HR tips

Responsible AI in Hiring: Raising the Bar Without Losing the Human

February 19, 2026 by HRSAdmin

February 19, 2026

Responsible AI in Hiring: Raising the Bar Without Losing the Human

By Anat Keidar, Chief People Officer at DoorLoop

Artificial intelligence is transforming how companies hire. From resume screening to structured evaluations, AI promises efficiency, scalability, and even fairness. But alongside its rise, candidate skepticism is growing — especially around one critical concern: Can an algorithm truly make an unbiased decision about a human being?

Hiring isn’t just a process. It’s a responsibility and the conversation shouldn’t be framed as “AI versus humans.” The real question is: How do we use innovation to raise the bar without lowering trust?

One of our core values at DoorLoop is Raising the Bar. In hiring, that means building structured, measurable, performance-driven systems. It also means holding ourselves accountable for every decision we make.

AI can help us raise the bar but only if we use it intentionally.

We use AI to enhance clarity and efficiency. It helps support screening at scale, surface relevant information faster, and create more consistency in early-stage evaluations. But we do not outsource judgment. No hiring decision is made without human review.

Why? Because Extreme Ownership is one of our values. And ownership cannot be delegated to software.

Technology can assist. Responsibility remains human.

Hiring is deeply personal. For candidates, it represents opportunity, identity, and growth. Regardless of the tools we use, the human experience must remain central.

There is a growing expectation that companies think carefully about how AI influences decisions. In my view, the goal is not to position AI as perfectly unbiased. No system, human or technological, is immune to bias.

The real standard is thoughtfulness.

Organizations should ensure meaningful human oversight, continuously evaluate outcomes, and make sure their processes align with their values.

Innovation without accountability creates risk. Innovation with discipline builds trust.

For organizations to do great things, they need great people. Performance matters deeply — but so does the team. Hiring is not only about capability. It is also about cultural contribution. In every hiring process, we ask ourselves two simple but powerful questions.

First, what we call the “airport test”:

If I were stuck in an airport at 3 a.m. with this person, would I feel energized having that conversation?

Second, we ask:

Is this a clear yes?

If the answer isn’t a confident yes, if it’s hesitation, rationalization, or probably — we pause. Protecting the bar requires conviction.

This isn’t about hiring friends. It’s about hiring people who elevate the room, individuals who bring ownership, curiosity, integrity, and positive intensity into the organization.

We look for people who challenge respectfully, take responsibility, support others, and genuinely care about winning together.

AI can help us evaluate data. But cultural contribution, character, and conviction still require human judgment.

Another one of our core values is Lead with Innovation. For us, innovation isn’t about adopting every emerging tool. It’s about applying technology in ways that improve outcomes while preserving responsibility.

AI in hiring exists on a spectrum, from basic automation like scheduling to more advanced data-driven insights. The further along that spectrum you go, the more important governance becomes.

That means:

Clear internal clarity on how tools are used
Ongoing review of outcomes
Willingness to adjust when unintended consequences appear

Responsible innovation requires active leadership.

When guided by strong values, AI can help reduce noise, improve consistency, and strengthen the rigor of our decisions. But it must remain a tool, not the decision-maker.

Ultimately, hiring is about building teams that win. Winning sustainably requires rigor, ownership, and values that guide decision-making, especially when technology evolves faster than regulation.

Organizations need to leverage AI to increase clarity and consistency while keeping people at the center of the process.

The future of hiring is not human or AI. It is human-led, AI-supported guided by values strong enough to lead both.

About the Author

Anat Keidar is the Chief People Officer at DoorLoop with over a decade of HR experience building high-impact teams and cultures, grounded in the belief that people are an organization’s most valuable asset. A trusted advisor to founders, managers, and employees, she is passionate about helping individuals lead in their own way, fostering openness, autonomy, feedback, and growth—especially when navigating the unfamiliar.

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Hiring in High-Stress Professions: What Law Firms Reveal About Burnout, Retention, and Talent Fit

February 14, 2026 by HRSAdmin

February 14 2026

Hiring in High-Stress Professions: What Law Firms Reveal About Burnout, Retention, and Talent Fit

By the HR Spotlight Team

In nearly every industry, HR leaders are grappling with the same challenge: burnout is rising, retention is unpredictable, and traditional hiring indicators aren’t delivering long-term stability.

