The CHRO as enterprise-wide strategic leader
The CHRO of today (and tomorrow) has to be many things. We found that 43% of the roles now encompass responsibilities that extend beyond the beyond the traditional HR remit.
The most successful HR leaders combine three things — business credibility, strategic thinking and organisational insight. Gone are the days where they would only be expected to take part in conversations about people and culture. Now, they need to also be able to shed light on technology, legal issues and capital deployment. It’s not that they are forgetting about HR, but more that their responsibilities are being layered with extra strategic commitments and objectives.
For example, they need to able to pivot from participating in boardroom debates about long-term operating models to talking through the latest benefits policies in a staff town hall. Yes, they need to be on top of upcoming legislation affecting the workforce, but they also need to be helping shape P&L discussions and identifying opportunities for efficiencies and growth.
In other words, today’s CHROs need to be more versatile than ever before in order to be effective.
Career paths to the CHRO role
As the job description evolves, so, too, do the CVs of those fulfilling the role — our career-path analysis revealed that 37% entered from non-HR functions, including engineering, market research and investor relations.
When it come to hiring, looking internally is the preferred option, with 71% of leaders rising from within their organisations. Among external hirings 72% are female, while internal promotions are slightly more evenly split, with 65% women and 35% men.
Unsurprisingly, we found that the previous role most of the leaders (74%) had been in HR, with 49% having had had experience in the top HR leadership position. Within that 74%, 76% had come from the same industry.
Among all the 101 HR leaders surveyed, only 16 hires were both external and from a different industry, a finding that demonstrates there is still a reluctance to hire out of the box candidates. Even though HR skills have long been viewed as transferrable to other between sectors, when organisations are looking externally there remains a preference for candidates who can hit the ground running.
Tenure dynamics
And how long have these leaders been in position? Our survey found that their average tenure is 3.9 years. Interestingly, both female and male HR leaders share this average, a finding which indicates a level playing field among genders in terms of experience.
For those CHROs with expanded responsibilities, we found that they tend to have shorter average tenures (3.4 years) compared to those without expanded roles (4.6 years).
This is in marked contrast to CEOs. For example, our most recent study of CEO Transitions in Europe found that the average tenure of departing CEOs in 2025 was 7.4 years, down from 8.8 years in 2022, but still substantially higher than their colleagues in the CHRO position.
Implications for tomorrow's CHROs
So what does all this mean for the CHRO of the future?
It’s clear that aspiring CHROs have plenty to ponder as they eye up their future career ascent. With the scope and scale of the role changing, they need to ensure that their experiences include going beyond traditional areas of HR to provide them with the all-round business exposure now necessary for success.
But CEOs should also be taking heed of these developments. With the potential for breadth in the CHRO role now well-proven, they will need to adjust their expectations and ensure that aspiring candidates oversee their function and be a strategic asset on their ExCom. They also need to be mindful of what these changes mean for their company’s C-suite structure and wider org. chart.
How to best combine and address these priorities and objectives remains an ongoing discussion and one that we will be exploring in greater depth, and alongside leading CHROs from across Europe, in an upcoming thought leadership paper later this year.
Stay tuned…