A New Era for HRM? The Promise of Personalisation
Personalisation – the landscape
“There is rarely a global audience for anything”, said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix.
Personalisation matters now more than ever. Personalisation drives performance and better customer outcomes. According to research by McKinsey 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen [5]. In the modern digital economy, we’re all used to personalised experiences whether it’s shopping, or streaming our favourite shows, or getting recommendations for dinner options, it feels that everything is tailored just for us.
With one exception, our workplaces. “Shouldn’t the place where we spend so much of our time and energy understand us better than any brand out there?”, asks Andy Biladeu, chief transformation officer at the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) [8]. Younger generations have grown up with personalised experiences, and as the number of digital natives increases as a proportion of the total workforce, this is becoming a bigger challenge for organisations. According to Qualtrics’ 2025 Employee Experience Trends report, with the lowest intent to stay among 18–24-year-olds, it is key to focus on a more personalised approach to employee experience management, where it’s not just about providing great experiences, but also understanding them and what they need to stay [6].
Personalisation in HRM is still at very early stages, but we are already seeing examples of tailored experiences in learning, career development, and rewards, where offerings are aligned with employee needs and preferences. Instead of assuming what people want or need, find out and tailor accordingly. But alongside the benefits of personalisation, and as businesses are navigating the shift to bespoke experiences, they also need to navigate the fine line between data privacy and personalisation. HR leaders will have to balance the promise and opportunity of personalisation for retention, productivity, and performance, and the ability to create truly inclusive environments, with the difficult questions – which data, how much, and how.
Has artificial intelligence exposed a gap between organisational ambition and reality, and is the promise of personalisation a defining moment and a new era for the workforce and HRM? It certainly challenges some of the principles at the heart of 20th century people management, those of equity, consistency, and fairness. Is there such a thing as too much personalisation? We will explore examples of personalisation, potential benefits, but also ethical and legal challenges, and inevitably the implications for the role and design of HR functions.
Personalising the employee experience
According to Josh Bersin and others who have coined the term exponential contributors, or the 10x workforce [1], employees can benefit from AI technologies to minimise the noise, expand their capabilities and turbo charge their productivity. The ability to really understand what your employees are looking for, and tap into that, would also be a godsend for HR functions, saving valuable time in debates on questioning the impact of solutions and initiatives.
The early adoption examples of personalisation are found in recruitment, training, benefits, and the HR systems that power employees’ daily experiences. With the advancement in people analytics and machine learning, companies are now able to use AI-powered platforms to offer customised experiences such as personalised onboarding plans, benefit recommendations, and data-driven performance feedback and recognition. AI-powered adaptive learning platforms personalise training recommendations by delivering customised courses, interactive learning experiences, and AI-driven progression tracking.
IBM’s AI-driven approach to career mobility has reportedly saved the company over $100 million [6] by efficiently matching employees to suitable roles, reducing turnover, and fostering engagement. Total savings are calculated by totalling the expenses IBM avoided in sourcing and recruiting for new talent, hiring and training new employees, as well as the costs associated with the value of workers who would have likely left the company because they didn’t envision career advancement there.
While there are examples of the benefits from personalisation from early adopters, there are to date no empirical studies on the ROI of personalised HRM. One study from 2019 showed that workforce planning, selection, and recruitment tended to result in the highest ROI, from personalising HRM via HR analytics and AI in those areas [11].
Ethical and Legal challenges
Alongside the potential benefits, organisations need to consider ethical and privacy concerns, together with legal considerations. Balancing enhancing employee experiences with protecting privacy will require careful and sensitive treatment. Employees should feel empowered not monitored.
While AI and data-driven tools enhance precision and scalability, excessive monitoring can undermine trust, introduce bias, and compromise fairness.
There are also important legal considerations in what may be classed as ‘personalisation’. If for example, the benefits offering for two employees in similar roles are significantly different based on arbitrary preferences rather than a structured, legally sound framework, it can lead to claims of unfair treatment, even discrimination [2,3].
