Privacy-friendly analytics help us see which jobs people explore. They stay off unless you agree.Analytics off unless you agree. Details

Read the record
Back to the river
Skip to sources
Time Machine

HR assistants

Official title Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping (SOC 43-4161)

Also called Human resources clerk, HR coordinator, Personnel assistant, HR administrative assistant

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 90,220 US HR assistants, with median pay of $50,610 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 165,760, in May 2003. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 18,000 from 1940, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for HR assistants: Conversational recruiting AI and applicant tracking systems, 2016 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 6.2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 46% of work tasks in office and administrative support occupations, this job's group, are exposed to automation by AI. Not a forecast of job losses. Goldman Sachs, 2023
  • 46.6% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

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). HR assistants: jobs and pay since 1940 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4161

Chicago

Future History. "HR assistants: jobs and pay since 1940." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4161.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_4161, author = {{Future History}}, title = {HR assistants: jobs and pay since 1940}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4161}}, 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 Personnel Investigator / Employment Clerk (industrial personnel departments)
Known then as Personnel Clerk (war-era and postwar bureaucratic expansion)
Known then as Personnel Clerk, Except Payroll and Timekeeping (BLS classification era)
Known then as Human Resources Clerk / Personnel Assistant (HR rebranding era)
Known then as Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping (BLS SOC 43-4161)
Known today as Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping (BLS SOC 43-4161)
Projected to still be called Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping (BLS SOC 43-4161)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
90K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$50,610

≈ $49,312 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1914

January 1914: Henry Ford announces the five-dollar day at Highland Park, and John R. Lee establishes the Sociological Department to administer it. Investigators visit workers' homes, take standardized notes, and compile individual personnel folders that will determine each employee's eligibility for the premium wage. This is the first systematic, employer-sponsored personnel record-keeping operation in American industrial history. The Sociological Department creates the template for the personnel file and the compliance checklist that will define the HR assistant role for the next century.

Beat · 1920

By 1920, 20 percent of large US employers have a personnel department, up from 5 percent in 1915. Personnel administration emerges as a defined field, with the American Management Association beginning to publish guidance on personnel management practices. The role of personnel clerk is now standard in any organization large enough to justify a dedicated department. The primary tasks are: maintaining employee cards or folders, recording job assignments and wage changes, tracking absences, and producing periodic headcount reports for supervisors.

Beat · 1964

President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and creates the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Employers subject to Title VII must maintain and retain all personnel and employment records for at least one year, including hiring, promotion, transfer, demotion, lay-off, and termination records. The EEO-1 report requirement (for employers with 100 or more employees) adds an annual statistical reporting burden. This compliance wave materially expands the volume and legal weight of the records that personnel clerks must maintain, driving employment growth in the occupation through the 1960s and 1970s.

Beat · 1974

President Gerald Ford signs ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, on September 2, 1974. ERISA requires plan administrators to maintain benefit plan records for at least six years. Combined with the ADA (1990), FMLA (1993), HIPAA (1996), and COBRA, the cumulative compliance record-keeping burden on HR departments grows substantially through the 1970s-1990s, sustaining demand for personnel clerks even as early HRIS technology begins absorbing individual transactions. Personnel clerks in this era become the custodians of a growing archive of legally required documentation.

Beat · 1989

PeopleSoft releases its first integrated client-server HRMS product in late 1989, co-founded by David Duffield and Ken Morris. The product is the first robust HR software designed for the PC/LAN environment rather than a mainframe, making sophisticated personnel database management accessible to employers outside the Fortune 500. SAP R/3 follows in 1992 with its own HR module. The client-server era does not immediately cut HR assistant employment because new-hire volume and compliance demands are high, but it establishes the technological foundation on which the next two decades of displacement will rest.

Beat · 1993

President Clinton signs the Family and Medical Leave Act on February 5, 1993, which takes effect August 5, 1993. FMLA requires covered employers to maintain records of leave usage, medical certifications, and return-to-work documentation for at least three years. The administrative burden is substantial: employers must track intermittent leave on a day-by-day basis, maintain separate FMLA files, and produce leave notices within precise time windows. Personnel clerks, already managing EEOC and ERISA files, absorb the FMLA compliance workflow. Each new leave statute adds tasks that sustain the occupation even as the underlying record-entry technology improves.

