Exploring HR Trends, People Sustainability, and Skills Infrastructure With Josh Bersin

On this episode of Redefining Work, I’m excited to talk with Josh Bersin. He’s the founder of The Josh Bersin Company, an author and a returning guest to this podcast. In this conversation, we talk about HR trends in 2023, what people sustainability means, layoffs in tech and his book “Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World's Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations.”

Every time I talk with Josh, we have an enlightening and educational conversation. This one’s no different. Josh has seen many changes in HR, and he’s excited about what’s on the horizon. 

“For me, as an analyst, there's an endless number of new things to think about,” Josh says. “I think being an HR person is more interesting, more fascinating and more confusing than it's ever been.”

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Embracing People Sustainability

One of Josh’s 2023 predictions is the emergence of the term “people sustainability.” 

“A lot of the things we do in HR —  diversity, inclusion, pay equity, employee experience, engagement benefits — we look at them as improvements to the employee work- life balance or the employee value proposition at work,” Josh says. “But there's another way to think about them — is that they're really organizational sustainability strategies.”

People sustainability isn’t just a buzzword; it’s an umbrella term for the employer approach to human capital that’s gaining favor with regulators. In Europe, the Council of the EU recently gave final approval to a corporate sustainability reporting directive that requires companies to disclose how their business model addresses human rights issues. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed including human capital as a component of public companies' financial disclosures.

The challenge, Josh notes, is that most companies don’t have any data related to people sustainability. And while it’s an HR issue, he argues, this will fast become an issue for the entire C-suite. 

Deconstructing ‌Recent Layoffs 

Over the past few months, high-profile layoffs have been all over the news, especially in the tech industry. To Josh, this reflects a long-running cycle of easy money and unlimited consumer demand that led to overhiring — and now, this correction. 

“I've worked for two really fast-growing companies. It's really easy for CEOs to be sort of intoxicated by this growth. … And all of a sudden they look around like, where'd all these people come from? And how come they're not getting enough stuff done? And how come our revenue's not keeping up?” Josh says. 

While this kind of overhiring is common and even understandable, Josh sees an opportunity for HR leaders to intervene. is common in the tech industry, and while companies are doing a mass reversal, there are things that can be done to tone down over-hire with the help of CHROs and CPOs.

“You do have a seat at the table now in HR,” Josh explains. “During the pandemic, most CHROs were right in the middle of all the business survivability issues, and now we can use that credential and that credibility to help the rest of the company plan the next level of growth without overhiring.”

Moving to Skills-Based Hiring and Development

Many companies have emphasized that they are looking for skills rather than credentials when they hire. Instead of who you know, it’s the skills you have and can learn. 

While that sounds great, Josh explains that companies need to rethink their structures and systems to make this possible. 

“The problem with internal mobility is a lot of companies don't have a culture of internal mobility.

They don't have a way to pay people or reward them for moving around as much. … There's a big sort of unsolved problem, which is the infrastructure,” Josh says. “And I think the skills tech and the skills taxonomies and the skills inference tools that companies are using are still not there.”

With new skills being invented or redefined constantly, companies need to keep up on emerging skills and how they’ll train their people on them. 

In Josh’s book “Irresistible,” the first chapter is about changing the traditional industrial hierarchy to have people work on projects based on their skills. And while skills-based hiring and development is in the early stages, Josh believes that we’re on the right track. 

“There's all these new things we can do with this that we never could do before,” Josh says. “So I think we're at the beginning of just a whole bunch of really important things that are going to make organizations more effective.”

People in This Episode

Josh Bersin: LinkedIn, Twitter, The Josh Bersin Company, “Irresistible” book