TL;DR

Short answer: It depends, and the honest answer is more interesting than the outrage. Most HR teams operate inside a reporting structure that rewards protecting the company first, and that default shapes everything from how investigations run to who gets the benefit of the doubt.

Key stats you need to know:

  • Only 49% of employees trust HR to follow through on what it promises, making HR one of the least trusted functions inside most companies (Forrester).
  • 62% of employees believe misconduct gets overlooked when a top performer or a leader is involved, and 45% have watched someone get promoted after mistreating a colleague (TalentLMS).
  • Bolt's valuation dropped from roughly $11 billion in 2022 to about $300 million in 2026, right around the time its CEO eliminated the entire HR department (Fortune).

The leadership takeaway: If your CHRO can't put a number on what HR actually changed for employees this year, don't act surprised when someone in the C-suite starts asking why the department still exists.

You can find the full episode on Youtube and Spotify.

Is HR Actually Anti-Worker?

No, but I get why it feels that way to the people leaving angry comments on my videos. When Bolt's CEO Ryan Breslow stood on stage and announced he'd fired his entire HR team, calling them "the wrong energy," my inbox filled with stories that had nothing to do with Bolt. People told me about the investigation that went nowhere, the manager who got a slap on the wrist, the exit interview that felt like a deposition. Their anger is data, even when it's not the kind you can chart.

The numbers back up the feeling. Forrester's Future of Work research found that just 49% of employees trust HR to follow through on its commitments, putting HR near the bottom of the trust rankings inside the average company (Forrester). TalentLMS found something even more specific: 62% of employees believe misconduct gets quietly overlooked when the person involved is a top performer or a leader, and 47% say managers actively discourage people from escalating harassment or discrimination complaints (TalentLMS). That's a pattern people have lived through more than once, not a one-off perception.

I've watched this play out inside real teams, not hypothetical ones. A frontline employee files a complaint and gets terminated within a week for something the company decides is unrelated. A VP gets the same kind of complaint filed against them and gets reassigned to a different division, sometimes with a bigger title. Same HR department, same policy manual, two completely different outcomes depending on where the person sits on the org chart. That gap is what erodes trust faster than any single bad headline.

And it's why the Bolt story landed the way it did. Breslow wasn't describing a fringe complaint when he said HR "was creating problems that didn't exist." He was tapping into a frustration that a huge share of the workforce already carries, which is exactly why Fortune kept covering the fallout, including the EEOC scrutiny that followed his onstage comments (Fortune).

Watch the episode about the CEO firing his HR department.

What Is The FutHRist HR Leader, and Why Does It Matter?

The FutHRist is my term for HR leaders who've already rebuilt their function around four things: transparency, mutual accountability, provable value, and a genuine seat in the room where decisions get made. I coined it because I got tired of watching good HR leaders get lumped in with the version of HR that earned the distrust in the first place.

Here's what separates a FutHRist from the department Breslow described:

  • Transparency over secrecy. A FutHRist can't always share the outcome of an investigation, but they can always explain how the process works, what rights the employee has, and what happens next. Silence is what breeds suspicion, not confidentiality itself.
  • Accountability that runs both directions. The same clock and the same consequences apply whether the person named in a complaint is an individual contributor or an executive. No quiet reassignments for the people with more power in the org chart.
  • Value employees can actually see. A FutHRist treats HR like a product team treats a roadmap: define what value gets created at each stage of a process, measure the outcome, and report it against a real business number, not an activity log of trainings completed.
  • A voice in the room before the decision gets made. FutHRists show up to strategy conversations with attrition data, skill-gap forecasts, and flight-risk signals already in hand, part of the decision instead of the group that finds out about it afterward.

In a boardroom, I'd say it this way: the companies cutting HR to the bone right now are rejecting a version of the function that never had to prove its value, and the FutHRist model is proof that a better version already existed.

How Should CHROs and C-Suite Leaders Respond?

C-suite leaders and CHROs should respond by treating HR's credibility problem as a design flaw, not a communications problem to manage around. Here's the playbook I'd run:

  1. Make your investigation process legible. Publish, in plain language, how a complaint moves through your organization, what an employee's rights are at each stage, and what kind of follow-up they should expect. People trust a process they can see, even when the outcome stays confidential.
  2. Apply one clock to everyone. If a frontline employee can be terminated in a week over a substantiated complaint, a vice president should face the same timeline and the same range of consequences. Audit your last twelve months of cases by seniority level and see what the pattern actually shows.
  3. Put a number on HR's value, every quarter. Tie retention, time to fill, and engagement movement to a business KPI your CFO already tracks. "We ran forty trainings" is an activity. "We cut regrettable attrition in engineering by six points" is value.
  4. Get in the room before the decision, not after. Bring workforce data, including projected skill gaps and flight-risk trends, into the meetings where strategy actually gets set. If HR only appears after a layoff decision has been made, HR still isn't in the room that matters.
  5. Answer the criticism instead of defending against it. When a CEO says publicly that he doesn't need HR, don't get defensive on his behalf. Ask what he actually saw, because there's usually a fixable answer underneath the insult.

What This Means for You as a Leader

The tension underneath all of this is simple. Companies are rewarding HR functions that can prove their value with real numbers, and exposing the ones that can't. Breslow just did it on a bigger stage than most, and plenty of companies are quietly running the same experiment without the headline.

Winning here doesn't require a bigger HR budget or a rebrand. It requires an HR function willing to measure itself the way the rest of the business already gets measured, and leaders willing to treat that data as a real input into strategy instead of a report that gets filed away. The CHROs still standing in five years will have rebuilt HR's credibility with numbers long before they ever needed to defend it in a comments section.

I talked through all of this, including the comments that started the whole conversation, on this week's episode of The Human Capitalist podcast, also available on Spotify.

FAQ

Is HR actually anti-worker?

Most HR departments operate inside a structure that rewards protecting the company by default, without any individual HR professional intending harm. That default is what creates the outcomes people experience as anti-worker.

Is AI-driven restructuring creating or destroying HR jobs?

It's doing both at once. Companies are cutting HR teams that can't show measurable value while investing more in the HR leaders who can operate like the FutHRist model, meaning the jobs disappearing and the jobs growing often sit inside the same department.

Why is there a trust premium on HR leaders who show their work?

Because trust in HR is already low. Forrester found only 49% of employees trust HR to follow through on its commitments (Forrester), so any HR leader who closes that gap with visible, consistent follow-through stands out immediately to both employees and the C-suite.

How does the FutHRist model actually improve job quality?

It replaces silence with an explained process and replaces uneven consequences with a single standard applied to everyone. Employees build trust in a system by understanding how it works and watching it get applied consistently, not by seeing every outcome disclosed.

What is the FutHRist in simple terms?

The FutHRist is my framework for the next generation of HR leader: transparent about process, consistent about accountability, able to prove value in business terms, and present in strategic conversations before decisions get made rather than after.

What should CHROs and CEOs do first?

Audit the last twelve months of complaint outcomes by seniority level before doing anything else. If the pattern shows uneven consequences, that's the credibility gap to close first, ahead of any messaging or rebrand.

A version of the FutHRist framework, along with the five mindsets HR leaders need for the AI era, is the subject of my upcoming book, "The FutHRist," dropping in September 2026. You can find where you stand on those five mindsets with the assessment at trentcotton.com