I'm just really fascinated in what makes organizations successful and the people within them and how you identify that talent and foster it. And it's certainly a really interesting time to be a chief people officer or to want to be a chief people officer. Lots of disruption going on out there. You mentioned the report that you do, which has been running for sort of a number of years. Tell us a little bit about the report and also, you know, what's kind of stood out from the latest set of results?

4:35So we've been running the report now for a number of years, but we published our latest edition earlier this year. The biggest headline for me is that we're seeing real fundamental shifts in what organisations are valuing when hiring chief people officers, as well as where they are looking and how often they are looking to hire that talent. appointment volumes have dropped quite dramatically globally over the last two years particularly and boards and leadership teams seem more willing than ever to take a calculated risk on talent and potential than they have really in all the time we've been running this piece of reporting rather than simply buying in proven experience from elsewhere so that's been fascinating to watch some of the key data points for me are that global chief people officer appointments have dropped by 20-ish percent in the last three years.

5:28In UK, that's 34 percent. So, for a population sitting in the same geography as me, although I work globally, I think that could be quite a frightening statistic. The report talks about why I'm not actually that terrified about the drop, and it's a cyclical thing. But it is still some big numbers and probably gives a sense of a data point for people who are thinking about hiring or looking for a job themselves. It's been a challenging market outside for some time. And one of the reasons we run the report is when you're looking for a job, when you're thinking about hiring, there's a lot of rhetoric about how's the market, what's happening, but actually not that much data about what's truly happening.

6:12This report looks at a huge volume of hires globally over the last two years. And that sense of global data and analysing those global trends, I think, gives a real sense of what's really happening as opposed to the perspective from one job seeker, one organisation, or even one country. There's probably a couple of other things that I think are really interesting. So, the proportion of appointments that are going to an experienced chief people officer, someone who's already sat in that seat, has fallen dramatically in two years, really unexpectedly. I checked the data multiple times myself to make sure I wasn't misreading it.

6:49But from 78 % three years ago being experienced established chief people officer appointments down to only 53 % last year in 2025, which is a massive drop and really different to some of the other functions that we look after. But exciting for people who were looking for their first appointment into the chief people officer seat suggests there's quite a lot of opportunity for up and coming talent. Absolutely. There's so much to dig into there. So just to sort of pick a few things to do a bit of a deeper dive into. Talking about that sort of traditional HR career path, you know, and whether that's still the route to the top job.

7:27What are companies actually looking for now when they appoint a chief people officer? Because from what you're saying there, it seems that things might have changed a bit. They have changed a bit. I think it's important to recognise that every organisation is at a slightly different point on its journey in terms of what it needs from the people function. So one chief people officer mandate looks very different for us than another in the arts of being a headhunter, I suppose, is unpicking exactly where an organisation is and therefore what skill set they need and approach they need at a particular point in time.

7:58But the data suggests that boards and exec teams are no longer asking who's done this exact job before and are thinking more about who's got the capability and the agility to navigate through transformation, a world of ambiguity, and think about it through a cultural change, workforce design type lens. ultimately though the traditional route of becoming a chief people officer probably still matters so most chief people officers come through relatively conventional hr generalist pathways and broad hr leadership experience remains valuable so very few appointments into that chief people officer seat come from the functional specialisms like talent acquisition talent reward very few of them.

8:47But the best chief people officers, in my view, have worked in those functional specialisms at points in their career. So have a nice broad set of experience. But it is hard to secure a chief people officer role in the main if you're not a good generalist as well, a very established generous. Boards are much more interested in what sits beyond technical HR expertise, but a bit like your CFO is responsible for making sure that all of your accounting practices are legal and you have the right governance in place. Similarly, the same filter is required for an HR leader as well. Boards are looking for strategic thinking, commercial judgment.

9:30I love it when I think about this list because this should be the same for a CFO or a chief marketing officer or your your chief ai officer than your your hr one but somehow we've been a bit slower to come to the table about talking about it capability to think about how you design your organization the ability to influence ceos boards investors to be credible and capable and have that impact and to be able to lead through and interchange almost none of those things are HR specific, maybe a little bit about organisation design, but most of them about brilliant leadership. So the modern chief people officer is no longer just a functional expert in HR.

10:12Actually, you sort of have to leave that at the door. That's the conduit to getting in the room, if you like. They're the person that is enabling organisational performance through their teams, through an effective HR or people and culture function. Boards want people leaders you can shape the organisation, not just hold it up with its people practice. And that's what's been brilliant to see over the last couple of years. No, absolutely. And I guess that's interesting because also I'm sure that the skills needed to kind of develop further as things become even more disruptive and chaotic. And I suppose reflecting back to, you know, that kind of HR career path that you sort of were talking about there.

