The Future Of HR Is Predictable – Learn The Pattern

What is HR’s future? It will follow other business functions.

Yes, it’s an internal version of the “follow-the-leader pattern.” In any large corporation, the fastest-changing business functions move first by adopting a new practice. Eventually, 2 to 3 years later, second-mover functions like HR adopt their version of the same practice. So if you wanted to know how HR’s capabilities will be managed in three years, you would simply look to the management and technology practices that your faster-changing business functions (like supply chain, marketing, and production) are implementing today. It’s a follow-the-leader pattern.

For example, if your supply chain function began the practice of completely AI-driven vendor assessments this year, you could expect HR’s recruiting function to follow suit about three years later, by adopting the related practice of completely AI-driven candidate assessment.

There’s No Shame in Being a Second-Mover Function

Business units must change at a slow or fast rate, depending on the environment in which they operate. So you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a low-risk function like accounting changes at a measurably slower rate than forward-looking, big-money risk finance, even though they are both responsible for a large sum of money.

And in a similar light, you would expect your AI and robotics functions to be changing at lightning speed (because their market demands it) while your employee benefits function would (and should) change at the speed of a sloth (because employees get nervous when you even talk about messing with their benefits). 

Once You Learn the Pattern, Forecasting the Future of HR Is Easier

Fortunately, throughout my long career, I have been a (mostly) accurate forecaster of the future of HR, where I have successfully forecast HR’s shift away from paper and face-to-face employee contact and toward becoming a digital remote service information provider. Now I’m forecasting HR’s shift toward becoming a digital, data, and technology-driven function. So, I freely admit that…

My accurate forecasting has been based on the fact that when it comes to “what’s coming next” in HR, I have openly based my forecasts primarily on the management, technology, and organizational changes that have already been adopted by the supply chain, finance, or production functions.

Which Business Functions Can HR Learn the Most From?

The initial step in identifying any “pattern of delayed copying” must be analyzing the major changes that have occurred in your HR function over the last decade in order to determine which of your corporation’s fast-changing functions have instituted the most major changes that HR eventually copied. And in that light, I have put together a list of the typically fastest-changing business functions and which areas they can help HR improve.

• Supply chain – because they do it every day, these professionals can help HR develop more scientific and objective selection processes, as well as how to shorten your processes while maintaining quality.

• Quality control – because they measure quality every day, they can walk you through the steps for both measuring and maintaining quality of hire.

• Marketing and consumer research – the leading-edge survey practices of this function can help HR better understand the needs, the problems, and the concerns of its employee base. Their advanced research techniques can also help recruiting better understand and utilize the “top attraction factors” for its recruiting targets.

• Customer service – these professionals can show you how to automate customer service without sacrificing service quality.

• Finance/CFO – these professionals excel at accurately calculating and assigning a dollar-of-revenue impact number to both successful and unsuccessful business actions.

• COO’s office – they can help you learn how to prioritize your services and your customers in order to maximize your overall business impact.

• Production – they can show you how to increase your output without increasing costs, as well as how to vary production periodically, in order to meet the ever-changing needs of the company.

• Technology – these pros can accurately assess the practicality and calculate the potential ROI of new technologies. They can also help you identify the cases when software and robotics can effectively replace human employees.

• Employee performance metrics – those in recruiting constantly whine about how difficult it is to measure new-hire performance and quality of hire. However, they could quickly learn that all of these types of quality metrics are routine in today’s Major League Baseball (under the name sabermetrics).

Action Steps for Identifying the Emerging Approaches That HR Might Eventually Adopt

You might assume that it will be difficult for HR to learn what management practices and technologies are being considered within your fastest-changing business units. However, many are surprised to learn that the heads of these faster-changing business units are more than willing to support HR in order to build on the overall team effort.

In most cases, the first step should be meeting with the leaders of your fast-changing functions that you wish to learn from and ask for their cooperation.

Next, ask each leader if they would allow an HR team member to serve as an informal member of the relevant planning team. And if that’s not possible, HR leaders can often subtly identify most emerging practices. By scanning through the function’s meeting agendas and their budget submissions. Some vendors in the subject area may also be willing to alert you about any internal company plans in the hopes that they might eventually make a double sale.

The next step is for HR to assign someone to study, be accountable for, and make recommendations on the emerging practice. And finally, for those with more resources. Reach out and explore what HR and the fastest-changing functions at our industry’s leading corporations are planning and implementing.

My advice is to stop assuming that any change in HR growth is a random event. Instead, realize that many of the new practices that HR has adopted were likely borrowed (after a delay) from other faster-changing functions within your company. And after HR fully understands this pattern, HR’s growth and capabilities can be easily accelerated with a few simple actions.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, it’s been unusual for fast-changing corporate functions to work closely with their counterparts in administrative or overhead functions. Even though this practice of isolation is likely slowing down the productivity and the final business results of your entire corporation. Fortunately, I have discovered that after the leaders of these overhead functions learn what other functions in the company are successfully planning and implementing, the traditional three-year delay before HR implements a similar practice can be dramatically reduced once HR leaders learn that adopting the practice is nearly inevitable.

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Notes for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.

Please help spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and posting it on your favorite social media.

Dr John Sullivan is its author – It first appeared in the 10/20/26 issue of Aggressive Talent Management.