Gen Zers born in 2000 will have their quarter-life crisis this year. If that doesn’t make you feel old, just think about how much HR has changed over the span of their lifetimes.

When Liz Bronson started her HR career as a recruiter in the early 2000s, her days consisted of a lot more phone calls—and paperwork. “So much is different,” she told HR Brew, “and so much isn’t.”

Since then, HR pros have ditched many (but not all) paper processes, and as they’ve done so, the function has evolved. But its values have remained the same, said the VP of people at pool service software firm Skimmer and co-host of the Real Job Talk podcast for mid-career professionals. “I had a mentor back then, who told me, ‘If you do the right thing by your people, you’re doing the right thing by the company.’ I still stand by that today,” she said.

Flash back to the 2000s. Those early years, Bronson said, were characterized by copious amounts of paper: printed-out résumés, handwritten interview notes, and employee documents tucked away in massive filing cabinets. And nearly everything was manual.

For more on HR’s transformative past quarter century, keep reading here.—MC

One of Hari Srinivasan’s first projects at LinkedIn was to help design the platform’s profiles. Srinivasan thought about business and trade conferences, where professionals network and exchange ideas and experiences. He imagined the first encounter between two networkers.

“When me and you first meet, what’s the first thing we do? We find something in common. We may shake hands. We understand how to pronounce each others’ names,” he said. “Look at the profile today.”

Then he pointed to the LinkedIn profile. It features a picture of the user, underneath which appears the user’s name and how to pronounce it correctly, if they’re verified, and a short summary of their professional interests, followed by their experiences and skills. “There’s a lot happening [at] LinkedIn, but that human-to-human connection…was always an insight that stuck with me,” he said.

Srinivasan began working for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company in 2014. He now oversees its $7 billion talent solutions business as VP of product. As he leads the company's future product development, especially as it contends with the current AI business transformation, one overarching fundamental remains clear, he said. The 23-year-old professional social network is, at its core, a platform for connecting humans.

For more on how LinkedIn has reshaped HR, keep reading here.—AD

School children might look at clouds and see cotton candy or popcorn. High up in the sky they can look like long locks of my sister’s (naturally) platinum hair crimped and ready for her first day of middle school in the early-aughts. But when HR and people pros look to cloud, they should see a comprehensive global network of servers storing data and running applications that has empowered the HR function in the new millennium.

In the early 2000s, HR had predominantly relied on paper-based processes, outdated legacy systems, and manual data entry. But the rise of cloud computing completely reshaped the focus and work of the function, as well as its strategic value to corporations and SMBs. Now, new tech, people analytics, and AI and automation continue to transform HR into a strategic and insights-based function critical to business outcomes.

“[To] the HR [department] of the early 2000s...the word ‘talent’ didn’t really exist. It was used for the top talent. So there was a very strong segmentation of early-career people, mid-level management, and senior leadership, and companies were a little more stable. They weren’t disrupted all the time,” said HR industry analyst Josh Bersin.

He noted that at the turn of the millennium, career lifecycle expectations remained the same as much of the previous century: Employees stayed with the same company for most, if not all, of their careers. Their managers gate-kept their promotions until they were deemed “ready,” and the stable career ladder was slow but consistent. Employees worked their entire careers steadily up the rungs. Their interactions with HR were largely transactional and most often occurred when paperwork was involved.

For more on how cloud turned HR into a data-driven powerhouse, keep reading here.—AD