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Human resources specialists

Also called HR specialist, Recruiter, Talent acquisition specialist, HR generalist, Recruiting specialist

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 912,430 US human resources specialists, with median pay of $75,940 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the highest was 917,460, in May 2024, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 12,000 from 1910, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for human resources specialists: Conversational AI recruiting, 2019 to 2023. Conversational AI scheduling raised interview throughput for teams that adopted it.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 6.4% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Human resources specialists: jobs and pay since 1910 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1071

Chicago

Future History. "Human resources specialists: jobs and pay since 1910." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1071.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_13_1071, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Human resources specialists: jobs and pay since 1910}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1071}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Welfare Secretary / Welfare Worker (industrial welfare movement)
Known then as Personnel Manager / Employment Manager (NCR model spreads)
Known then as Industrial Relations Specialist / Personnel Specialist
Known then as Personnel Specialist (ASPA era)
Known then as Human Resources Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1071)
Known then as Human Resources Specialist (SHRM era, post-1989 rebrand)
Known today as Human Resources Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1071)
Projected to still be called Human Resources Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1071)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
912K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$75,940

≈ $73,993 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1901

Following a labor strike at its Dayton, Ohio factory, the National Cash Register Company (NCR) establishes one of America's first formal personnel departments, hiring Lena Harvey Tracy, a welfare worker trained in the settlement-house movement, to manage employee grievances, working conditions, and the daily frictions of industrial employment. Tracy later wrote "How My Heart Sang: The Story of Pioneer Industrial Welfare Work" (1950), documenting this founding moment of the American HR profession.

Beat · 1924

Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo and his team begin the Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works plant in Cicero, Illinois (1924-1932). The illumination studies, relay assembly experiments, and bank wiring experiments produce the counterintuitive finding that worker productivity is influenced more by social recognition and management attention than by physical working conditions. Mayo's Human Relations Theory becomes the intellectual foundation for the shift from scientific-management "efficiency experts" to the personnel specialists who emphasize employee motivation, group dynamics, and supervisory relationships.

Beat · 1948

On November 21, 1948, a group of 28 professionals, personnel managers and industrial relations specialists from companies across the Midwest, meets to found the American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA) in Berea, Ohio. ASPA begins with the modest aim of creating a professional community for people doing the work that NCR's 1901 experiment had pioneered. Forty years later, in 1989, ASPA renames itself the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), reflecting the profession's broadened scope from administrative personnel to strategic human capital. As of 2026, SHRM has more than 340,000 members in 165 countries.

Beat · 1964

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and creates the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). For personnel departments, the law is transformational: record-keeping requirements, complaint procedures, and the prospect of federal enforcement action turn compliance from a soft responsibility into a hard institutional necessity. Every HR Specialist hired after 1964 works inside a legal architecture that did not exist in 1963.

Beat · 1997

Dave Ulrich publishes "Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results" (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), introducing the HR Business Partner model: four roles for HR professionals: strategic partner, administrative expert, employee champion, and change agent. The HRBP model reshapes how large organizations structure their HR functions for the next two decades, elevating the specialist from a compliance administrator to a business-embedded strategic partner. Every modern HR org chart with embedded HRBPs, Centers of Excellence, and Shared Services traces its architecture to this book.

Beat · 2018

October 10, 2018: Reuters publishes an investigation revealing that Amazon's internal machine-learning recruiting tool (built by a team starting in 2014, trained on ten years of successful hire resumes) was systematically penalizing resumes from women, downgrading graduates of all-female colleges, and flagging any resume containing the word "women's." Amazon had already quietly disbanded the recruiting-AI team before the Reuters story ran; the company had discovered the bias in 2015 and spent three years attempting, unsuccessfully, to correct it. The story is the most widely read single article about AI in employment ever published and triggers a decade of regulatory attention, academic scrutiny, and corporate risk assessment of AI hiring tools.

Beat · 2023

May 18, 2023: The EEOC issues its first technical-assistance guidance on AI hiring tools, "Assessing Adverse Impact in Software, Algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence Used in Employment Selection Procedures Under Title VII." The document clarifies that employers are responsible for the discriminatory impact of AI tools they deploy, even if developed by a third-party vendor. July 5, 2023: New York City's Local Law 144 begins enforcement, requiring annual third-party bias audits for any AI tool that "substantially assists" a hiring or promotion decision. HR Specialists become the primary internal implementation function for LL 144 compliance in New York-headquartered organizations.

