New Study: AI Won’t Replace HR – Here’s Why

Inside: The White-Collar Recession Has Quietly Begun

Author

The HR Takeaways
May 23, 2025

Happy Friday, HR Pros!

If you’ve ever been blindsided by a colleague raving about a tool you’ve never heard of—welcome to the club. This edition started with one of those “wait, what is HiBob and why does everyone love it now?” moments, and it unraveled into something bigger. Between AI shakeups, quiet recessions, and unexpected hiring insights, the HR world isn’t just evolving—it’s quietly rewriting the rules while no one’s looking.

This week’s newsletter isn’t about what might happen in HR. It’s about what is already happening—let’s dive in!

📰 Upcoming in This Issue

  • 🤯 My Friend’s HR Team Is Obsessed With HiBob

  • 👩‍💼 HRs Aren’t Getting Replaced by AI: ILO Study Finds

  • 💼 The White-Collar Recession Has Quietly Begun

  • 📈 AI in 2025: What HR Needs to Know Now

  • 👩‍💼 Why HR Should Pick Who Gets Interviewed First

  • Walmart to cut 1,500 corporate jobs in restructuring (WSJ)

  • Paychex announces free payroll for 3 months; offer ends May 31 (Paychex)

  • 9 in 10 companies lack ‘future-ready’ talent strategies (Yahoo)

  • TikTok layoffs begin: employees told to work from home (Business Insider)

🤯 My Friend’s HR Team Is Obsessed With HiBob

When I asked my friend what HRIS software they were using lately, she immediately sent me a wall of texts about how HiBob changed the game for her company.
(Yes, the screenshot is real. She would not stop.)

She told me HiBob made everything smoother—onboarding, time off, payroll reports, surveys—and even replaced a bunch of tools they used to duct-tape together.

But the part that stuck with me?
They’re actually using it to engage people. From shoutouts to polls to internal updates, the whole team finally feels in sync. It’s like an intranet that people want to open.

Oh, and the FOMO kicker?
Her CFO literally said:
“This would’ve saved us months last year. Why didn’t we do this sooner?”

If your current HR system feels more like a blocker than a boost, then without a doubt it’s time to try HiBob see what the HiBob hype is about.

I just read "HR managers roles less likely to be impacted by generative AI" from the International Labour Organisation, and the verdict might surprise you: HR managers are among the least exposed to GenAI automation.

Unlike payroll clerks or data entry staff, HR leaders fall into a "minimal exposure" category, where only a few tasks are moderately automatable.

The study doesn't deny AI’s reach—it flags 25% of global jobs as potentially impacted—but it reframes the future of HR: evolution, not extinction.

Key Takeaways:

  • 💼 HR managers stay mostly human: Despite fears, HR managers show minimal GenAI exposure—strategic roles remain too nuanced to easily automate.

  • 📉 Payroll takes the AI hit: Payroll clerks are in Gradient 4—tasks highly automatable with high exposure and little variation; top targets for disruption.

  • 👩‍💻 Women face greater AI risk: 41% of women’s jobs vs. 28% of men’s are exposed in rich nations; 9.6% vs. 3.5% at highest risk level.

  • 🔄 It’s transformation, not replacement: ILO stresses GenAI will reshape roles, not erase them—policy, dialogue, and design are key to adapting.

Revelio Labs’ "White-Collar Workers Are Getting the Blues" reveals a sharp slowdown in white-collar hiring—job postings dropped 12.7%, with tech and business roles hit twice as hard.

Salaries are flat since mid-2024, especially for early-career roles. Meanwhile, executive pay keeps rising, widening internal gaps.

Major metros like D.C., Chicago, and Dallas are losing share in white-collar postings, signaling a geographic shift in demand.

Key Takeaways:

  • 📉 White-collar postings fell 35.8% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2025—tech and business roles saw drops at twice that rate

  • 💸 Wages stagnate below inflation for early-career white-collar roles, while top exec salaries continue to rise significantly

  • 🏙️ Urban job markets shrinking with D.C. down 0.58 percentage points in national share, followed by Chicago, Dallas, and Boston

  • 🛠️ Manual labor gains ground as blue-collar wages and demand continue rising while white-collar bargaining power weakens

I dove into "12 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2025" from IEEE Spectrum, and here’s what matters most to us.

Yes, AI is expensive to build ($192M for Gemini Ultra), but shockingly cheap to use ($0.07 per million tokens).

The U.S. leads in innovation, but China’s models are catching up—fast. GPT-4 now outperforms physicians on diagnosis tests, but don’t panic: only 36% of global workers think AI will replace them.

Key Takeaways:

  • 💡 High ROI, low cost use: AI inference costs dropped 99%, creating new ways to augment HR without draining budgets.

  • 🧾 Big budget builds: Model training can cost up to $192M, showing how concentrated innovation is among tech giants.

  • 📊 Workers expect change, not loss: Only 36% fear job loss—60% believe AI will just reshape how they work.

  • 🚀 China narrows talent gap: U.S. still leads in model quantity, but China’s model performance now trails by just 1.7%

I just read "Research: The Benefits of Letting HR Decide Who Gets an Interview" from Harvard Business Review, and it makes one thing clear: who builds your interview list might change your hiring outcomes.

At a global tech firm, when HR—not managers—chose first-round candidates, female hires increased by 9.2%.

HR used more objective criteria, while managers under time pressure leaned on shortcuts—like referrals or gut feel. The kicker? Manager satisfaction with HR jumped from 60% to 82% after the switch.

Key Takeaways:

  • 📈 9.2% more women hired: When HR chose interviewees, gender diversity improved—even without a stated diversity goal

  • 🧠 HR stayed objective: Managers, crunched for time, often defaulted to biased shortcuts; HR stuck to job-fit data

  • 📊 Manager buy-in rose fast: Post-process change, 82% of managers approved of HR’s role—up from just 60% before

  • ⚖️ AI can’t replace nuance: Study warns: AI isn’t bias-proof—it's only useful when guided by trained, accountable HR pros

The bottomline

Every edition we put together is rooted in one belief: HR isn’t just reacting to the future—it’s shaping it. Whether it’s choosing better tech, pushing back against bias (even the algorithmic kind), or navigating a new labor landscape, you’re not just managing change. You’re directing it.

So if this week made you pause—even for a second—and rethink a system, a stat, or a hiring step, then we’ve done our job. And more importantly, so have you.

Until next week, keep building what’s next.

How was today's edition?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.