Over the past 18 months, Evan Loveless has led seven rounds of layoffs, personally informing hundreds of his ad-agency colleagues that they were being let go.
“It’s a chronic feeling of sadness because it’s so frequent for me,” said Loveless, a senior human-resources partner in St. Louis. “It’s like being stuck under a raincloud.”
Loveless recalled a particularly soul-crushing layoff conversation with a worker who thought he was reaching out with news about a promotion.
“Sometimes the person’s husband or wife also just lost their job,” he said. “You see their faces and then their faces haunt you a little bit.”
Working in HR has never been glamorous, as the occupation often requires enforcing unpopular company rules and decisions. Now, HR professionals say the job is getting downright ugly. Unceasing layoffs, stricter return-to-office mandates, immigration raids in the workplace, and a sudden need to help everyone master AI are among the latest challenges upending their workloads.
“It’s a confluence of events that are occurring simultaneously, the likes of which and magnitude of which I never have observed in my more than 30 years of being a human-capital leader,” Jim Link, chief human resources officer for the Society of Human Resource Management, told Business Insider.
The new rigors come after another tumultuous period for HR workers. During the pandemic years, they suddenly had to develop and manage remote-work set-ups, grapple with anti-vaccine pushback, and deal with employee tensions and calls to action following murder of George Floyd.
Today, HR teams are juggling even more, said Tracy Brower, a Ph.d sociologist who researches organizational behavior in Michigan. “The demands on HR today are significant, increasing, and intense,” said Brower.
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Deportation fears
One of the new tasks HR is having to deal with is the impact of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the workplace.
Several times a week foreign workers now come to Alexandra Valverde, an HR director for a midsize food manufacturer in the Southeast, with concerns about getting swept up in raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Some have tears in their eyes.
“This is the hardest year I’ve had in HR,” said Valverde, who’s been working in the industry since 2019. “The fear I’m seeing from employees, even if their status is completely fine — that is something I hadn’t experienced before.”
The steady drumbeat of layoffs is also particularly unsettling for HR workers at companies with staffers on H1-B visas, which allow foreigners to temporarily live and work in the U.S. if they meet certain criteria.
“It’s never easy to lay anybody off, but it’s even harder when you’re telling someone they’re probably going to leave the country,” said Mike Smart, an HR executive at a California tech company. Upon losing a job, H1-B workers typically have just 60 days to find another employer or face deportation.
“Even in the best of job markets, 60 days isn’t ample by any stretch,” said Smart.
As of May, employers have announced 696,309 job cuts this year, an 80% increase compared with the same period last year, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Making matters worse, the cuts are coming at a time when company chiefs are warning of even more layoffs coming down the line due to the rise of generative AI and AI agents. Last week Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company’s extensive use of the technology is expected to reduce its total corporate workforce, which totaled approximately 1.5 million last year. CEOs of other companies, including chatbot maker Anthropic, freelance-job site Fiverr, and payments provider Klarna, have recently issued similar declarations.
‘You’re a horrible human being’
HR workers are used to taking heat for implementing policies that don’t sit well with workers. But lately they say it’s gotten a lot harder to keep their cool.
In the second quarter, employees at organizations that experienced layoffs in the past year committed 67% more acts of so-called workplace incivility on average than those at firms without such cuts, according to new SHRM data. Those acts, which the trade group says includes silencing and excessively monitoring colleagues, were also 63% higher among workers at organizations with return-to-office mandates than at those without.
David Gaspin, the head of HR for a commercial real-estate company in New York, said that at his previous employer he was hit with “some serious vitriol” from a colleague he thought he had a good relationship with after having to lay this person off last year. The tongue-lashing included comments such as “you’re just a corporate tool” and “you’re a horrible human being.”
“That’s never easy to hear,” said Gaspin.
Given the more taxing landscape, it’s perhaps no wonder that fewer people are looking for work in HR. Searches for HR jobs on Indeed.com in the first half of this year were down nearly 5% from the first half of 2024, and they’ve been declining annually since 2021, Indeed data show.
Separately, a 2022 study from LinkedIn found HR had the highest turnover rate of any job function. (The job site hasn’t updated the report since then.)
Rebecca Taylor, a former HR professional in New Jersey who co-hosts a podcast called HR Confessions, said one reason she left the field is that she was tired of always being the office grinch. The final straw came after a worker she was tasked with laying off looked up her parents’ landline and called them repeatedly to chastise her.
“It was scary,” said Taylor, 37, who uses a pseudonym partly because of that incident. If a disgruntled employee is angry enough, she added, what else will they try to find?
