Fisher & Paykel's Simon Fenwick on why the future of HR belongs to lawyers, salespeople and finance leaders
The next generation of HR leaders may not have studied human resources at all. This shift was highlighted in a chat with Simon Fenwick, global head of talent acquisition at Fisher & Paykel, who argued that the profession's future lies in attracting talent from legal, finance and commercial backgrounds – and that the organisations already doing this are pulling ahead.
"I've seen some real success where it's been people who've come from revenue or growth areas, or sales areas, or have come from legal teams that have stepped in, they've grasped the basics but they're able to think more strategically around the broader impacts to the business around the decisions that are being made for people and capability," said Fenwick.
It is a striking claim, but one that is gaining traction. What was once a transactional cost centre had rapidly become a strategic engine room for growth, risk management and organisational resilience – with HR professionals arguing the function gained influence not by accident, but because the commercial environment changed fundamentally.
Fenwick, who spent more than three decades navigating the talent landscape across Australia, the United States and New Zealand – including senior roles at Facebook and the Publicis Group in New York – says that commercial pressure is now driving a rethink of who gets hired into the function in the first place.
The core of Fenwick's case is that HR has outgrown its original skill set. As automation absorbs routine administrative work – compliance paperwork, case management administration, onboarding logistics – what remains demands a fundamentally different capability profile.
"The skill sets of people in the people and capability HR space have actually become more like human experience advisors versus policy advisors," he said.
"We've moved from 'what's the policy, how do we design around the policy' to 'the policy is there and we've got to adhere to it, but actually how do we create the experience that's going to drive the business forward?'"
That shift is playing out across the Tasman too. Ben Mansour, named Australian HR Director of the Year in 2025, told HRD Australia that "HR has moved definitively from a traditional support role into a role that is genuinely operational and strategic," adding that in periods of uncertainty and disruption, it is increasingly HR that leaders are turning to for stability, clarity and workforce confidence.
Research published alongside the Australian and New Zealand Readers' Choice Awards for HR found that 42% of respondents came from non-traditional or unspecified roles, reinforcing that skills development strategies must now account for diverse career pathways, not just conventional HR tracks.
For Fenwick, that data reflects a structural shift already well underway at the senior level. He pointed to professionals from legal, finance and commercial backgrounds as particularly well-placed to lead modern people functions – not because they know HR policy, but because they know how businesses actually operate.
"I can think of some HR leaders in New Zealand that I've met that haven't come from the traditional path that are really smart leaders who understand HR but really come with an 'oh, okay' – they understand how the business operates, they understand the impact of the decisions that are being made."
AI is accelerating the shift
The arrival of artificial intelligence is compressing the timeline. Fenwick described a tiered operating model now being adopted across many organisations, in which automation handles what he calls "basic HR work," freeing senior practitioners to focus on strategic decisions.
"Technology and the advancements with AI are allowing organisations to simplify a lot of what I call that basic HR work. So that's being automated, it's being made much more efficient. And so that's elevating and lifting the function of HR into that strategic space."
The scale of that transition is significant: In New Zealand, 93% expect a significant impact, with 57% increasing their AI technology budgets in 2025, up from 40% in 2024.
Recruitment specialists recently noted that AI is actively redesigning roles around efficiency, automation and leverage – with traditional job titles and linear career paths giving way to outcome-driven roles that demand both technical and commercial capability.
That shift, Fenwick argued, makes the case for non-traditional HR entrants even stronger. A finance professional who can read a business case, or a lawyer who instinctively understands risk and employment regulation, may be better placed to lead in this environment than a career HR generalist. HRD America
"As HR professionals, we have to have that mental agility. How do we self-educate and what do we need to do to make sure that we are educating ourselves so we can have those conversations? The organisations that are struggling are the ones that aren't thinking, 'we need to evolve and we need to change because the business is headed in that direction.'"
The result, Fenwick predicts, will be HR teams that are leaner but more influential. Smaller headcounts, higher stakes, and a much stronger expectation that every person in the function can hold their own in a boardroom conversation.
New Zealand's talent problem makes this urgent
The stakes are particularly high in New Zealand, where a shrinking domestic talent pool and persistent brain drain are forcing organisations to be smarter about how they build and retain capability. Fenwick, who left New Zealand in the late 1980s before returning in 2022, is blunt about the lack of progress on this front.
"We've got a shrinking talent market, we've got a lot of brain drain happening. Same problems as when I left in the late 80s, early 90s. Nothing much has changed," he explained.
Waiting for the traditional pipeline to deliver strategically capable HR leaders is no longer viable. The better path, Fenwick argued, is to look sideways – at the lawyer who understands risk, the finance director who reads a business case instinctively, the sales leader who knows how to move people.
Fisher & Paykel Appliances, a 98-year-old company with approximately 4,500 employees globally, is itself evidence that long-term workforce thinking pays off.
The message from Fenwick is clear: the profession is not waiting for permission to change. The question is whether the people entering it – and the organisations hiring them – are ready to change with it.
