9 Unexpected Aspects of the Modern CHRO Role Not in Job Descriptions 5 Years Ago

Offboarding is a security event. Five years ago, offboarding an employee mostly meant paying out any remaining funds to them and collecting back any company property such as laptops, etc. Today that same employee may hold admin keys to production servers, have API tokens dropped onto shared password vaults and have remote access to client environments. And it takes only one person to not trigger revocation an hour after offboarding has been triggered in the people function.

TradingFXVPS runs its infrastructure to prevent large amounts of damage being caused by stale credentials to servers that deal with lots of money trading. I have seen it take 9 days for the account of a former contractor to expire while he thought he was no longer active. It all worked out fine for us but that was pure luck.

So in order to adapt to this, we have now tied HR identity to the same mechanical process that we use to onboard people. So in essence, HR now effectively owns identity for us. HR is the source of truth for who has access to what, and we're all operating under a bunch of assumptions that haven't been written down in terms of job descriptions. A role change and/or exit in HR automatically opens up access for review and corresponding tickets for revocation that need to be processed within a 2-hr time frame for terminations.

The main thing that leaders of people need to understand is what each role can actually do. In order to create a sensible access policy for a team, you need to understand the difference between read-only monitoring and root access on a production server. I review the permission map for our teams with our people leads on a quarterly basis with our ops team, going through line by line.

Culture still matters though. A good people leader is only half a modern job if they can't tell you who has root on any given day.

The biggest surprise is that people leaders are now required to run something akin to investor relations for their staff. The HR function of hiring, establishing policy and culture used to be solely the domain of HR whilst the numbers were the remit of finance. However, staff now require leaders to explain how business is really performing, the reasons behind headcount decisions and what impact AI is going to have on them and they expect the people leader to provide them with a straight answer.

It is very visible to me in my work at CheapForexVPS and at TradingFXVPS (where I work across sales, marketing and finance) for example, when we recently automated parts of our client support function. The hardest thing to discuss with staff was not the technology itself but the silent fear that they would be replaced by a machine. Rumour travels faster than any internal communication and very soon fills any vacuum left by lack of information. In the same way that property buyers are prone to be influenced by rumour in the market before good information surfaces, staff's concerns will get resolved one way or another and it's better that they come from management than from speculation.

I treat my employees with the same respect as I would a valuable customer and hold short, monthly "open-book" sessions where I outline our current revenue, costs and investment for the month in simple terms that wouldn't be misused. I explain the reasoning behind decisions before they happen and not after they have occurred. They can handle the bad news much better than silence.

The outcome has been fewer surprise resignations and much more open feedback upwards. And trust is now the biggest currency of any function called people. And it needs to be protected by everyone - whether or not that is actually written in their job description.

The surprise is that CHROs now own people who were never hired. A meaningful slice of the work inside most tech organizations gets done by contractors, augmented engineers, and partner teams sitting in other countries. None of that sat with HR five years ago. It sat with procurement, or with whichever engineering lead signed the statement of work.

I see it from the other side of the table. When I place developers with U.S. founders, the first call used to be with a CTO. Increasingly it is a people leader asking how onboarding works, who runs the performance conversation, and what happens when someone on a contract outperforms a full-time hire.

The way I handle it is to refuse the two-tier setup. If a person's work shows up in your sprint board or in front of your customers, they get the same onboarding, the same context documents, the same review cadence, and the same access to the people whose decisions affect their work. Contract type changes payroll mechanics and nothing else.

Teams that run one standard stop losing their best augmented engineers to whoever offered them a title. Teams that run two standards keep re-hiring the same role and calling it attrition.

The most unexpected addition to the CHRO role is deciding how work should be divided between employees and AI agents. Five years ago, workforce planning largely meant planning for people. Now it also means deciding what software can execute independently and where human judgement remains essential. At Otto Media, we reduced our workforce to two after adopting agentic AI. That experience has made workforce design a practical business concern for me. My approach is to automate repeatable coordination while keeping client commitments, important decisions and final approvals with people.