Beat · 2024

July 12, 2024: A federal judge in the Northern District of California (Judge Rita Lin) allows Derek Mobley's putative class action against Workday to proceed as a national age-discrimination class action. Mobley had submitted more than 100 applications through Workday's platform and was rejected every time (often within minutes, sometimes in the middle of the night) without an interview. The EEOC filed an amicus brief supporting the novel theory that AI vendor Workday could be directly liable as an "agent" of employers for discrimination by its AI hiring tools. The ruling is the most significant development in AI-hiring law since Title VII itself, potentially expanding discrimination liability to every HRIS vendor whose AI touches a hiring decision.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace human resources specialists? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+6.4%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 13-1071 (Human resources specialists): 939.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 999.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +60.1 thousand (+6.4%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
58.9%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 13-1071.00 Human Resources Specialists. Shown: human-rated β = 0.589, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.378 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.8; GPT-4-rated β 0.644. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for human resources specialists

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereManage AI-powered high-volume candidate sourcing for hourly and frontline roles, reviewing Paradox Olivia's automated text-and-chat screening conversations, approving shortlists surfaced by Eightfold AI Talent Intelligence, and making the final selection call before extending offers.

Manage AI-powered high-volume candidate sourcing for hourly and frontline roles, reviewing Paradox Olivia's automated text-and-chat screening conversations, approving shortlists surfaced by Eightfold AI Talent Intelligence, and making the final selection call before extending offers.[8],[9],[4]

Where your edge is

Shift focus from volume screening to quality calibration: design the criteria Olivia screens against, audit the Eightfold ranking model for demographic bias quarterly, and build relationships with hiring managers so you understand what "good" looks like beyond the resume.

AI is sitting alongside you hereReview and calibrate AI-ranked resume shortlists from the ATS, auditing Workday Recruiter Agent or iCIMS Copilot's automated scoring for bias, override incorrect rankings with documented rationale, and present a final candidate slate to the hiring manager.

Review and calibrate AI-ranked resume shortlists from the ATS, auditing Workday Recruiter Agent or iCIMS Copilot's automated scoring for bias, override incorrect rankings with documented rationale, and present a final candidate slate to the hiring manager.[10],[11],[3]

Where your edge is

Learn to read the explainability outputs from your ATS AI (why it ranked a candidate highly); conduct periodic bias audits comparing AI shortlists against manually reviewed pools; document overrides to build a feedback loop that improves model accuracy over time.

AI is sitting alongside you hereResolve new-hire and employee HR policy questions via AI-powered self-service channels, configuring Moveworks or ServiceNow HR Agent knowledge bases, monitoring unresolved escalations that require human judgment, and handling the exceptions AI cannot answer.

Resolve new-hire and employee HR policy questions via AI-powered self-service channels, configuring Moveworks or ServiceNow HR Agent knowledge bases, monitoring unresolved escalations that require human judgment, and handling the exceptions AI cannot answer.[12],[13],[5]

Where your edge is

Shift from answering routine policy FAQs (now handled by AI) to improving the knowledge base that trains the AI; invest in the edge cases (leave disputes, accommodation requests, conflict situations) where policy interpretation requires contextual judgment.

Where human resources specialists go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Human Resources Managers

HR Specialists who develop strategic business-partner skills, people-analytics literacy, and demonstrated employee-relations judgment are natural candidates for the HR Manager role. AI is absorbing the transactional execution layer (screening, scheduling, HRIS data entry), making the remaining human value in the specialist role increasingly overlap with manager-level strategic work, compressing the gap between the two. HR Managers score higher on CRI because they own the policy, vendor selection, and governance decisions that the specialist implements.

What you'd add
· People analytics and workforce planning using tools like Workday Peakon or Visier
· AI governance for HR tools: bias audits, EEOC compliance, vendor due diligence
· PHR or SPHR certification (HRCI) or SHRM-CP / SHRM-SCP
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of human resources specialists changed since 1901?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Paper personnel files + typewritten records

    From NCR's 1901 personnel department through the mid-1950s, the entire personnel function ran on paper: handwritten application forms, typewritten employment records stored in physical folders, payroll ledgers maintained in bound books, and regulatory compliance documented through paper correspondence. A personnel manager's office was literally a file room, often a room-sized steel cabinet bank. Hiring decisions were documented on paper cards. Grievance records were handwritten. The work was largely clerical; the skilled judgment layer was thin and concentrated at the top.

