The Chief People Officer role is on the rise – according to LinkedIn, the title has surged by 32%.

While it’s coveted, JP Mangalindan of Protocol argues that it’s “the worst best job in tech”.

So what are the key contributing factors to this nomination?

Piling responsibilities

“There’s been a fundamental paradigm shift more recently in the way businesses see people,” said John Foster, CPO for car buying site TrueCar. “Traditional HR heads may see people more as costs, and they’re trying to avoid risk, manage costs and keep them down. I think in a more modern, growth-oriented, consumer-driven company, a CPO is thinking more about people as investments. ”

Highly visible, but thankless

“While the CEO receives external recognition when a company does something right — the successful launch of a new product, better-than-expected financial results — being CPO can be relatively thankless.”

Accountability without responsibility

“You don’t have direct control over a lot of things and so, I, for example, see things that I believe are issues, and I [do] not always have the ability to fix those myself,” she said. “But I have also been very lucky that I have worked for some great business leaders who also saw the value of this role. Not everybody has been that lucky.”

So what is a CPO to do?

Given the limited number of resources to devise, let alone deploy policies across large organizations, people leaders will have to find ways to use platforms to roll out cultural changes. That means:

  • Gathering data so as to get a better picture of what cultural norms exist, what drives success
  • Enabling organization intelligence by tying people data to performance data
  • Driving change by making the collection and delivery consistent across the organization

Learn what the Aptology platform can do to help leaders understand what drives behavior in their organization, align on Success Profiles based on objective performance metrics, and move the needle on internal hiring.