Few workplaces expose these cracks faster than law firms.

Legal environments are deadline-driven, adversarial, and emotionally demanding. Client expectations are high. Stakes are often personal. The margin for error is thin. When hiring decisions miss the mark in these settings, the consequences appear quickly, in performance gaps, morale issues, or early departures.

For HR leaders, law firms offer a valuable case study in what happens when high performance expectations meet imperfect hiring systems.

Law firms have historically prioritized pedigree: top schools, clerkships, trial experience, technical precision. But credentials alone rarely predict durability in high-pressure roles.

Tim Wheeler, Partner at Greene Broillet & Wheeler, has seen this firsthand.

“Technical competence is table stakes,” Wheeler explains. “What separates long-term contributors from short-term hires is judgment under pressure. In litigation, stress is constant. The people who succeed are typically steady, collaborative, and able to manage intensity without letting it disrupt the team.”

For HR leaders outside the legal field, the lesson is clear: high-stress roles magnify soft-skill deficiencies. Emotional regulation, communication under pressure, and adaptability are foundational.

Organizations that overweight résumé signals and under-evaluate resilience often discover the mismatch only after the hire is embedded in high-stakes work.

Burnout is frequently framed as a workload problem. But in high-pressure professions, it is often a hiring alignment issue.

Justin Lovely of Lovely Law Firm Injury Lawyers notes that expectations play a decisive role.

“In plaintiff litigation, cases move quickly and emotions run high,” Lovely says. “If candidates don’t have a realistic understanding of that intensity before they join, the adjustment can be overwhelming. Transparency during hiring is critical. It’s better to lose a candidate upfront than lose them six months in.”

This insight resonates beyond law. Across industries, organizations often soften job previews to remain competitive in talent markets. But when reality diverges from recruitment messaging, disengagement accelerates.

HR leaders who prioritize honest role descriptions (including the difficult aspects) reduce attrition driven by surprise and misalignment.

In calmer settings, onboarding gaps can go unnoticed. In high-demand environments, they become liabilities.

The pressure can compound rapidly if new hires enter roles without:

Clear performance expectations
Defined communication channels
Decision-making boundaries
Access to mentorship

Legal workplaces, where time sensitivity and client accountability are constant, demonstrate how essential structured onboarding is. The same holds true in healthcare, technology, finance, and other performance-driven sectors.

HR teams that treat onboarding as an operational ramp-up rather than a cultural integration period may inadvertently increase early burnout risk.

While high-stress roles may be unavoidable in certain professions, work design still matters.

Frederic S, co-founder of RemoteCorgi, observes that flexibility (when structured correctly) can extend sustainability even in demanding careers.

“Remote and hybrid options don’t eliminate pressure,” Frederic explains, “but they give professionals greater control over how they manage it. The key difference we see is autonomy. When employees feel trusted to structure their work around outcomes rather than constant presence, resilience improves.”

However, Frederic cautions that flexibility without clarity can backfire.

“Organizations that advertise flexibility but maintain unclear performance standards create confusion, not relief. High-performing teams need both autonomy and clearly defined expectations.”

For HR leaders, the takeaway is not simply to expand remote options, but to ensure that flexibility aligns with measurable outcomes and accountability systems.

Law firms are not unique in facing burnout challenges. What makes them instructive is the speed at which hiring misalignments surface.

From their experience, several consistent themes emerge:

Resilience must be evaluated, not assumed. Behavioral interviewing and situational assessments are critical in high-pressure roles.
Honest job previews reduce early attrition. Transparency builds trust and improves retention.
Onboarding is risk management. Structured mentorship and expectation-setting prevent performance shock.
Autonomy supports sustainability. Flexibility works when paired with clarity.
Culture amplifies stress or mitigates it. Competitive environments without collaboration accelerate burnout.

High-stress professions will always demand more from employees. But the solution is not simply about reducing expectations but you must also improve alignment.

Organizations that refine how they hire, communicate role intensity honestly, and build support structures around performance can convert demanding environments into sustainable ones.