  • IBM punch card payroll + mainframe record systems

    IBM's punch-card tabulating systems, which had been used for Census processing since 1890, were adopted by large employers through the 1950s-1960s for payroll calculation, employee records, and benefits tracking. The mainframe HRIS era proper began with EDS (Ross Perot, 1962) building the first large-scale outsourced HR data-processing systems for insurance companies. By the 1970s, most Fortune 500 firms ran payroll on IBM mainframes. The personnel department's clerical workload shrank for batch-processable tasks (payroll calculation, benefits enrollment tallying) but compliance work grew faster: the Civil Rights Act (1964), ADEA (1967), ERISA (1974), and OSHA (1970) all created new record-keeping mandates that required dedicated human attention.

  • PeopleSoft / SAP HRIS: client-server HR systems

    PeopleSoft, founded by Dave Duffield in 1987, was the first purpose-built client-server HRIS, designed from the ground up for HR business requirements rather than as a bolt-on to a financial ERP. By the mid-1990s PeopleSoft and SAP HR were displacing mainframe payroll systems at large employers. For HR Specialists, the client-server HRIS era meant that employee records, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and compliance reports could now be queried on a desktop rather than retrieved from a filing cabinet or requested from an IT batch run. The job became more analytical; the specialist who could navigate PeopleSoft's reporting tools had a visible edge over colleagues who couldn't.

    Effect on the work

    Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft in December 2004 became a defining moment in enterprise software history, accelerating the market shift toward the cloud HRIS era that Workday would lead.

  • First applicant tracking systems: Resumix, Taleo, Restrac

    Resumix, founded in 1988, was the first commercial system to use optical character recognition to parse resumes and match them to job requisitions without human reading. Taleo (originally RecruitSoft, founded 1999) brought the ATS model to the web, giving mid-market employers a hosted alternative to on-premise systems. By 2005, most Fortune 1000 firms had an ATS, and the act of applying for a job was fundamentally restructured: instead of mailing a resume to a named HR contact, candidates submitted to a system that parsed, scored, and filtered before any human saw the application. For HR Specialists, the ATS era compressed the time-to-screen dramatically while creating new failure modes: keyword matching penalized non-standard career paths, and the systems amplified whatever biases existed in job descriptions.

  • Workday / cloud HRIS + LinkedIn Recruiter

    Workday, founded in March 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, launched commercially in 2006 as the first cloud-native HRIS. By 2015 it served more than half the Fortune 500. LinkedIn Recruiter (2008) gave every HR Specialist direct access to the professional history of every LinkedIn member, hundreds of millions of profiles by 2019. The combined effect was a step-change in recruiting leverage: a single recruiter with Workday, LinkedIn Recruiter, and a modern ATS could manage pipelines that previously required a team. The cloud HRIS era also enabled people analytics: real-time headcount, turnover, time-to-fill, and compensation-equity dashboards that had previously required a data scientist and a batch extract.

    Effect on the work

    LinkedIn reports that its AI-assisted search features (introduced in 2024) reduced sourcing time per hire for its Recruiter users. Workday grew to serve thousands of organizations worldwide by 2026, making it the de facto operating system for large-enterprise HR teams.

  • AI video assessment + biometric screening: HireVue, Pymetrics, Amazon's failed tool

    HireVue introduced AI-scored video interviews in 2014, promising to remove human bias from initial screening by analyzing facial expressions, speech patterns, and word choices. Pymetrics (2013) used neuroscience-based games to assess candidates without resumes. Amazon's machine-learning team built an internal AI recruiting tool from 2014 that trained on ten years of successful hire resumes; by 2015 the team had identified that the model was systematically penalizing resumes containing the word "women's" and downgrading graduates of all-female colleges. Amazon disbanded the team in 2018 when it could not guarantee bias elimination. The Amazon story, broken by Reuters on October 10, 2018, triggered a wave of academic and regulatory scrutiny of AI hiring tools that continues today. Unilever and Delta Air Lines continued using HireVue, reporting positive diversity outcomes; the research on AI interview fairness remains contested.

