Employers urged to rotate business leaders through HR to build CHRO pipeline
Employers should start developing their next generation of HR leaders now, including by rotating high-potential leaders from outside HR through "meaningful people work," according to Heidrick & Struggles.
In an insight, the executive search firm said the traditional route to the chief human resources officer (CHRO) role has not kept pace with its expanding responsibilities, creating a "pipeline problem that searching harder within the same pool will never solve."
"As with any key leadership role, you should ensure you have a robust pipeline before you need to fill the role," wrote report authors Brian Kropp and Brad Warga.
Two-way rotations
To build that pipeline, the firm recommended giving high-potential HR leaders ownership of products, transformations, operating-model work, or business outcomes.
It then urged employers to "reverse the flow" by rotating high-potential business, product, engineering and transformation leaders through people roles so they experience the judgment required in employee relations, leadership, culture, workforce decisions, and trust.
"These proving grounds allow unconventional talent to acquire human-capital depth while career HR talent develops new ways of creating value," the report said.
Narrow pipeline
The recommendation comes as the firm's June 2026 survey of 600 CHROs found that 61% had always worked in HR. Another 23% began their careers elsewhere before moving into HR, while 15% left HR and later returned. Just one per cent had worked only outside HR before taking the top people role.
Only 42% of respondents rated their HR function as mostly or highly effective at building and maintaining a robust leadership pipeline.
The firm's separate analysis of sitting Fortune 1000 CHROs also found that only three per cent began their careers in strategy consulting, product or engineering, while four per cent hold an undergraduate degree in a hard-science field.
"Companies are broadening expectations faster than they are broadening the experiences that prepare leaders to meet them," the report said.
Only a quarter of surveyed CHROs are currently fully working as what the firm calls an "enterprise CHRO," whose mandate starts with business problems rather than HR programmes.
Mixing backgrounds
Prasad Setty, former vice president of people operations at Google, told the firm that the tech giant drew its HR staff from several backgrounds.
"We staffed the HR function [at Google] with three types of backgrounds: consulting or business; academic or analytics; and HR. To those three, I would certainly add product thinking and technology acumen," he said.
Hannah Pritchett, chief people officer at Anthropic, said deep HR experience still has a place alongside fresh perspectives.
"I want the deep experience to be balanced against fresh, first-principles thinking. We produce our best results when somebody is thinking from first principles and somebody else can say, 'I've tried that—and here is why it failed,'" she said.
CEO backing needed
The report also warned that new HR talent will struggle without support from the top. Only 22% of surveyed CHROs described themselves as entirely aligned with their CEO.
"Without your backing, unconventional leaders will be pulled toward a conventional service mandate; career HR leaders attempting to change the existing model will face the same gravity," it said.
Heidrick & Struggles said CEOs should widen both their search for CHROs and "the route that prepares leaders for it."
"Your next great CHRO may come from engineering, product, operations, strategy, or elsewhere in the business. They may also rise through HR after accumulating new cross-functional experiences that the traditional ladder rarely required," the report said.
