I’ve been recruiting in HR for 23 years. I’ve watched the function transform from something that was rarely taken seriously into one of the most complex, commercially demanding disciplines in any business.

HR still gets a bad rap. There’s a persistent image of the function as the 'people police' — the team that manages performance plans, writes policies, and occasionally brings a fruit bowl into the office. It’s a caricature, and an outdated one. It persists partly because the profession has been on an uneven journey — and the people driving it forward deserve more credit than they get.

From Welfare Officers to the Executive Table

HR didn’t start with a great deal of status. In the 1800s, we were welfare officers. Then personnel officers, who were largely transactional, focused on payroll and compliance - a doing function, with limited strategic influence.

The shift happened in the early 1990s, when David Ulrich reframed HR as a strategic business partner. The impact was real. It changed who was attracted to the function — commercially minded professionals began actively choosing HR as a career, drawn by the opportunity to sit at the executive table and shape how businesses perform.

Today, a well-run business has three critical functions in equal measure: the CFO looking after finances, the COO running operations, and the CPO leading people. HR has earned that seat. The question is whether the people filling it are ready to own it.

What 'Commercial' Actually Means

I get asked often what a commercial HR professional looks like. The most useful answer I can give: they speak the language of the business, fluently.

When you sit with them, the conversation is about what the business needs to look like in three to five years, and how people strategy gets it there. They’ve lifted up and out of the function. They hold a business leader’s perspective alongside their HR expertise.

The best ones I’ve placed have often done something unusual — they’ve stepped out of HR for a period. They’ve led an operational function. They’ve been a stakeholder to an HR team, which changes your understanding of what a business partner actually needs to deliver. That experience is hard to replicate in any other way.

At the junior end, it looks different but draws on the same instinct. It’s curiosity. It’s asking “why are we doing this?” and following that question until it connects to a business outcome. It’s being able to speak in percentages, dollar values, measurable change — articulating what moved, and by how much.

The Difficulty Nobody Talks About

Working in HR is genuinely difficult in a way that’s hard to explain to people outside the function.

You sit in the middle of commercial outcomes and advocacy for people. Those two things require constant navigation — they pull in different directions, often without a clean resolution. The HR professionals who do this well are the ones pushing back on the CEO when they need to, having the difficult conversations that others avoid, and making calls in genuinely grey territory.

That takes a particular kind of confidence. As a profession, HR has developed that confidence significantly over the last decade. The best HR leaders say no more than most, and they do it with clarity about why.

Where It’s Going

Some roles will change. Transactional HR advisor work — high-volume, process-driven tasks — is genuinely at risk from automation. That’s a reality worth acknowledging clearly.

Business partners, though, are in a different position. The pace of change in organisations is accelerating. People need to be led through that change. Psychological safety, organisational design, workforce planning — these require human judgment, relationship, and influence that automation cannot replicate.

The specialist areas will evolve too. Industrial relations is becoming increasingly complex — Australian legislation rewards deep expertise, and businesses are bringing in legally trained professionals to navigate it. The intersection of IR, employee relations, and psychosocial safety is one of the most demanding and in-demand spaces in the market right now.

At the executive level, the CPO role is becoming more visible, more valued, and more scrutinised. The executives filling those roles have done the work to become genuinely commercially literate — and that’s raising the bar for everyone moving through the function.

The Profession Is In Good Shape

After 23 years, my assessment is that HR is in a stronger position than it has ever been. The people entering the function are smarter, more curious, and more commercially minded than at any point in my career. The ones rising through it have earned their progression by understanding business — and by having the backbone to act on that understanding.

That’s a profession that has fundamentally reinvented itself in a generation. It deserves to be recognised as such.

Geraldine Doyle is a Director at Next Step in Birsbane, specialising in HR recruitment across Australia. She has over 23 years of experience placing HR professionals from early career through to executive level.