30 Years, 30,000 Conversations
What I'm actually seeing in the Australian People & Culture market right now
By Jo Skipper, Director, LeadHR | Connecting People & Careers
I've spent close to thirty years in one narrow, specialised corner of working life: the human side of HR. Connecting people with careers, coaching leaders through the moments that define them, and — if I'm honest about the arithmetic — somewhere past thirty thousand conversations with the people who run People & Culture in this country. Chief People Officers and HR Directors. Heads of People holding a function together with too few hands. The ambitious generalists two and three rungs below them who want the top seat one day. And the CEO’s and boards who hire and fire all of them.
Thirty thousand conversations teach you something no dataset can: where the real anxiety actually sits. And right now, the worry in the room rarely matches the headline on the screen. “AI is making HR obsolete. It's the best — no, the worst — candidate market in a generation. Everyone has an opinion, and almost all of them belong to someone else.
So I did the unglamorous thing and checked the opinions against the evidence: the actual Australian numbers, not the LinkedIn weather report. This is what I found, and where I've landed.
My position
The Australian executive HR market in 2026 is neither booming nor collapsing. It's quietly rebalancing — and the people being reshaped hardest are not the ones the headlines are shouting about.
The loud story says the CHRO is under threat. The evidence says almost the opposite. The chair at the top is remarkably stable. What's being hollowed out is everything underneath it — and that's a more serious problem, because it's the part nobody is watching.
Start with the backdrop, because the senior HR remit is defined by what's happening to everyone else's workforce. The tide has gone out. Unemployment reached 4.5% in April, the highest since late 2021, with employment actually falling in the month. Inside that number, female unemployment rose while male unemployment held flat — and this is a profession that is majority female, so that detail isn't incidental. Wages, meanwhile, have stopped keeping up with prices. The Wage Price Index rose 3.3% over the year to March; headline inflation was 4.6%. Do the subtraction and most Australians are taking a real pay cut of more than a percentage point, while the cost of money keeps climbing — the cash rate sits at 4.35% after a third hike this year. The easy story of 2022 — tight market, pay whatever it takes — is simply no longer true.
Against that backdrop, demand for senior HR has cooled, but it hasn't cracked. The longest-running Australian HR job-advertising index — built from an external job-listings provider and benchmarked to 100 a decade ago — read 159.1 in February. That's a market about 84% bigger than ten years ago, so structurally HR demand has grown enormously. But it sits well below its early-2023 peak of 225.3. Around 5,540 HR roles are advertised nationally each month, and four in five of them are permanent. SEEK's advertised salaries for HR grew just 2.1% over the year to January — below the national average and well under inflation. Mercer reports employer hiring intentions at their lowest in five years, with 2026 pay budgets forecast at a 3.5% median. And the HR Institute's own forward read — its employment-intentions index — has rolled over from a record high last September to one of its softest readings since the survey began. When a job-ad index, a listed job board, a remuneration consultancy and the profession's own institute all point the same way, that isn't noise. It's signal.
So: softer than 2023, but a long way from weak. A market in a quiet pivot.
Who is impacted the most
Let me name them, because thirty thousand conversations have made me protective of them. It's the mid-career HR generalist — the HR manager and the senior business partner who, in every cycle before this one, was the raw material of the next CHRO.
I land there, and not on the top job, deliberately. The most recent dedicated turnover data shows CHRO seats aren't churning at all — incoming changes are down sharply and average tenure has lengthened to about four and a half years, up from under four. (That series is global; I'll flag it every time, because no current Australian equivalent exists.) If anything, the people in the chair are staying longer and holding on tighter. The seat is stable.
What's being dismantled is the staircase that used to lead to it.
We have roughly 95,000 people in Australia carrying the title "HR Manager" — 57% women, median age 44 — and another 85,000 in the broader professional layer beneath, 72% women. It is a majority-female, mid-career, NSW-weighted profession that is still, on the official projections, growing. This is not a function in collapse. But the rotational roles that quietly turned a capable HR adviser into a board-ready CHRO — a stint in payroll, a turn through shared services, a year holding the line in employee relations, time learning how recruitment really works — those rotations are non-existent and the roles increasingly housed in Manila, Bengaluru and Kuala Lumpur, not in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
That's the heart of it. The CHRO seat isn't being offshored or automated. The apprenticeship for it is. And a thinning of the bench doesn't show up in a single KPI — it shows up two or three years later, when you go to fill the seat and find no one inside the building has the capability to take it.
Why this is happening
Three forces, all real, all documented — and they happen to push in exactly the same direction.
The first is offshoring, but not the offshoring the headlines describe. The public record is clear about what's actually moving. ANZ runs its largest capability centre outside Australia in Bengaluru, with more than 7,500 staff — its own employees, not a vendor's. QBE runs a shared-services centre in Manila handling high-volume people processes. Telstra has built a People Services centre in the Philippines and, in February, announced a further 650 roles affected, with hundreds shifting to partners in India. KPMG moved 200 of its 260 executive-assistant roles offshore last year for reported savings around $17 million. Every one of these is operational and transactional: payroll, shared services, recruitment support, executive assistance, HR administration. And here is what the data does not show — there is no validated evidence, none, that a single Australian company has offshored its CHRO, HR Director or Head of People role. The leadership stays here. The training ground for it leaves.