Law firms offer a clear example: when talent fit, transparency, and structured leadership align, pressure becomes a catalyst for growth rather than a driver of turnover.

For HR leaders across industries, the message is practical: burnout prevention does not start at resignation. It starts at recruitment.

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At Work, Relationships Are Operational

February 13, 2026 by HRSAdmin

February 13, 2026

At Work, Relationships Are Operational

By Tim Mobley, President, Connext Global

Valentine’s Day is usually framed as personal, but it’s also a useful moment to zoom out at work and ask a different question. What makes a professional relationship healthy in the first place? It’s not the perks or the forced bonding exercises. Instead, leaders should focus on whether people feel clear, safe, and supported enough to do great work with their colleagues, despite differences in their roles, backgrounds and pressures.

That’s why I keep coming back to a simple idea: Healthy workplace relationships rarely happen by chance. HR’s job is to design the conditions that make them possible.

Workplace relationships are shaped by structure, not just personality. How work gets assigned, how decisions get made, how feedback is delivered, and how conflict is addressed all determine how relationships feel day to day.

Consider a long-term initiative that spans multiple departments, such as a year-long systems rollout involving operations, IT, finance, and customer support. These kinds of complex projects inevitably have overlapping deadlines and shifting priorities. Even when the entire team puts forward their best effort, pressure builds.

Without clear ownership and decision rules, small miscommunications start to feel personal. A delayed response reads as avoidance, and a blunt message sounds dismissive. Tension grows even when no one intends harm.

This dynamic intensifies in distributed teams. In a shared office, misunderstandings get corrected quickly because you can clarify intent in real time. In remote or global teams, it takes a more deliberate effort for those corrections to happen.

Returning to that cross-department project, imagine contributors spread across time zones. Scheduling constraints can cause some team members to miss meetings, while late-night emails may arrive without the context needed to interpret them right away. When this happens, silence fills the gaps and assumptions take hold.

In distributed teams, relationship issues surface faster when expectations are not written down. HR has to formalize how teams communicate, collaborate, and course correct, or small misunderstandings quietly turn into long-term disengagement.

Many organizations misunderstand team building. They treat it as an event rather than an operating principle. Real team building is created through predictability. People need to know who makes decisions and how to communicate respectfully.

On complex projects, this clarity matters even more. When teams know how tradeoffs are decided and how feedback flows, conflict becomes manageable instead of personal. HR sets those guardrails so the work can stay focused on progress rather than unspoken rules.

That’s how we create psychological safety — by delivering predictable outcomes when people speak up.

Boundaries have become nonnegotiable in remote and hybrid environments. Without clarity, flexibility often turns into constant availability. People burn out when they never know where the edges are.

Team members stay online late to avoid being seen as uncommitted and they jump into issues outside their scope to keep projects moving. Over time, that leads to exhaustion and faltering collaboration.

One of HR’s most important responsibilities now is protecting boundaries. Clear norms around response times, escalation paths, and ownership prevent burnout before it starts. These norms do not need to be complex, yet they do need to be explicit.

Trust at work comes from consistency. When performance is measured predictably and feedback is delivered fairly, relationships feel steadier.

Inconsistent standards turn relationships political. People chase visibility instead of progress and credit becomes competitive. Employees are afraid to take the risks required to innovate. But if employees have a clear understanding of what good looks like and how growth is supported, collaboration becomes easier.

HR is responsible for building that consistency into the system.

I have seen firsthand how quickly relationships improve when these guardrails are treated as part of the operating system rather than personal preference. At Connext Global, we led a team transition for a U.S.-based managed service provider, and found that the real challenge was rebuilding trust, morale, and operational reliability after a strained outsourcing relationship. By establishing clear communication rhythms and consistent expectations, the team scaled while improving retention and satisfaction.

By designing expectations and boundaries into the system, relationships stop depending on guesswork and start supporting performance.

Ultimately, modern HR must lead this transformation. HR is creating the environment where relationships form and live. To be healthy, these relationships don’t require everyone to be close friends, but they do demand consistency and guardrails that protect people from unspoken expectations.

Valentine’s Day may be the reminder, but the work is ongoing. When HR designs the conditions for healthy relationships, teams spend less time managing friction and more time doing their best work.

