Is HR On Your Side or On the Budget?

About 2 weeks ago, SHRM President and CEO admitted at one of the largest HR conferences globally that HR faces extinction. To survive, he argued, the profession must stop fussing over whether employees are happy and start proving the ROI of each one.

And it gets even worse.

See, in a 2025 survey of 92 big-company CEOs, only 1 in 10 said they valued HR. In other words, the function built to look after you is now fighting for its own survival by learning to put a price on your head. And if you are still waiting for someone inside your company to advocate for your growth, your wellbeing, or your future, this is the sign to stop.

How the Nest Disappeared: And Why HR Was Never Fully On Your Side

HR began as the mama bird. It feathered your nest, watched your wellbeing, and gave you somewhere to turn when work went wrong. That was the deal. You showed up, you delivered, and the organisation looked after the humans doing the delivering.

Then cost pressure arrived, and the deal changed. HR shifted from caring for you to coaching your manager to care for you. And that was reasonable enough… until leadership decided managers were overhead too. The middle layer thinned out and, in many places, vanished completely. The people whose actual job was to guide you, develop you, and fight for you got gutted from the org chart in the name of efficiency.

Now, here's what's left behind. Managers are still told to manage, but no longer have the time, the training, or frankly the incentive to do so. People look for guidance and find no one there. They turn to HR, and HR hands them a support phone number. And so people do what people do when the structure fails them. They disengage first, then they leave. And as they go, so does engagement, trust and retention in the organization. Every metric that matters heads south, and the boardroom acts surprised every single quarter.

None of this was an accident. It was a chain of choices, each defensible on its own, that systematically removed the very people whose job was to hold the humans together. And now the last one standing, HR itself, is on stage announcing that it too is pivoting away from you.

What This Actually Means for Your Career: HR Is No Longer On Your Side

Here is what nobody in that boardroom is going to tell you. The institution is not coming back. The layer of people whose job was to invest in you, develop you, and advocate for your growth has been stripped out, automated around, or redirected toward proving your ROI to a CEO who, statistically speaking, does not value the function at all.

That is not cynicism, it's the data. And the fact that it was publicly admitted by the No.1 HR professional in the world speaks volumes.

In spite of that, most professionals are still operating as though the old deal is intact. Still waiting for the annual review to tell them how they are doing, still assuming someone upstairs has a plan for their development and still believing that if they keep their head down and deliver, the organisation will take care of the rest. That belief was already expensive five years ago. In 2026, it is a career liability.

The professionals who are pulling ahead are not the ones working harder inside a system that has stopped working for them. They are the ones who looked at the system clearly, saw it for what it has become, and decided to build something of their own alongside it.

The Value Trap: HR Is On the Budget's Side, Not Yours

Right now, the same leaders who cut HR while it was adding value are now asking HR to decide who else is worth keeping. When the choice is between funding AI and funding people, someone has to build the case that ranks humans. Now, that someone is the function still fighting to prove its own worth.

So the obvious question writes itself. When HR was adding value, you cut it anyway. Now that value becomes the measuring stick, does proving it actually protect people? Or does it simply speed up the firing of everyone who lands below the line?

I am not against measuring value. After all, a function that never tied people to results would always be exposed eventually. But be honest about what a value scorecard turns into in a year of cuts. It tends to make the layoffs faster and tidier, not fewer. It is a ranking of who stays and who goes, dressed up in the language of accountability. And most professionals do not realise they are already inside that system.

The people who built their careers on institutional goodwill, on being liked, on being reliable within a structure that valued reliability, are the ones who will feel this first. Not because they are bad at their jobs, but because the criteria just changed underneath them without anyone telling them.

Own Your Nest: Because No One Else Is On Your Side Anymore

Now you know all this, do not wait for HR to protect you or expect a hollowed-out management layer to develop you. That safety net was cut years ago, one restructure at a time. SHRM just confirmed it from the main stage, which means it is no longer a rumour, it is a policy.

The one thing no reorganisation can take from you is the value you carry yourself. Not the value your title rents you for a while, but the judgment, the relationships, the skills that travel with you when the structure changes again, and it will. At the moment, that is the only asset worth building.

In a world actively deciding who is worth more than a machine, the answer has to live in you. Not in your job description, your performance rating, or in what HR decides to put in the column next to your salary. And if you are still running on the traditional career playbook, this is the moment to stop.

And this is exactly what RISEUP was built for. Now, if you've thought that RISEUP is a career growth tool in the conventional sense, good news is you're mistaken. Let me explain.

See, RISEUP is the infrastructure that replaces what the institution quietly stopped providing. A continuous read on your own value, a system for building what compounds across the full arc of a career, a way to own the asset that survives every restructure, every pivot, every moment a boardroom decides the humans need to prove their worth.

That said, this July, we are launching the new RISEUP, a solution for professional decision-making. We are currently inviting 300 more "Founding Builders" to join our current platform for free.

If you join the waitlist, you will receive 100% Free Lifetime Access to the Builder Tier on the new platform as a thank you for your early feedback.