The second force is AI, and it's pressing on precisely the same layer. The validated picture is far calmer than the headlines. Yes, 93% of organisations now use AI in some capacity — but the actual use clusters in administrative tasks: drafting job ads, summarising survey results, chasing training completions, not workforce strategy or scenario planning. Jobs and Skills Australia's whole-of-market study found that augmentation outweighs automation: only about 4% of Australian workers face high automation risk, and the roles most genuinely exposed are clerical and administrative — which is to say, HR's transactional layer. The Productivity Commission lands in the same place, calling forecasts of mass white-collar elimination out of step with the evidence. So AI isn't making HR obsolete. It's augmenting the senior, judgement-heavy work and automating the routine work beneath it — the same routine work already boarding a plane to Manila.
Two independent forces, labour arbitrage and automation, both eroding the entry-and-mid-tier roles where future CHROs have always been grown. I'll be honest about the limit here: there is no validated Australian data on AI's effect on HR headcount specifically. Anyone quoting you a precise number is guessing. But the direction of travel is not in dispute.
The third force is a supply surge that, for once, hands the advantage to employers. Company insolvencies hit 14,722 in 2024–25, up a third on the prior year and the highest since the turn of the century. The named collapses make it human — Whyalla's steelworks operator, Mosaic Brands and its 2,750 staff, Barbeques Galore, Star Entertainment teetering with 9,000 employees. When a national business fails, the CHRO and HR Director don't get re-hired by the administrator; they go to market. At the same time, the public sector has tipped from net hirer to net rationaliser: the Australian Public Service grew to nearly 199,000 by mid-2025, then the federal budget effectively froze it, while agencies pull work back in-house. A sector that employs a large share of Australia's HR managers stopped being the hiring engine it was.
Put those three together and you have the paradox of this market. The work that builds senior HR leaders is leaving — offshore and into software — at the very moment an unusually deep pool of already-built senior HR leaders has been pushed into the open.
What I anticipate next
Here is where I'll plainly share my judgement, based 30 years and 30,000 conversations.
The hiring window is open now, and it has a clock on it The depth of available senior talent — particularly in restructuring, large-workforce industrial relations and complex change — is the strongest I've seen in years, and the negotiating position has shifted toward employers for the first time since 2022. But insolvencies are already plateauing, levelling off at around 1,200 to 1,300 a month. The pool won't stay this deep. If you've held off a senior HR hire; you have a small window, where the talent pool is exceptional and you can find exactly what you need. But that window will close.
The succession bill comes due in eighteen to thirty-six months. This is the one that keeps me up. If your operational HR has been migrating offshore, and your routine work is being absorbed by AI, you may have stopped growing CHRO-ready leaders inside your business without ever deciding to. It won't appear in a dashboard. It appears the day you open the top role and find the bench empty — and then you're hiring externally into a thin market at a premium. Cast your minds back to the five years post GFC after everyone cut their graduate programmes the ‘War for Talent’ was ridiculous. The boards I'd most want to advise aren't asking ‘do we have a CHRO?’ Most do. They should be asking ‘do we still have a CHRO-in-waiting who's in Sydney who has rotated across our organisation?’
Pay becomes a retention problem long before it becomes a budget line. A "standard" 3% increase, against inflation near 4.6%, is a real-terms cut — and your best people can do that arithmetic faster than your engagement survey can detect the discontent. The quiet flight risk in 2026 isn't the unhappy employee. It's the capable, loyal one who simply notices they're going backwards.
Migration won't be the fast fix the occupation lists imply. HR roles sit on the skilled-visa lists, so on paper the supply valve is open. In practice — and this is thirty years of watching it happen — even very capable HR migrants struggle to land roles in their first six to twelve months here, because HR is a trust-and-context profession and employers want demonstrated fluency in Fair Work, local IR and Australian stakeholder norms before they hand over the people function. The displaced local pool will almost always be the faster, lower-risk hire this year.
And the gender conversation has to get more honest.
This is one of the few executive professions in Australia where most of the talent is female — 57% of HR managers, 72% of the professional layer — reporting into a C-suite that is still majority male, where women hold just 22% of CEO roles and the pay gap at the very top has actually widened. The CHRO is often the only woman, or one of two, at the executive table — carrying both the accountability for the organisation's gender outcomes and the symbolic weight of being the visible woman in the room. That shapes the experience of the role, the tenure, and the kind of support I see these leaders genuinely needing. We don't talk about it enough, and the data we'd need to talk about it precisely — an Australian census of CHRO gender — doesn't yet exist.
So here's my read, after thirty years and thirty thousand conversations. The market is softer than the boom but stronger than the doom. The top seat is safe; the staircase to it is being quietly removed. The smartest move available right now is to hire from a talent pool that won't stay this deep — and to look hard, today, at whether you're still growing the leaders you'll need when it closes.
Drawn from validated Australian sources including the ABS, RBA, Jobs and Skills Australia, AHRI, Mercer, SEEK, WGEA, ASIC, the APSC and public company disclosures, current to May 2026.