About the Author

As President and Founder of Connext Global Solutions, Tim Mobley brings over 20 years of executive leadership experience to the team, including 10 years in the healthcare industry. He is a proud United States Military Academy graduate with an MBA from Harvard Business School. Tim enjoys mentoring young professionals, snowboarding in Japan and delivering Hawaiian chocolates to our offshore teams.

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5 Ways to Manage Your Team Like an Olympic Coach

February 11, 2026 by HRSAdmin

February 10, 2026

5 Ways to Manage Your Team Like an Olympic Coach

By Ashley Herd, Leadership Speaker and Podcast Host

Every two years when the Olympics roll around, we all become experts in sports we may not have even tried ourselves (though curling does make a surprisingly fun team outing). We’ll yell to the slalom racer on TV, “You should’ve taken that turn tighter!” even though we wouldn’t want that same racer showing up on Monday morning to give us play-by-play feedback in the office.

But Olympic athletes don’t succeed because of random commentary from the sidelines. They succeed because of consistent coaching, years of preparation, and the kind of feedback that’s based on trust. Those breakthrough moments aren’t luck; they’re the result of practice, support, and someone helping them get better over time.

This is where HR comes in. One of the most valuable things HR can do is help managers move from “sideline commentary” to real coaching, with practical tools for feedback, trust, and development. If you want to empower your managers to set their team members up for their own “gold medal” moments, here are five tips to share:

Olympic coaches don’t prepare athletes for vague success. They train for the exact conditions of competition.

Managers sometimes do the opposite. We tell employees, “Do your best,” and “Be successful,” but we don’t clarify what success actually looks like. Or we assume people know what the finish line is, because we can see it.

Olympic-level management means being specific:

What does a great outcome look like?
What’s expected of them, and what will they receive from others?
How will you each measure it along the way?

Teams can’t hit a target that hasn’t been clearly, and specifically, communicated.

No Olympic coach waits until the gold medal round to say, “By the way, your form was off.”

Feedback happens in real time. It’s part of the process. If managers are only talking about performance at review time, this can be a training gap, not necessarily a motivation problem. The strongest leaders build a culture where feedback sounds more like coaching than criticism:

“This was great. Keep doing that.”
“Here’s one tweak that could help.”
“Let’s look at that together.”

Consistent, constructive feedback makes it feel supportive, not stressful.

Olympic coaches absolutely challenge their athletes. They stretch them, and raise the bar. But the best coaches also know the difference between growth and burnout. They support, and require, recovery. They notice when someone can do more, but also when they need a break. They understand that performance isn’t just about effort. It’s about sustainable effort.

Managers need that same awareness. If your team is always sprinting, they’ll eventually stop running. A good question to ask your team is “How can we make sure you’re able to balance getting your work done and taking time to recharge?”

That check-in can prevent a lot of breakdowns later.

When an athlete steps onto the world stage, they’re not wondering if their coach believes in them. That trust was built long before the spotlight.

In workplaces, trust works the same way. You can’t wait until the big moments to try to build it. It comes from showing up regularly, following through, and communicating clearly day to day.

Trust isn’t extra. It’s what makes everything else work.

Olympic athletes are chasing excellence, which means no one’s perfect on Day One. They get there through repetition, learning from mistakes and adjusting along the way.

Managers sometimes forget that work is developmental, too. If someone isn’t getting it, the question isn’t always, “Why can’t they do this?” It’s often: “How can they learn and grow?”

A manager’s job isn’t to lead a team of flawless performers. It’s to lead real humans who are learning, trying, growing, and doing it all over again.

A team member’s presentation next week might not come with medal chances, but it can still feel like they’re on the world stage. That’s where good coaching matters. Managers can use these tips to help people not only understand what’s expected, but feel supported in how they’ll succeed. And HR can play a role in making that kind of leadership the norm.

