Are HR Strategies Evolving Fast Enough to Keep Up with Changing Markets?
Are HR Strategies Evolving Fast Enough to Keep Up with Changing Markets?
While 2024 was the year of experimentation with AI, 2025 will separate the frontrunners from the followers. The real differentiator isn’t efficiency gains—it’s how market leaders are embedding AI into their organisations to build a workforce that is agile, adaptive, and future-ready.
It’s Innovation and Change, NOW or NEVER
Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2024 report underscores this shift, revealing a growing divide between high-growth firms and those that lag behind in engaging and inspiring their people toward a digital future.
Looking ahead, this divide will only grow as geopolitical shifts and aggressive AI investments redefine competitive edge. In other words, organisations that recognise that true change happens at the intersection of technology, work design, and talent management and act upon it will set the new standard.
Against this backdrop, HR leaders will play a critical role as architects of a workplace and workforce that can leverage AI as a strategic enabler to drive reinvention at scale.
How is AI Supporting HR Work and Work Design?
In terms of HR work and work design, some ways forward-thinking leaders are leveraging AI include:
- Performance Management: AI can help uncover deeper strategic insights that enable HR leaders to have more productive discussions with managers on how to support employees’ career and professional development.
- Personalised Training: AI can be used to analyse data to help HR leaders create customised learning paths that accelerate employee skill adoption. An example is how Delta Airlines is developing a proof of concept guided by AI recommendations that maps employees’ skills to both formal and informal learning opportunities.
- Employee Engagement: AI-powered tools can monitor workforce sentiment, tailor communications, and proactively suggest support resources or frameworks, fostering a more connected and engaged team. They can also be used to detect early signs of disengagement, enabling HR teams to intervene before productivity, morale, and retention rates take a hit.
- Proactive Workforce Planning: By evaluating changing industry trends, current employee skill sets, and company-specific objectives, AI can help HR leaders anticipate future talent needs.
Which Talent Strategies Can HR Still Talk About Today?
1. Leadership: People Don’t Leave Jobs—They Leave Managers
Under the branch of talent strategies, hiring and retaining leaders with people manager skills has taken on renewed interest and urgency for several reasons.
i. Managing change and motivating teams
In an environment where AI can trigger anxiety around job security and career progression, managers who can pick up on these concerns are indispensable. Strong people management skills will ensure leaders can guide their teams with empathy while enabling teams to embrace new ways of working.
ii. Identifying and addressing skill gaps
The adage “people don’t leave jobs—they leave managers” holds true now more than ever. Employees increasingly expect their managers to actively support their growth, and having strong people management skills will allow leaders to better identify and address employees’ needs in a timely manner so individuals feel empowered to grow alongside the organisation.
However, fostering career development isn’t solely a manager’s responsibility—it’s a collective effort. Managers, while pivotal in day-to-day development, need robust support from overall organisational leadership.
This includes HR, which plays an important role by providing tools, resources, and learning and development programmes as well as cultivating a culture of continuous learning.
Beyond driving employee engagement, HR leaders who play an active role in employees’ career development also help build a more agile, future-ready workforce.
2. Career Mobility: Advancing Upward and Across
Traditionally, career growth is often seen as a vertical climb—moving upward through promotions. But in today’s dynamic corporate environment, lateral moves can be just as valuable for employees and organisations.
When employees cross functions or roles, they can gain diverse skill sets, broaden their perspectives, and develop deeper strategic thinking. This not only prepares them for more senior roles and supports their professional development but also enhances employee engagement and boosts workforce agility and resilience for the organisation.
However, to help employees reimagine their career paths, HR’s proactivity in opening up new avenues to support talent mobility within the organisation is key. Some impactful strategies HR leaders are embracing include:
- Mentorship programmes that connect employees with leaders across different departments, fostering knowledge sharing and cross-functional growth.
- Internal talent marketplaces that match employees with temporary assignments, projects, or internal opportunities based on their skills and growth potential.
- Job qualification systems that formally recognise and validate the competencies employees gain through lateral moves, helping to eliminate the stigma often associated with non-linear career paths.
Moving Beyond Traditional HR Playbooks
With disruption and change becoming the new norm, traditional HR approaches no longer suffice. Leaders must now shift their mindset from simply following established procedures to proactively driving transformational change. This means moving away from a sole focus on quantifying investments to making strategic, deliberate choices about where and why resources should be allocated.
Equally important is aligning these investments with long-term business objectives, which requires leaders to navigate the balance between internal talent development and external industry shifts. In doing so, they create organisations that don’t just respond to change but actively drive it—cultivating agility, resilience, and a culture that thrives on continuous learning, creativity, and adaptability.
For deeper insights into the trends shaping HR agendas in the year ahead, connect with our HR recruitment consultants to continue the conversation.