Demand for people skills is rising, Indeed’s latest data shows, and it's forcing a rethink of familiar hiring playbooks
Scroll through job postings today and you’ll see the usual technical requirements: software proficiencies, domain expertise, maybe some AI experience. But that’s not all. These days, another set of skills continue to crop up in job descriptions across the country.
That’s according to new research from Indeed Hiring Lab that found “HR skills” have become part of the core skill set employers expect across the business, not just in HR.
In an analysis of U.S. postings, economist Sneha Puri and her team found that “business operations” skills, which includes administrative, project management and human resources capabilities, appeared in over 70% of job ads in Q4 2025, by far the most of any skill group. Within that, human resources skills alone were mentioned in more than a quarter of postings, 27.3% during the same period.
“HR skills go beyond what we typically associate with an HR person,” Puri said. They include “employee management, retention, training and development,” and are now required across sectors.
That demand isn’t limited to HR roles, either. In fact, it’s showing up in retail, project management, hospitality, and administrative jobs too.
In broad terms, the report’s findings suggest that the skills once associated with HR are becoming part of the baseline expectation for the wider workforce.
Why ‘people skills’ are having a moment
For Puri, the widespread presence of HR-related skills reflects the realities of modern work. Many of the capabilities that sit under the HR umbrella are, in practice, essential to running any team or function.
“Training and development, for example, is required across sectors,” she said. “You need to train your staff that is in computer science, or the staff that is in marketing.”
At the same time, the rise of AI is changing how organizations think about skills more broadly.
Read more: How to use AI in hiring, growth and onboarding
Author and workplace futurist Alexandra Levit says the growing emphasis on interpersonal capabilities is closely tied to what technology can’t do.
“AI can do a lot of tactical things. It can do things faster than we can,” she said. “But what it can’t do is bring nuance, judgment, intuition, creativity and true problem solving to the table. Those are the things that set human employees apart.”
Even so, Levit sees a persistent gap between what employers say they want and how they actually hire.
Organizations may emphasize soft skills in job descriptions, but hiring decisions still tend to favor technical qualifications, which Levit attributes to a measurement problem.
“The only thing we know how to measure consistently is technical skills,” she said. “So inevitably, we end up hiring people based on technical skills, even though we’ve said and genuinely believe that human skills are better and necessary.”
That leaves many organizations relying on interviews, subjective impressions, and rapport to gauge interpersonal strengths, which can be inconsistent at best.
Rethinking how talent is hired and developed
Both Puri and Levit point to a need for organizations to rethink how they approach talent. From a hiring perspective, Levit argues that traditional models are too narrow, focusing heavily on direct experience rather than potential.
“HR leaders and interviewers have kind of a lack of imagination,” she said. “They are looking for someone to check a bunch of boxes in terms of what they’ve already done.”
Read more: Is your hiring approach scaring young candidates?
That approach can lead organizations to overlook candidates with strong transferable skills. To address this, Levit pointed to talent intelligence platforms, which analyze career data to identify adjacent capabilities and surface less obvious candidates.
She pointed to an example where an organization struggling to hire customer service representatives used such technology to identify candidates from hospitality backgrounds.
“They already had the right soft skills,” she said, including empathy and the ability to manage difficult interactions. “They were just as capable of getting the job done with some minor training.”
At the same time, Levit cautioned that technology alone is not a solution. AI-driven hiring tools require careful oversight to avoid bias and unintended consequences, she said.
Alongside hiring, both experts emphasized the importance of building HR-related skills within the existing workforce.
“I think it would be super important for employers to continue building these skills across the business,” Puri said, pointing to areas such as human capital management, performance management, and training as key opportunities for development.
Levit sees this as an opportunity for HR to expand its influence. Developing the human side of the workforce has always been central to the function, she noted, and organizations now have a chance to apply that expertise more broadly.
“The charter of HR really is to develop the human elements of our workforce and to ensure that we are training,” she said.
In practice, that means embedding people management capabilities more broadly and giving employees at all levels the tools to lead, collaborate, and support one another.
“If HR skills are showing up everywhere, then we need to be training people in those transferable skills across the entire business,” she said.
Indeed’s findings send a simple message: HR skills now run through the whole organization. The real question is whether companies will treat them as a core capability to be built and managed or as wishful thinking in a job description.