About the Author

Ashley Herd is a former Chief People Officer and General Counsel , leadership speaker, and podcast host who has trained over 250,000 managers through LinkedIn Learning and live corporate trainings. Ashley has spent her career helping professionals navigate leadership challenges with clarity and confidence. Ashley built Manager Method after leading HR and Legal teams at McKinsey, Yum! Brands and Modern Luxury. She’s a top LinkedIn Learning instructor and co-host of the HR Besties podcast. As the CEO of Manager Method, Ashley works with organizations of all sizes to equip their managers with practical, proven tools that drive clarity, accountability and stronger teams – because better managers build better workplaces.

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The Future of HR: Key Workplace Trends and What They Mean for 2026

February 10, 2026 by HRSAdmin

February 10, 2026

The Future of HR: Key Workplace Trends and What They Mean for 2026

By Quentin Varaldi, Chief Executive Officer, Unstoyppable

As organizations enter 2026, the Human Resources (HR) function is undergoing one of the most significant transformations in its history. With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), changing workforce expectations, tightening labor markets, and evolving workplace models — HR leaders must adapt quickly. Today’s top trends aren’t just incremental improvements; they represent structural shifts in how organizations attract, develop, manage, and retain talent.

Below, we explore the most impactful trends shaping HR right now, drawing from recent industry research, surveys, and expert analysis.

Perhaps the biggest trend reshaping HR in 2026 is the integration of AI into virtually every HR process — from recruiting and performance management to employee experience and self-service tools. According to recent talent trend research, 43% of organizations now use AI in HR tasks, up from just 26% in 2024 — and adoption is highest among publicly traded companies.

AI is not just about automation — it’s driving strategic value. For example:

AI-powered candidate screening systems can rank applicants and predict likelihood of success.
Chatbots and virtual assistants handle routine HR questions about benefits, policies, and workflows.
Predictive analytics can identify employees at risk of disengagement or turnover before it happens.

Interestingly, surveys show employees are increasingly comfortable using AI for HR support, but trust remains a challenge — as some workers express skepticism about accuracy and transparency.

This underscores that AI must be implemented responsibly, with user transparency and human oversight to preserve trust and fairness.

Gone are the days when job roles were defined strictly by rigid titles. In 2025, skills-based hiring is rapidly replacing traditional job descriptions. Rather than searching for perfect role matches, organizations are identifying needed skills first and then finding people who possess them.

This trend reflects two fundamental shifts:

Businesses are struggling to fill roles — and competition for top talent remains intense. Surveys show that 69% of organizations still find hiring difficult, mirroring challenges not seen since 2016.
Rapid technological change — particularly AI — is creating new skills requirements again and again, meaning current employees must evolve alongside shifting expectations.

In response, HR leaders are:

Conducting skills inventories to understand internal capabilities.
Designing personalized learning and development (L&D) pathways.
Shifting to skills-based performance frameworks rather than rigid competency models.

This helps ensure that workers aren’t just hired — they’re continuously developed, agile, and prepared for future roles.

Remote and hybrid work models are no longer temporary or experimental — they are standard operating models for many organizations. According to workforce trend research, companies are formalizing these models and integrating them into long-term talent strategies.

With remote and hybrid models, HR faces new priorities:

Ensuring connection and engagement across distributed teams.
Bridging compliance and payroll differences across geographies.
Supporting well-being and work-life balance in decentralized work environments.

What’s more, a new labor phenomenon called “job hugging” is emerging — employees remain in roles despite limited advancement or engagement, often due to economic uncertainty. This trend is slowing turnover and affecting internal mobility, challenging HR to rethink engagement and career development in this environment.

HR is increasingly recognized as the steward of the employee experience — not just paperwork. Organizations are elevating well-being, engagement, and personalized experiences from “nice-to-have” to core strategic priorities.

Key areas of focus include:

Mental health initiatives and stress management programs.
Continuous feedback models that replace annual reviews with real-time performance insights.
Recognition programs that foster inclusion and affirmation across all levels of the workforce.

HR leaders know that engagement isn’t just feel-good — it directly influences retention and productivity. When employees feel heard, valued, and supported, they are more likely to contribute meaningfully to organizational goals.

With so much employee data available, HR teams are using analytics to make smarter decisions:

Predictive models identify flight risk — employees likely to leave soon.
Workforce planning models simulate future hiring needs based on business forecasts.
Sentiment analysis tools measure engagement from communication patterns.