Beat · 2005

Workday Inc. is founded in 2005 by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, PeopleSoft veterans who had just sold that company to Oracle. Workday is built from the ground up as a cloud-delivered, browser-based HR platform with employee self-service as a core design principle rather than an add-on. The Workday model, soon joined by competitors BambooHR (2008) and Rippling (2016), shifts the unit economics of HR record-keeping fundamentally: the incremental cost of allowing an employee to update their own record approaches zero. BLS OEWS data shows HR Assistant employment declining from approximately 178,000 in 2003 to 95,200 by 2024 as self-service adoption spreads across employer size ranges.

Beat · 2025

Workday announces Illuminate AI agents in September 2025, embedding generative AI into its HR platform so employees can submit requests, ask policy questions, and receive status updates through a conversational interface without reaching a human HR assistant. Simultaneously, Leena AI reports resolving up to 80 percent of employee helpdesk tickets autonomously, and Rippling's AI Plan Parser begins auto-populating benefits fields from plan documents without manual data entry. The 2025 generation of AI tools targets the exception-handling and inquiry-response tasks that the self-service portal era of the 2000s had left intact, compressing the scope of the HR assistant role further toward the judgment-intensive and physical-presence-dependent functions that remain genuinely hard to automate.

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 HR assistants? 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
-6.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-4161 (Human resources assistants, except payroll and timekeeping): 96.5 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 90.5 thousand in 2035, a change of -6.0 thousand (-6.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.9% 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)
46.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 43-4161.00 Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping. Shown: human-rated β = 0.466, 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) 0.138 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.793; GPT-4-rated β 0.621. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Goldman Sachs (Briggs & Kodnani, 2023), "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth"
2023 study · Share of work tasks exposed to automation by AI, all office and administrative support occupations (US)
46%
of tasks
What this measures

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research scored the task content of each US occupation for exposure to automation by generative AI and weighted by OEWS employment. Exhibit 5 (US panel) reports 46% for office and administrative support occupations, the occupational group this role belongs to; the report publishes no figure for individual occupations. It measures how much of the group's work AI could automate, not how many jobs disappear, and it is a 2023 estimate, not a forecast for a later year.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for HR assistants

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

AI is taking this onCoordinate interview scheduling between candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters: confirm room or video-link logistics, send calendar invites, and update the ATS with scheduling status so the recruiter dashboard stays current.

Coordinate interview scheduling between candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters: confirm room or video-link logistics, send calendar invites, and update the ATS with scheduling status so the recruiter dashboard stays current.[7],[8]

Where your edge is

Shift focus to ATS administration and reporting rather than manual scheduling; learn to configure Paradox or equivalent tools so the assistant coordinates rather than executes the booking flow.

AI is sitting alongside you hereProcess new-hire paperwork through the HRIS: enter personal data, I-9 verification status, tax withholding elections, and direct-deposit details, then confirm automated onboarding workflows have triggered equipment provisioning and system-access requests.

Process new-hire paperwork through the HRIS: enter personal data, I-9 verification status, tax withholding elections, and direct-deposit details, then confirm automated onboarding workflows have triggered equipment provisioning and system-access requests.[1],[9]

Where your edge is

Build expertise in configuring and auditing HRIS onboarding workflows rather than just entering data; errors in automated provisioning steps still require a human to catch and resolve.

AI is sitting alongside you hereRespond to employee inquiries about benefits enrollment windows, leave balances, and company policy

Respond to employee inquiries about benefits enrollment windows, leave balances, and company policy; escalate edge cases to HR Specialists when the chatbot or self-service portal cannot resolve the issue.[5],[10]

Where your edge is

Develop fluency with the organization's self-service chatbot configuration so you can update the knowledge base when policies change, rather than simply triaging tickets the bot misses.

