Personnel managers worldwide can't have been too pleased with the new Harvard Business Review article, “It’s Time to Blow Up HR and Build Something New.”

But it is true: HR finds itself in a phase of self-discovery and, without doubt, no area feels the impact more strongly than IT.

Flexibility, specialisation, the demands of a new generation for work-life balance in the workplace, shorter product lifecycles, etc. — these problems did not exist with such intensity 10 years ago.

All these points, however, result in long-term HR tasks such as staff development, talent management, and personnel controlling losing their value. A CEO once said it this way:

“Why should I train people when my competitors are willing to do it for me?”

The trend is towards "hire and fire," which is now not only in the interest of the company, but also in the interest of some IT professionals. Recruiting is becoming the key qualification of each HR department. But unlike in the USA, Europe [especially the D/A/CH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)] has a long path ahead before it creates a flexible labour market appropriate to these trends.

Even if European labour laws were not blocks to a more flexible approach to recruiting, various compliance regulations (limited external access rights) burden the roll-on process and close the door on an entire pool of suitable IT professionals based on formal risks (e.g. one-person companies because of weak liability commitments or the risk of higher penalties because of bogus self-employment).

And although outsourcing may offer many advantages, it often also poses risks that the products will not meet expectations.

We can already see signs of a hybrid trend combining long-term HR measures such as personnel development with short-term recruitment of IT professionals. The new focus of HR departments must be on internal specialists such as IT architects, IT managers, and other specialised areas, while entire development teams can be hired on as needed.

What differentiates this approach from classical outsourcing is that the hiring of additional IT professionals takes place under the direction and staffing of the above-mentioned internal specialists and HR. In this way, the employee knowledge base remains within the company, and investments in training are no longer lost.

New outsourcing concepts such as SPG’s TeamEngine can accommodate current and future demands. HR, and above all IT HR, will not die. Like so much else, it will just become more specialised and flexible.