This shift reflects a broader trend: HR no longer reacts — it predicts. Advanced people analytics helps HR make proactive, strategic choices rather than operational or reactive ones.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) remain essential components of HR strategy in 2025 — but the conversation is evolving beyond compliance and policies into measurable impact and accountability.

Key developments include:

AI tools being designed to reduce bias in hiring and performance decisions.
Inclusion efforts shifting toward everyday, embedded practices rather than annual campaigns.
A growing emphasis on belonging — not just diversity — to strengthen retention.

Though DEI faces political and regulatory headwinds in some regions, HR professionals are doubling down on thoughtful, values-based inclusion strategies to reinforce fairness and belonging.

With the proliferation of digital tools — from AI platforms to cloud-based HR systems — HR is working more closely with IT than ever before. In fact, surveys indicate that a majority of IT leaders expect HR and IT functions to fully merge within five years.

This collaboration extends across:

Governance of data, platforms, and systems.
Deployment of secure, compliant AI tools.
Seamless HR-IT support infrastructure for employees.

The result? HR teams with stronger technical fluency, and IT teams better aligned to people strategy — a combination that accelerates innovation and helps mitigate risk.

Despite all technological change, one constant remains: workplaces are human at their core. HR leaders are placing greater emphasis on:

Building resilient leadership capable of guiding teams through uncertainty.
Prioritizing emotional intelligence and connection.
Encouraging managers to play a central role in employee engagement and culture.

In other words, HR is balancing tech with humanity — understanding that while automation can enhance efficiency, human connection drives trust and fulfillment.

The HR function is no longer back-office support. It has become a strategic driver of organizational success. In 2025 and heading into 2026:

AI and automation are transforming how HR operates and decisions are made.
Skills-based hiring and development are replacing outdated models.
Remote work requires new ways of managing engagement and culture.
Employee experience and well-being are top priorities.
Data analytics informs strategy and forecasting.
DEI, resilience, and human-centered leadership guide people practices.

These trends reflect a broader reality: HR must be both a technologist and a humanist — embracing innovation while maintaining empathy, fairness, and connection in the workforce. For HR teams that succeed, the future holds opportunities to influence business performance, elevate employee experience, and shape the world of work in profound ways.

About the Author

Quentin Varaldi is the Chief Executive Officer of Unstoyppable, a premier licensed product manufacturing partner based in Guangzhou, China. He leads a company that specializes in transforming intellectual property into high-quality consumer products by providing OEM and turnkey production solutions — from engineering, prototyping, and precision tooling to global fulfillment and retail readiness. Unstoyppable’s certified manufacturing systems uphold Disney FAMA, BSCI, and international safety standards, ensuring rigorous IP protection and ethical production practices. Under Quentin’s leadership, the company has built enduring partnerships with entertainment brands and media licensors, delivering compliant, market-ready merchandise worldwide and reinforcing Unstoyppable’s reputation for reliability and operational excellence.

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Volatility is the baseline: Why CEO turnover is rising and how boards must rethink succession planning

February 9, 2026 by HRSAdmin

February 9, 2025

Volatility is the baseline: Why CEO turnover is rising and how boards must rethink succession planning

Dan Russell, Senior Partner, Global Head of Assessment at RHR International

CEO turnover is rising, bringing chaos for organizations that do not thoughtfully invest in their leadership strategies. CEO departures have increased over the past couple of years due to a number of factors: retiring baby boomers ushering in generational shifts; added pressure within the financial, retail, and entertainment sectors; and complexities and rapidly shifting economic, technological, and political landscapes. At the same time, expectations of the role have changed; people now desire shorter tenures and greater work-life balance.

Cultivating a healthy pipeline of CEO and senior executive talent can take a decade. Without proper planning and investment, CEO succession can throw a company into crisis mode. Consequently, proactive CEO succession plans have grown significantly more important on the corporate priority list to ensure smooth transitions.

Today’s CEOs and senior leaders are operating under unprecedented pressure. Boards expect transparency, candor and a learning orientation for incoming leaders, along with the ability to cut through noise and focus on what actually matters to the organization’s continued growth. Simultaneously, as volatility continues to rise, decision-making cycles are shorter and public visibility into leadership actions has never been greater and more accessible. The combination of these factors results in intense pressure that’s felt most acutely across the retail, entertainment and financial services sectors.