10:53I mean, how well equipped is that to provide someone with these sort of skills? Where's the gap? I mean, it's quite a live debate at the moment in the HR community about what does a good HR person look like and what skills do you need in order to part of moving an organisation forward. I think we're really good as a function. If I look internally at developing people expertise, the technical expertise that you need to keep an organisation out of court and drive performance through an organization. But I'm less convinced that we are brilliant at developing commercial expertise as an easy way of bracketing it, but business capability.

11:32The future generation of chief people officers and the one that's in post at the moment need workforce strategy capability. They need more and more AI literacy and ability to understand what the workforce of the future, the hybrid workforce of the future might look like. change leadership, stakeholder management, the ability to communicate with investors and the board and enterprise-wise thinking. None of this is taught in your professional qualification, really in your career. And some of it is taught if you're an HR graduate and you go through a business management scheme, but it's not necessarily where the function has been historically.

12:10In my view, you'll find people slightly different view. I told you at the beginning about my own background. I mean, I was an operational leader and led teams of 300 odd people and then moved into HR. So I do have a different view about what makes a great HR leader that worked really well for me. I could stand toe to toe with big operational leaders and talk to them on a level because I have led big teams and I have had to drive performance at a granular level. Most HR people will spend their early foundational years not like that, not learning how to lead teams, but close relatively to HR process and to policy.

12:48And those things are important. And gosh, did I have to learn them later. But if you have an understanding of the kind of strategic trade-offs you have to make when you're running a business, growth decisions, capital allocation, P &L decisions, how what the HR function does impacts your company's ability to make money, and you're capable and confident discussing productivity, value creation, then that's really the challenge. How do we get from policy and process? How do you get from accounting practice to good finance practice? There's a lot of similarities, I think, but probably we don't necessarily, we're not fostering that for our kind of up and coming talent unless you land in an organization in your first HR advisor job where business partnering is an approach or the expectation is that your function is super commercial and really understands this stuff.

13:43You know, I still work with plenty of businesses who are, you know, 15 or 20 years behind their expectation of HR. And so if you're working in that business, it's hard to see what it actually could be.

13:58Now, you sort of mentioned earlier in the conversation about people not being sort of directly appointed from functional specialisms to chief people officers. A lot of very senior TA leaders are listening to the podcast. And I know for a fact that many of them see a CPO, CHRO as an ultimate kind of career goal or certainly something that they're aiming at. And also taking into account what you were just saying about the commercial reality and the lack of specific experience that people might have in certain aspects of, in certain parts of the HR function. What advice would you give people on how to position themselves, the type of experiences that they need to seek out?

14:37How can they move from where they are to that top job? It is a tough move and one that I think you need to think about carefully and in a really considered way. The HR function as well, in my view, we're not particularly brilliant at career planning for ourselves. We're pretty good at doing it for other people. But the reality for leaders in TA is that they're quite well positioned. If you think about it, leaders in this space, the brilliant ones, understand labor markets, talent strategy, workforce planning better than almost anyone else in the organization, but they need to broaden out and take the opportunities to do so and they can be harder to find.

15:15So broadening beyond just talent acquisition and finding way to look across the whole end-to-end talent life cycle, including things like org design, reward, they should seek out transformation exposure where they can pick up projects you know AI is a brilliant opportunity right now facing straight into the talent acquisition function how can people think about AI transformation business restructuring etc getting exposure to that kind of transformation capability they have an opportunity in many cases to build board level credibility as well they will have interface and the opportunity to present to members of the executive committee in some roles if they can push and engage with NEDs, investors in the right context.

16:01Obviously, that's a great opportunity. And then developing commercial fluency as well. How does what they do impact the organization and how do they find opportunities to both understand and impact value creation and and sort of lead beyond HR. The TA role is the most outward facing role in some organizations. You build brilliant connections and people see the power of your capability in action when you're in those roles. So they can be really exciting roles to move on and out from, but it can be difficult to do. My advice to people is typically to try and broaden out in their current organization where people know you, trust you, and you have the organization knowledge to do so and then make a move into another organization at a point that feels right it is pretty hard to go with all of these projects you've done loads of work broadening out but your core role has been a ta leader it's a gamble for an organization to come and find someone who's unproven holding the seat despite what i've said about the trends in the cpo space we are not now in the ta space i suppose my advice to people is don't focus on becoming the best talent acquisition person you know, focus on becoming the person who understands how talent creates value and being able to describe that to people.

17:19And that will help you on that journey. That's brilliant advice. And on that, what's the situation with internal candidates versus external candidates? I mean, how do organisations make that sort of decision and how is it changing? So there's real geographical variance from country to country. Our study looked at global trends. For me, this was one of the most interesting findings in the report. After a number of years where businesses have been really looking internally and pulling internal successes up through their organization for whatever reason, but in many cases because it's tricky to get the go-ahead to hire externally in the last few years, We're now seeing a really sharp swing globally back towards external hiring and interestingly hiring from the same sector compared to two years ago.