    Effect on the work

    The Amazon story shaped a decade of HR policy: EEOC issued its first AI hiring technical-assistance guidance in May 2023; New York City's Local Law 144 required annual third-party bias audits of AI hiring tools starting July 2023. HR Specialists became the first line of internal defense against AI-discrimination liability: a new skill set, not just a new tool.

  • Conversational AI recruiting: Paradox Olivia, Eightfold, GoodTime

    Paradox's Olivia (deployed commercially 2019) was the first AI to fully automate text-and-chat candidate screening for high-volume hourly roles without recruiter involvement, scheduling interviews, answering candidate questions, and sending offer letters autonomously. McDonald's, Lowe's, and Wendy's deployed Olivia at scale, reducing time-to-interview from days to minutes for frontline positions. Eightfold AI (2018) applied deep learning to career-trajectory matching, surfacing ranked candidate shortlists from both internal talent pools and external applicants. GoodTime automated interview scheduling across hiring-panel calendars. By 2022, these three tools had effectively automated the scheduling and initial screening workflow that had occupied perhaps 30-40% of a typical recruiter's day.

    Effect on the work

    Conversational AI scheduling raised interview throughput for teams that adopted it. The implication for HR Specialist headcount is ambiguous: volume hiring teams in retail, logistics, and food service have reduced recruiter-to-hire ratios, while complex professional-role recruiting has shifted recruiter time toward sourcing strategy and hiring-manager advisory, expanding the scope of the judgment-layer work.

  • Agentic HR AI + AI-bias governance: Workday AI agents, ServiceNow, Moveworks, Workday class-action (2024)

    In 2023-2024, every major HRIS vendor shipped generative-AI features: Workday's Recruiter Agent automates resume ranking and interview kit generation; ServiceNow's HR Service Delivery AI resolves employee policy questions autonomously; Moveworks deflects a large share of tier-1 HR service volume without human involvement. The same period produced the most significant AI-hiring litigation in US history: Mobley v. Workday, filed in 2023, became the first class-action lawsuit alleging that an HRIS vendor's AI screening tools discriminated based on race, age, and disability. In July 2024, a federal judge allowed the age-discrimination class to proceed nationally. The EEOC filed an amicus brief supporting the novel theory that AI vendors can be directly liable as "agents" of employers. For HR Specialists, the dual reality is clear: AI is absorbing the transactional execution layer while creating a new premium on the governance and judgment layer, the people who can evaluate an AI tool's bias risk, document AI-hiring decisions for audit readiness, and make the human call when the algorithm's shortlist is wrong.

    Effect on the work

    SHRM 2025 Talent Trends: just over half of organizations (51%) use AI to support recruiting efforts, with resume screening (44%) and candidate search automation as the leading applications. Josh Bersin (January 2026) estimates 30-40% of existing HR roles can be automated with relatively low effort -- while simultaneously creating new specialist roles in AI governance, people analytics, and HR product management that did not exist in 2020.

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Human Resources Specialists employment and pay by year

On record since1901
Latest US employment912,430 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$75,940 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+6.4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 3571)

    Employment, 2025
    138,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 3571 Human resources and industrial relations officers, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £33,012, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 3571 Human resources and industrial relations officers, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 2231)

    Employment, 2025
    84,700, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2231 Human Resource Professionals, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$102,440, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,970 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 25 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
191012,000n/aEst., The 411 HR Researched contextReport
194065,000n/aEst., NLRB Researched contextReport
1970160,000n/aEst., EEOC Researched contextReport
1990355,000n/aEst., Society for Human Resource Management Researched contextReport
2003164,020$40,770BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004169,750$41,190BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005181,260$41,780BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006186,620$42,420BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007193,620$44,380BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008205,800$45,470BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009198,190$46,200BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2012394,380$55,800BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013426,570$56,630BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014456,170$57,420BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015491,090$58,350BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016524,800$59,180BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017553,950$60,350BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018593,790$60,880BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019633,040$61,920BLS OEWS May 2019 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2019 (pay) Official statisticReport
2020647,810$63,490BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021740,830$62,290BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022835,360$64,240BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023895,970$67,650BLS OEWS May 2023 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2023 (pay) Official statisticReport
2024917,460$72,910BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025912,430$75,940BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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