What has surprised me is the amount of money and laws that have landed on the desk of the CHRO.

Five years ago it was culture, talent and engagement. Now I hear a different question from HR peers: can we hire an engineer in Bengaluru next month, and how much will it actually cost us? What is needed is understanding which entity employs the person, what statutory contributions apply and where the compliance risk sits, none of which was in the job description.

What has worked is HR and finance working on a common cost model, instead of HR guessing and finance correcting later. Neither of us owns it alone, and it gets updated every time a rule changes.

The modern CHRO has transitioned from a custodian of administrative policy to a strategic architect of organizational agility through AI and data. While the job description five years ago centered on recruitment and compliance, today's mandate requires a level of technical fluency and data-driven foresight previously reserved for the CTO or COO. We are now Chief Change Officers, tasked with integrating artificial intelligence into the workflow without eroding the cultural fabric of the business.

In scaling our global operations to over 650 professionals, I have seen that traditional talent management is no longer sufficient. We have adapted by moving away from rigid job descriptions toward a model centered on "learnability." HR is now responsible for identifying not just who can perform a task today, but who can adapt as AI tools reshape their specific functions. We no longer view headcount as a static resource; it is a flexible ecosystem of capabilities augmented by technology.

This evolution has placed HR at the center of the technology selection process. The modern CHRO must vet how new tools impact employee mental health, workflow transparency, and internal mobility. When we introduce automation, the mandate is to ensure the human element of the business is amplified rather than diminished. We have moved from monitoring output to nurturing the environment where innovation happens. Success in this era depends on the ability to balance the efficiency of machine learning with the nuanced empathy required to lead a global, distributed workforce. The most effective HR leaders today treat talent cultivation as a high-stakes engineering challenge rather than a back-office function.

One of the biggest changes I've experienced in HR leadership is how directly people decisions are now tied to financial sustainability and broader business planning. The role is no longer confined to talent programs, policies and employee relations. It increasingly requires translating hiring plans, compensation choices, retention risks and organizational design into their operational and financial consequences, then helping leadership decide among competing priorities. For me, working across both human resources and finance has made that connection especially clear. Workforce capacity and financial discipline have to be considered together. My background spans business development, talent acquisition, human resources and finance, and I now oversee both financial operations and human capital. I've adapted by treating people planning and financial planning as one leadership conversation, evaluating whether a workforce decision supports employees and the work they perform while ensuring the organization can financially sustain it. I recommend starting each major workforce decision with the same inputs: the roles and skills required, timing, full cost, operational constraints and measures of success. Finance should not enter after a people plan is complete, and HR should not enter after financial targets are fixed. Bringing both perspectives in at the beginning clarifies the tradeoffs, supports realistic staffing plans and gives leaders a consistent explanation for the decision.

Five years ago, nobody expected the people function to help write the rules for AI. Now, when an engineer pastes client code into an AI assistant, that's a compliance decision as much as a productivity one, especially when the client is a hospital bound by HIPAA or a bank under GDPR. Deciding which tools people can use, on which projects, and with what data used to belong to IT. In practice it has turned into a question of behavior, training and trust, and that has always been people work. The adjustment for me was to stop treating AI policy as a document and start treating it as onboarding. A rule nobody remembers protects no one. What works is building the guardrails into how people start a project: which tools are approved for that client, what data never leaves the environment, and who to ask when they're unsure. The goal isn't to slow engineers down. It's to make sure the safe path is also the easiest one.

Being accountable for the quality of decisions that other people make. The role used to be about running HR processes well. Now the CHRO is expected to be in the room when the executive team decides who leads, who is ready and where the business needs capability, and to say when the evidence does not support the view in the room. That is a consulting role, and most HR leaders were never trained for it. The skill that matters most is establishing what the business actually needs before agreeing to a programme, a restructure or a succession slate, and I have adapted by treating every request as the start of a conversation, not an order.