In response to this pressure, leaders are searching for better ways to make decisions and execute faster, taking advantage of the rate at which technology is advancing. Some are heavily investing time and money to incorporate AI into their processes, but the most thoughtful leaders are taking their time experimenting with AI to evaluate where it’s most valuable. Even as organizations become more adept at leveraging this technology in their decision-making processes, they also must become more confident using their intuition. The staggering pace and truly unprecedented decisions they are being asked to make further fuel their appetite to lean on external tools to take measured, thoughtful risks.

For emerging CEOs and senior leaders, this volatility is not an interruption of stability, but a baseline from which they operate.

Many CEOs are stepping away earlier, emphasizing the point that succession planning must be a long-term, continuous process rather than be treated as a simple handoff.

Still, many boards remain loyal to outdated assumptions about what CEO readiness looks like. For example, succession discussions of the past revolve around a single “heir apparent” or default to candidates that resemble (or directly contrast) the sitting CEO. The actual key is shifting the focus from who to what. State-of-the-art succession planning starts with defining what the next CEO needs to accomplish within the future-facing context of the organization, rather than mirroring the past.

The charismatic visionary CEO of the 2010s with disruptive ideas has become a moment of the past, but it still has influenced the next era of leadership and made room for a new set of expectations for the role. The CEOs of today and the future must continue to make good decisions and galvanize people around a shared agenda that focuses on maintaining agility and resilience, all while continuing to operate under extreme pressure. They are incredibly purpose-driven problem solvers with a greater focus on scanning the external landscape, recognizing the implications of market trends and embracing the need to continually evolve and innovate. These leaders foster multidisciplinary approaches to opportunities across their organizations, balanced with cultivating their individual resilience and the resilience of those around them. The importance of these components will become more vital in the future and set a higher bar.

While elite academic credentials remain a common thread among top leadership, today’s CEO candidates reflect a notable shift toward functional and geographic diversity. In RHR’s work with companies of all sizes around the world, boards are increasingly looking beyond traditional Ivy League pipelines, prioritizing operational readiness and specialized experience over prestige alone. In a volatile market, a candidate’s track record of navigating disruption has become as critical a differentiator as their pedigree.

The most common mistake organizations make in the transition process is waiting for a crisis to occur. In reality, effective CEO transitions begin the moment a new CEO is named, and remain an intentional and ongoing process to ensure leadership continuity is not left to chance in a world where mayhem is the baseline.

Collaboration is key; great CEOs and boards partner closely with their CHROs to create and execute evergreen processes for all critical leadership positions. It begins by identifying the type of leadership required for the future based on the specific needs of the company and assessing candidates against that profile while providing development support and feedback to help them grow into the role while still in their current one. From ongoing talent reviews and leadership assessment to career pathing, the best prepared organizations are those that treat succession planning as a continuous cycle. Steady leadership investment allows companies to respond when disruption occurs, such as an unplanned vacancy or an unexpected opportunity that requires strong leadership.

As my colleague Deb Rubin says, relying on a future CEO to simply “emerge” from the organization is like riding on the highway in a go-kart. You might make it, but the odds are against you.

Despite preparing to exit, outgoing CEOs still have a critical role in this process. When engaged productively, they help build leadership by focusing on strengthening the organization rather than preserving an individual legacy and casting a shadow over the transition. The legacy of founders and board members does not lie solely within their own performance; it relies on the readiness of the person who takes your seat. Preparation is a combination of ambition, education and situational context.

About the Author

Dan Russell is a senior partner and head of Assessment at RHR. In this role, he combines deep psychological expertise with commercial acumen to design and scale executive succession programs. Dan has advised Fortune 100 companies across industries in North America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe. His expertise spans leadership assessment, succession planning, talent strategy, and advanced people analytics, including predictive modeling and machine learning.

Prior to RHR, he had senior roles with global firms including Deloitte and Aon. Dan holds a master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Austin Peay State University. He is a Chartered Coaching Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, an active member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology over some 30 years, and a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation.

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