18:13So external appointments were just about half in 2023, 62 % in 24 and 71 % in 2025. Now, there's a few explanations for that. my personal belief is there's something quite particular about the uk and we do tend to lead the world in terms of our preference to hire externally but in every report we have done every set of data the uk is further indexed towards external hiring we as a country love and we're seeing it now we love shiny and new right get a new prime minister from somewhere else yeah all that kind of stuff we're quick to throw what we've got in the bin and move on and then that we have a honeymoon period and then we do the same again it's part of our internal psyche i think and so we see that play out in our cpo hiring but what's happening now i think is probably for two reasons one internal pipelines have really been stretched over the years between kind of post-covid and now but also organizations i think are seeking fresh input and fresh thinking after years of disruption and ambiguity and not quite knowing what was going to come over the horizon.

19:26Now, interestingly, that external thinking doesn't always mean radical thinking. Actually, I was really surprised how many hires, although they're external, they're not very external. So they're coming from the same sector, competitors, same industry, very similar organizational contexts. So we're seeing shiny and new, but not too new is the kind of trend at the moment. So in 2023, external hires were 74 % of them were in the same sector. So three quarters of them came from the same sector. Last year, four fifths came from the same sector. So that's a significant shift of almost 10 percentage points.

20:09Whereas when you compare it with the CFO research that we've done. I mean, they love same sector hiring in the finance division. So on average, it's about 90%. And that has been consistent for the last three years, no change in variables. So you might expect some similarities in those functions. If you're going to start hiring from your competitors in HR, you'd expect you might be doing that in finance too. I'd argue that we're already doing it in finance and that's an HR just catching up. But there are some differences between the two. So boards are looking for fresh perspective, I think, but not really unproven perspective.

20:43But what's interesting is when you add all of that to the fact that these are often inexperienced hires, they are the progression candidate in a competitor. So you're happy with someone who hasn't sat in the seat before, but you want the security of them coming from an industry that feels familiar. None of that is played out in the hiring that we do at Eaton Bridge, actually, which I think is quite interesting. We're just one sample in a big old fragmented industry of search and interim firms. I mean, some of how we set ourselves up, we're organised by function rather than by geography or by sector.

21:15So I look after all types of companies and all types of ownership models and all geographies, and I've worked cross-sector. So maybe I'm predispositioned to help organisations make out-of-sector hires. I've got my own views on why you would or wouldn't in different circumstances. But often we hear from clients that they think someone needs to come from a sector when we go out and start a search. But those, I would say, more than half of the time don't end up hiring from the same sector because you unpick through the course of a recruitment process that maybe isn't that that you need. So I think it's quite interesting when you have those three bits of data together around internal versus external, experienced versus inexperienced, and then the CFO data, it does paint quite an interesting picture.

21:59Yeah, it certainly does. And a kind of final question for you, based on the data, based on what you're seeing in your experience, what do you think the role of the Chief People Officer is going to look like in two to five years time? Because there is just so much change going on at the moment, isn't there? Yeah, there is a lot of change. And I talk about the role of the CPO or the HR function being on a spectrum between transactional and transformational. And all organisations are somewhere on that spectrum. Our job is to figure out who is going to be close enough to where an organisation currently sits, but is going to edge them along at a speed that feels right.

22:37So it might be edge, it might be drive them along that spectrum to get them towards transformational leadership from an HR perspective. So not every organisation will look for similar things. But I think overall, what we'll start to see is broader backgrounds reaching that top role, and the kind of core technical generalists not falling away but being less important as that work stays further down the organization and the cpo really steps into the business leadership transformational space and by the way in many cases we're already there but not everyone will follow the classic hr generalist route the best future chief people officers will understand skills productivity workforce design, technology, how you AI enable an organisation.

23:22None of this should be new to the population of chief people officers now, but the maturity of organisations is different. And we'll see them shift kind of beyond your traditional talent and leadership processes into more of that business leadership space. But that shouldn't be rocket science to most people. That's what we're all pushing towards. And so I think hopefully it's more of an evolution. Similarly, we may see in some business is, as we've seen a little bit in the US, almost a division of the two roles. So you get a chief culture, organisational effectiveness officer type person, and then the transactional elements of HR almost sitting separately.

24:01I'm not sure we'll see that quickly, but over time, we may see that. Fantastic. Olivia, thank you very much for talking to me. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. my thanks to olivia you can follow this podcast on apple podcasts on spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts you can search all the past episodes at recruiting future.com on that site you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting future feast and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening i'll be back next time and i hope you'll join me

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