Data privacy considerations will require clear data governance policies. Employee data should be treated with the same level of care as financial and customer data and have a say in how their data is being used and what is collected.
Empathy and human judgment should remain central to cultivating meaningful connections, avoiding bias and respecting individual aspirations.
The changing role of the people function
“As machines get better at being machines, humans have to get better at being more human.” Inevitably, this era of personalisation will result in changes for the people (HR) function.
According to McKinsey [4], the people function’s role will shift as the technology continues to evolve. The function will initially need to double down on skill building for leaders, managers, and employees, and an ethical sounding board for senior leaders on technology usage, to a thought partner to managers and the senior leadership team, bringing its perspectives on systems, people, technology, and the organisation into decision-making.
Early examples of organisations choosing to bring together the people and technology functions, highlight the need to do away with siloed perspectives and really dial up the focus on the work that needs to get done, and who is best placed to do it. The biotechnology company, Moderna, is one such example, where its CPO Tracey Franklin also now leads HR. She describes starting from the actual workflows and working back through to talent and leadership planning to determine what the organisation needs.
Early research has shown that AI’s main competitive advantage over human HR professionals will be around what is defined as ‘mechanical and analytical intelligence’, the ability to carry out routine and repeatable tasks, and to process information and gather insights, both now and in the future [2]. But the ability to understand why employee issues arise, and how to create effective, innovative solutions to address the issues, is what AI has difficulty achieving today, but may be able to do so in the future.
A Promising Future?
Personalisation in HRM is still in its early stages but it is already transforming employee experiences. There is immense opportunity in aligning employee experiences to employee preferences and needs but recognising and proactively considering the ethical and legal challenges will determine the degree of success in adoption.
An intentional and strategic approach, alongside the use of evidence-based insights should drive successful outcomes.
The operating model, shape, and roles of the people function will continue to evolve but what is evident is the function’s critical role in partnering with employees and leaders to make sense of the change and help them navigate proactively the everyday chaos that they experience at work.
After all AI can’t lead change – only humans can!
Resources
Bersin, J. (Jan 14, 2025). The Rise of the Superworker: Delivering On The Promise of AI https://joshbersin.com/2025/01/the-rise-of-the-superworker-delivering-on-the-promise-of-ai/
Budhwar, P., Malik, A., De Silva, M. T. T., & Thevisuthan, P. (2022). Artificial intelligence – challenges and opportunities for international HRM: a review and research agenda. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 33(6), 1065–1097. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2022.2035161.
Coleman, Alison (Apr 13, 2025). How Tech Is Driving the Personalisation of Employee Benefits. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2025/04/13/how-tech-is-driving-the-personalization-of-employee-benefits/
McKinsey & Company (Feb 7, 2025). A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/a-new-operating-model-for-people-management-more-personal-more-tech-more-human
McKinsey & Company (Nov 12, 2021). The value of getting personalisation right – or wrong – is multiplying. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying
Qualtrics. 2025 Employee Experience Trends. https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/employee-experience-trends/
SHRM (May 20, 2019). IBM Transforms Its Approach to Human Resources with AI. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/ibm-transforms-approach-to-human-resources-ai
SHRM (Feb 27, 2025). The Future of Work is Personal: How AI is Reshaping Employee Experience. https://www.shrm.org/enterprise-solutions/insights/future-of-work-is-personal-how-ai-is-reshaping-employee.
Teitelbaum, A. (Feb 7, 2025). The Future of Work is Personal: How AI is Reshaping Employee Experience. Society for Human Resource Management https://www.shrm.org/enterprise-solutions/insights/future-of-work-is-personal-how-ai-is-reshaping-employee
World Economic Forum Insight Report (2025). Matching Talent to the Jobs of Tomorrow: A guidebook for Public Employment Services.
Xiaoyu Huang, Fu Yang, Jiaming Zheng, Cailing Feng, Lihua Zhang (2023). Personalized human resource management via HR analytics and artificial intelligence: Theory and implications, Asia Pacific Management Review, 28 (4) 598-610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmrv.2023.04.004.