Where HR assistants go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Human Resources Specialists

HR Assistants with a few years of HRIS and compliance experience share most of the foundational knowledge required for HR Specialist work; the step up requires developing independent case management, employee-relations judgment, and at least an associate-level HR certification.

What you'd add
  • · SHRM-CP or PHR certification
  • · Employee-relations case documentation and investigation techniques
  • · Intermediate HRIS configuration (workflow rules, report design)
  • · Employment law fundamentals (FMLA, ADA, Title VII)
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of HR assistants changed since 1914?

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

  • Paper personnel file + standardized forms (industrial personnel era)

    The paper personnel file, introduced as a systematic practice by the Ford Sociological Department in 1914, was the defining technology of the early HR assistant role. Every employment event, hire, wage change, disciplinary notice, leave of absence, transfer, and termination, was recorded by hand on standardized forms and filed in a physical folder maintained for each employee. The clerk's job was to create, update, and retrieve these folders accurately and to compile periodic reports for supervisors by counting and tallying the paper records manually. No technology assisted; the job was pure clerical precision.

  • Punched cards + early tabulating machines (IBM 80-column, Remington Rand)

    Large employers, especially federal agencies and defense contractors, began using punched-card tabulating systems for personnel record-keeping in the 1950s. IBM 80-column cards could hold basic employee data fields: employee number, department code, pay grade, and employment status. Personnel clerks in these organizations learned to operate card punches and verify card decks rather than (or in addition to) maintaining paper folders. Tabulating machines could produce headcount reports, department rosters, and payroll summaries far faster than manual tallying. The technology was expensive and available only to large employers; the majority of organizations still worked entirely on paper through the 1960s.

    Effect on the work

    Punched-card tabulation slightly concentrated personnel work in large organizations and reduced the manual reporting burden per clerk, but it did not reduce clerical headcount because the compliance and record-keeping demands of the era (union contracts, EEOC rules from 1964, ERISA from 1974) were expanding the volume of records faster than the technology could automate them.

  • Mainframe HRIS (early centralized payroll and personnel databases)

    The 1960s and 1970s brought the first mainframe-based HR information systems to large corporations. These systems, pioneered by IBM and later by specialized vendors, centralized employee data into a single database rather than distributed paper files. Personnel clerks in organizations that adopted them shifted from maintaining physical folders to entering transactions into a terminal. The driving force was compliance: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) created EEO reporting obligations, ERISA (1974) created benefits record-keeping mandates, and the Privacy Act of 1974 imposed new requirements on federal personnel records. Each law added categories of data that had to be maintained, increasing both the volume and the legal weight of the personnel record. Mainframe HRIS handled the data storage but still required significant manual data-entry work.

  • Client-server HRIS: PeopleSoft (1989), SAP HR, ADP Enterprise

    PeopleSoft version 1, released in late 1989 by David Duffield and Ken Morris, was the first fully integrated, robust client-server HRMS application suite. It replaced the mainframe-terminal model with a networked system that any authorized HR staff member could access from a desktop PC. Within a few years, SAP R/3 (1992) included an HR module, and ADP moved its payroll and HR products to client-server architecture. The effect on the HR assistant role was significant but gradual: the most repetitive file-maintenance tasks (creating records, updating address changes, filing status changes) became online forms rather than paper transactions, reducing the time each transaction required. This was the first wave of genuine employment compression for the occupation, though it was partially offset by the hiring booms of the late 1990s and the compliance demands added by FMLA (1993) and ADA (1990).

    Effect on the work

    The PeopleSoft-era compression was modest in raw headcount terms because new compliance mandates kept adding to the record-keeping workload even as the technology handled each transaction faster.

  • Web-based self-service HR portals (Workday 2005, employee self-service)

    Workday was founded in 2005 by PeopleSoft veterans David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri specifically to move HR onto a cloud-delivered, browser-based architecture. By the mid-2000s, web-based employee self-service portals became the dominant driver of HR assistant displacement: when employees could log in to update their own home address, elect their own benefits during open enrollment, request their own time-off, and view their own pay stubs, the transaction volume that had sustained large HR assistant pools dropped sharply. Each self-service adoption event moved dozens of routine transactions per week from an HR assistant's queue to the employee's own screen. BLS OEWS data shows HR Assistant employment declining between 2003 and 2012, a drop of about one-third in under a decade.

