SHRM Talent 2026: The Future of HR Work
I spent the last few weeks reflecting on the SHRM Talent Conference in Dallas. Several hundred HR and talent leaders attended who were there for the same reason I was: to get a clear read on what is actually happening in the workforce right now.
The themes that kept surfacing, session after session, were quieter, more structural, and in several cases more uncomfortable than what gets splashed across LinkedIn feeds. This conference had a recurring undercurrent I did not expect to hear stated so plainly: the old operating models for HR are not just outdated, they are actively creating risk.
This post is my recap of what I took away. I am pulling from specific sessions and specific speakers because the ideas deserve attribution, and because vague summaries of conference content do not help anyone. I want you to walk away from this with something to bring back to your desk on Monday.
The talent acquisition reckoning is structural, not cyclical
SHRM's own research, presented by Ashley Miller and Dr. Jennifer Perez of SHRM's Thought Leadership team, put this clearly: organizations cannot hire their way out of today's talent challenges. The 2026 Talent Trends Study surveyed more than 2,000 HR professionals and found that recruiting challenges remain widespread, skills shortages are still a critical barrier, and the same sourcing strategies organizations have relied on for years remain the most popular, despite mounting evidence that they are not working.
Organizations are using the same tools, reaching the same shrinking pool of candidates, and wondering why they are still short-staffed.
The data also pointed to something worth paying attention to: learning and development pathways are showing real results as a sourcing mechanism. Building talent from within, or partnering with community pipelines, is outperforming traditional recruiting in certain hard-to-fill roles. That is a supply chain problem with a known fix that most organizations are still not deploying at scale.
AI in HR is both a compliance problem and a leadership failure waiting to happen
Two sessions addressed AI in hiring from very different angles, and together they outlined a problem that should concern any HR leader who has handed their AI vendor's system the keys to screening decisions.
Dr. Milton J. Perkins, SHRM-SCP, presented data showing that 80 to 90 percent of employers currently use AI in some part of the hiring process. Automated rejections often happen without any human review. Bias enters through data inputs, feature engineering, vendor assumptions, and scoring thresholds that no one on the HR team can fully explain. Entire groups of qualified candidates are being excluded invisibly, and the HR function often has no line of sight into why.
Paul Carney, MBA, SPHR, came at the AI question from a different direction. His session on AIQ ROI argued that most organizations are measuring AI's value with the wrong scorecards. Efficiency metrics tell part of the story: hours saved, costs reduced, processes automated. The organizations that win with AI will be measuring intelligence gained, risks avoided, and competitive advantages built. The framing matters because it changes what HR leaders are accountable for.
Kathryn Landis, whose session focused on human-centered AI, raised the question that tends to get skipped in most AI rollouts: what happens to the team when AI is deployed without clear communication about ownership and decision rights? Her work, co-authored with Jenny Fernandez and published in Fast Company, documents what high-performing teams do differently in the age of AI. They keep humans in the accountability structure. The AI does not make the call. A person does.
Christi Venable, Licensed Professional Counselor and AI consultant, brought the psychological safety dimension. Her session identified three forces that derail AI adoption internally: employee anxiety about displacement, distrust of systems that cannot explain their own decisions, and concerns about fairness from people who have reason to believe automated systems may not treat them equitably. If your AI rollout did not include a communication strategy, you did not actually roll out AI. You installed something and hoped for the best.
The EEOC environment is more complicated than the headlines suggest
Michael S. Cohen, Esquire, of Duane Morris LLP ran one of the denser sessions of the conference on the current EEOC landscape, and it was instructive well beyond standard legal updates.
The current administration has shifted EEOC's focus in ways that create new liability categories while some traditional protections are being reinterpreted at the federal level. LGBTQ+ workplace protections remain a live question despite the Bostock decision. More than half of states provide express protections for transgender employees that exist independent of whatever federal guidance says this month. Anti-American discrimination has entered the enforcement conversation. The Ames decision eliminated the "background circumstances" requirement in reverse discrimination cases.
Cohen's point, made through scenario-based questions to the audience, was that HR does not need to memorize every regulatory shift. The conditions under which people work have changed faster than most HR policies, and leaders need to apply judgment, not just checklists. Treating everyone fairly does not mean treating everyone the same. That distinction matters now more than it has in years.
Erin Foley of Seyfarth Shaw LLP picked up a related thread in her session on political expression and hiring. When politics enters the hiring process through resume content, social media screening, or interviewer reaction to candidate identities, it creates failure-to-hire liability. Her session walked through specific flashpoints: Black Lives Matter affiliations, COVID-related views, religious expression, DEI program involvement, and others. The legal risk is real and growing, particularly in states with political expression protection statutes.
Fair chance hiring is an infrastructure problem, not a values problem
Jodi Anderson Jr., Amanda Hall, Taja Hereford, and Jackiez Gonzalez presented a session on fair chance hiring that was one of the most operationally specific of the conference.
The numbers are not ambiguous. More than 70 million Americans have a criminal record. Formerly incarcerated individuals face a 27 percent unemployment rate, five times higher than the general population. At the same time, more than 80 percent of business leaders say employees with records perform as well as or better than those without. Ninety-one percent of hiring leaders say the need to fill frontline roles is urgent.
The constraint is not talent. It is infrastructure.
The JBM Packaging case study showed what it looks like to actually build that infrastructure. They moved from a high-volume open applicant model with 50 percent retention, to a referral-based community partner model, to an operationalized system with standardized hiring criteria and 80 percent retention. The shift was about building a system that found the right people and gave them a real path.
