The chief HR officer’s chair is changing hands faster than the org chart suggests, and increasingly the new occupant has never worked at the company before. Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global CHRO Turnover Index puts 155 CHRO appointments across major markets in 2025, up from 124 in 2024, and finds that even as first-time CHROs accounted for 60 percent of that total, the largest companies are the ones most likely to look outside for the job. The pattern says something uncomfortable about how HR builds its own leadership pipeline compared to how it tells everyone else to build theirs.
The data behind the shift
Russell Reynolds tracks CHRO appointments and departures across the S&P 500, FTSE 100, EuroStoxx 100, TSX 60, and ASX 200. In 2025, the total volume of moves climbed for the second straight year: 155 appointments globally, against 124 the year before. Average tenure for outgoing CHROs held at 5.2 years worldwide, a touch above the 4.5-year average the firm had recorded for 2024, suggesting boards are not necessarily moving faster on CHRO exits so much as replacing more of them at once as a wave of post-pandemic hires reaches its natural end point.
The more specific finding is where boards look when a seat opens. Sixty percent of 2025’s appointments were first-time CHROs, people stepping into the top HR job for the first time in their careers. But Russell Reynolds notes that pattern skews heavily toward smaller and mid-cap companies making internal promotions. Among S&P 500 companies specifically, the index finds the opposite pull: a distinct preference for external, already-proven CHROs over first-time internal candidates, even when a capable internal successor exists.
Why the largest companies default to outside hires
Anna Penfold, Russell Reynolds’ global leader of the CHRO practice, frames the growing scope of the job as part of the explanation: “This evolving remit positions CHROs as pivotal in driving both operational agility and sustained business performance.” A CHRO today is expected to own workforce AI adoption, restructure the organization around fewer layers of management, and defend the company’s talent strategy to a board that increasingly treats headcount and productivity as one line item, not two. Boards facing that scope, and facing it under time pressure after a CEO transition, gravitate toward someone who has already run the playbook somewhere else rather than someone learning it in role.
That preference has a mechanical driver, too. Russell Reynolds’ research ties much of CHRO turnover to CEO turnover: a new chief executive often wants a CHRO who is their own choice and their own confidant, not an inherited one. When that CEO comes from outside the company, as is increasingly common at large-caps, the incoming CEO frequently reaches for an external CHRO as well, someone whose track record they can verify independently rather than take on faith from the existing organization.
What large companies are trading away
The tradeoff is explicit in how Russell Reynolds frames the decision boards face: developing a first-time internal candidate who already understands the business and its culture, against recruiting a seasoned external leader who arrives with a proven track record and an outside perspective but no institutional history. Large companies are choosing the second option more often, and that choice compounds. Every external CHRO hire is one fewer rotational or stretch assignment that builds the next internal candidate, which pushes the next search toward an outside hire too.
It is a pattern large companies would flag immediately if they saw it in any other function. A finance organization that filled every CFO vacancy externally for a decade would draw board questions about whether it was developing controllers into finance leaders at all. HR, whose entire professional discipline is built around succession planning and leadership pipelines, is running exactly that pattern on itself without much of the same scrutiny.
What it means for the HR leader
For sitting CHROs and their succession committees, the index is a prompt to treat the CHRO seat with the same rigor HR applies to every other C-suite succession plan it manages for someone else. That means naming and developing at least one internal candidate with real exposure to the board, not just the CEO, well before a transition is imminent. It also means being honest about scope: if the job now requires fluency in workforce AI deployment, org-design economics, and board-level data storytelling that the current bench does not have, that is a development gap to close now, not a reason to default to an outside search later.
For HR tech and people-analytics teams specifically, the data argues for treating CHRO-track development as its own tracked program inside the succession and talent-review platform, the same way companies already track CFO-track finance leaders or general-manager-track operators. Few HRIS deployments currently tag “future CHRO” as a distinct talent pool with its own competency model. The index suggests that gap is showing up in the appointment data itself.
What to watch next
Russell Reynolds’ own tenure numbers offer a signal worth tracking: outgoing CHRO tenure sits below the five-year average and well below post-pandemic highs, even as it ticked up year over year. If tenure continues to normalize upward while external-hire rates at large-caps stay elevated, it will confirm that companies have made a durable trade: shorter internal pipelines in exchange for CHROs who arrive with a finished playbook. If tenure instead starts climbing alongside a rebound in internal promotions, it will suggest boards are recognizing the succession gap and starting to close it. Either way, the next twelve months of appointment data will show which bet large companies are actually making.
Source: Russell Reynolds Associates
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