    Effect on the work

    The self-service era is the most consequential single wave of displacement in this occupation's history. Employment fell between 2003 and 2012 as the web-portal model spread from early adopters (large technology companies) to mid-size employers across all industries. The remaining workforce concentrated in organizations with high onboarding volume or complex compliance environments where the self-service model reduced but did not eliminate the need for human review.

  • Conversational recruiting AI and applicant tracking systems (Paradox Olivia 2016, Eightfold 2016)

    Paradox (founded 2016) and Eightfold AI (founded 2016) brought conversational AI to two of the highest-volume HR assistant tasks: interview scheduling and job requisition management. Paradox's Olivia chatbot could screen candidates, schedule interviews, send offer letters, and answer pre-boarding questions via SMS without human involvement, handling over one million interviews monthly by the mid-2020s. For the HR assistant, these tools removed tasks that had previously required daily attention: confirming calendar slots across multiple parties, updating the ATS with scheduling status, and fielding repetitive candidate questions. The tools did not eliminate the need for a human to configure and audit them, but they sharply reduced the headcount of people executing individual scheduling transactions.

  • AI HR agents and helpdesk automation (Workday Illuminate 2025, Leena AI, Rippling AI)

    Workday's Illuminate AI agents (announced September 2025) embedded a generative AI assistant directly into the Workday platform: employees can ask HR questions, request status updates, and trigger workflows through a conversational interface without ever reaching an HR assistant. Leena AI resolves most employee helpdesk tickets autonomously by pulling from the HRIS knowledge base. Rippling's AI Plan Parser reads benefits plan documents and auto-populates enrollment fields without manual entry. For the HR assistant, these tools mark the third and sharpest wave of task displacement: they target the judgment-adjacent tasks (answering policy questions, routing cases, confirming data accuracy) that self-service portals of the 2000s left behind. The remaining irreducible function is the exception layer: the case the chatbot cannot categorize, the grievance that requires human tact, the I-9 document that needs a physical inspector. Whether this exception layer is large enough to sustain the occupation at current levels is the open question of the 2025-2035 decade.

Part of Admin & Office · see all 39 roles →
Different role?

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

Browse the directory by industry, or search by title or SOC code.

Browse all roles

Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping employment and pay by year

On record since1914
Latest US employment90,220 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$50,610 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-6.2% 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.

  • Canada (NOC 14102)

    Employment, 2020
    11,475, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 14102 Personnel clerks, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$56,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 14102 Personnel clerks, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
194018,000n/aDecennial Census 1940 Researched contextReport
195055,000n/aDecennial Census 1950 Researched contextReport
1980130,000n/aEst., BLS Monthly Labor Review 1980 Researched contextReport
1985155,000$15,400Est., BLS Monthly Labor Review Researched contextReport
2000172,070$28,340BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003165,760$31,060BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004164,940$31,750BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005161,870$32,730BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006159,750$33,750BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007161,970$34,970BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008164,340$35,750BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009161,920$36,650BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010150,090$36,800BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011145,780$37,250BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012139,200$37,510BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013136,960$37,680BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014135,270$38,040BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015138,910$38,100BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016137,150$39,020BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017134,570$39,480BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018124,600$40,390BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019117,340$41,430BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020108,470$43,250BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021102,770$45,630BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022103,680$45,930BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023101,440$47,710BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202492,580$49,440BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202590,220$50,610BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
Embed this timeline on your site

Free for any site. Paste this where the timeline should appear; it stays interactive, every datapoint stays cited, and it sets no cookies on your page. How embedding works

<iframe src="https://futurehistory.earth/embed/43-4161"
  width="100%" height="430" style="border:0"
  title="Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping, a Future History timeline"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4161">Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping: jobs and pay over time</a>, from Future History</p>

See all roles in Admin & Office