This is a workforce strategy conversation. HR leaders who treat fair chance hiring as a values exercise rather than a talent pipeline decision are missing what the data is showing.
Recruiting is not a transaction
Christopher CJ Gross of Jabbar HR Solutions made an argument that sounds obvious until you look at how most hiring processes actually work. He presented the CARDS model, a framework for community-driven hiring built around curiosity, awareness, rituals, drivers, and systems. His session documented a 62 percent increase in quality applicants and an 83 percent reduction in recruitment effort for organizations that moved from transactional recruiting to what he calls community-building.
The distinction he drew: recruiting asks whether a candidate fits. Community-building asks how you build something together.
Jeremy Eskenazi, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, of Riviera Advisors added a related frame with his Curious, Courageous, and Consultative model for talent acquisition professionals. His argument is that the recruiters who survive the next phase of automation are the ones who have learned to operate above the transactional level. They bring market intelligence. They ask hard questions of hiring managers. They function as strategic advisors, not order-takers.
Dr. Marshaun R. Hymon, SHRM-SCP, added skills-first interviewing to this conversation. When you design the interview process around validated skill assessment rather than proxy signals like degree requirements and previous titles, you get better decisions and a more defensible process. His session gave practitioners specific tools: skills profile templates, structured interview guides, and behavioral question frameworks.
The overemployed workforce is a real operational risk
Mario Pecoraro, CEO of SmartHRCheqs, addressed something most HR teams have no formal policy for: dual employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 8.5 to 8.9 million Americans classified as multiple jobholders. Research from Resume Builder suggests 30 to 40 percent of remote workers hold two full-time positions simultaneously. Employers lose an estimated $450 to $500 billion annually to time theft and productivity loss.
Most hiring processes were built for honesty. They were not built to detect fraud. AI-generated resumes and deepfake interview technologies are making the gap between what candidates represent and what is verifiable wider than it has ever been. This is a risk management conversation, and most HR functions do not have it on their agenda.
The leadership pipeline is not a pipeline. It is a practice.
Several sessions converged on a theme I keep coming back to in my own work: organizations talk about leadership development as though it is a program to deploy rather than a behavior to design.
Tina Schust Robinson, CEO of WorkJoy, presented two sessions on career agility. Her core argument in the "No More Spaghetti" session is that random acts of development do not add up to a leadership strategy, regardless of how many programs you run. The business case for intentional leadership investment has to be built around why, what, who, and how, in that order. Measuring the return matters. Most organizations skip that step.
Dr. Ethel James, whose Legacy Rising session focused on succession and executive influence, made the point that legacy is behavioral. What leaders leave behind is determined by what they tolerate, model, and avoid, not by what they say in all-hands meetings. When leadership is not designed, organizations get high performance with low transfer. People perform well but cannot scale. That is an architecture problem.
Jevon Wooden's session on turning uncertainty into opportunity gave practitioners a practical framework for moving from protection mode to readiness mode. His CLEAR framework, which stands for Clarify, Label, Evaluate, Analyze, and Respond, is a structured way to move stuck talent initiatives forward even when the environment is unclear.
Culture by default is not culture at all
Dr. Carrie Graham and Dr. Christie McMullen presented on moving from culture by default to culture by design. Their AIM ERA framework walks through analyzing existing systems, engaging meaningfully, improving conditions for learning, retaining through structure, moving practice forward, and applying real-world knowledge. It is built on a premise that organizations tend to resist: your current culture was designed, whether you designed it intentionally or not.
Dave Collins' session on practical diversity made a related point about inclusion. The distinction between diversity and inclusion is real. Diversity is the composition of the mix. Inclusion is whether the mix works. Most organizations measure the first and have no structural answer for the second.
Krishna Powell, a multi-generational workforce expert, brought the global and generational angle through her session on designing workforce ecosystems that perform. When your organization has four or five generations in the workforce and operations that cross borders, the systems you use to manage, develop, and retain people need to be built for that reality.
What the quieter voices said
Richard Etienne's session on quiet leadership is one I have been thinking about since I left the room. His argument is that organizations lose good ideas because their meeting structures reward the loudest voice in the room, not the sharpest one. Designing for inclusion in meetings is a quality-of-decision initiative.
Scott Tillema, who brings a background in hostage negotiation to the communication and connection space, made an observation worth putting on the wall of every HR department: you have no idea what someone else is thinking. The contexts people carry into work conversations are invisible to you. The assumptions you make about what another person means, intends, or feels are more often wrong than right. Building communication systems that account for that, rather than assuming shared understanding, is structural work.
The labor market data says what we already feel
Justin Ladner and Sydney Ross from SHRM's research team presented the current labor market picture without softening it. Employment growth has slowed significantly after years of strength. Reporting on conditions has been volatile. SHRM publishes monthly, quarterly, and annual labor shortage metrics to give HR leaders a consistent, objective read. The unemployment-per-job-opening ratio and occupational mismatch data are both worth tracking if you are making hiring or workforce planning decisions in the next 12 months.
What I am taking back
I attend conferences because I want to come home with a sharper sense of where the gaps are. Here is what sharpened for me this week.
The organizations doing this well have built HR systems. They have moved from reactive compliance to proactive risk architecture. They are not treating culture, talent acquisition, and leadership development as separate functions that occasionally coordinate. They are designing them as connected infrastructure.
The organizations that are struggling have not failed for lack of effort. They are running sophisticated initiatives on top of systems built for a different era. AI without governance. Fair chance hiring without infrastructure. Leadership development without measurement. Culture work without diagnosis.
The gap between where HR is and where it needs to be is a design gap.
That is the work in front of HR right now.
