HR executives are receiving higher pay, titles today than in previous decades

Pay for top HR executives is on the rise, according to new research published by Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, and Mert Akan, a research fellow with the school’s Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The share of S&P 1500 firms that counted an HR executive among their top five highest-paid C-suite executives rose from just 0.5% in 1992 to 13% in 2022, according to Bloom and Akan’s research, which analyzed companies’ DEF 14A filings to the SEC using Execucomp data.

Chief HR titles have also eclipsed less senior-sounding titles in recent years, with companies hiring chief human resource officers (CHRO) and chief people officers (CPO) in lieu of HR directors, the research found.

These trends point to the increasing complexity of HR roles, Akan told HR Brew, and show how companies are placing a higher premium on HR talent due to current events and globalization.

HR roles on the rise. Though the share of companies with top-paid HR professionals has been rising steadily over the past three decades, Bloom and Akan documented a particularly sharp uptick between 2018 and 2022. During this same period, they also saw a precipitous uptick in companies documenting CHROs and CPOs among their executives, while HR director titles declined.

This period of time was marked by a number of major events that demanded a response from employers, which HR was often tasked with handling. The #MeToo movement, which started in 2017, led to the ouster of some 200 powerful men in business and politics, and prompted workplaces to rethink policies and training regarding sexual misconduct, as well as the use of nondisclosure agreements to handle harassment claims. Three years later, the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world of work, with HR departments scrambling to respond to shifting health and safety regulations, while managing employees working remotely. Protests against racial injustice following the police murder of George Floyd that summer further challenged employers to deepen their DE&I commitments.

The rising share of highly paid, senior-level executives “suggests that HR is perhaps becoming more important for these companies. And that could be because the job itself is becoming more complex,” Akan said. Akan cited the #MeToo movement, DE&I initiatives, the Covid-19 pandemic and a subsequent shift to working from home—all coupled with broader globalization trends—as factors that have made top HR roles more complex in recent years, and in turn more important to companies.

More to explore. Akan noted this research is a jumping-off point, and there are a lot of related topics he and Bloom want to explore in the future. They’d like to find out, for example, whether it’s increasingly likely for CHROs and CPOs to become CEOs over time, as well as how appointing HR leaders to top positions in their firms affects company performance. Analyzing the text for job postings of HR executives might shed light on how the demands of the job have changed over time.

Until then, for those looking to advance to a top-paid HR role, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, or wholesale and retail trade might be the most promising places to look. These industries had the highest shares of highly paid HR executives, according to the analysis.