The path into HR has become far too narrow.

Outside of structured campus recruitment programs, there are very few meaningful entry points for aspiring HR professionals to gain real, hands-on experience. Job postings labelled “entry level” routinely ask for 1–3 years of experience. Generalist roles that could be incredible learning grounds are filled by people already mid-career. And HR, as a profession, often talks about “building talent pipelines” while neglecting our own.

Over the years, I’ve taken a different approach with my own HR teams, and it has reinforced for me both the possibility and the responsibility HR has to change this.

I’ve worked with early‑career HR professionals across multiple forms of Work‑Integrated Learning (WIL), including co‑op placements, internships, practicums, field placements, capstone and project‑based work. These experiences have reinforced my belief that emerging talent are the architects of our futures.

The students have done real work. They’ve supported recruitment, onboarding, policy development, HRIS updates, employee communications, and day-to-day HR operations. They’ve participated in team meetings, contributed ideas, and seen the direct impact of their work on employees and the organization.

What I’ve witnessed is clear: when we give early-career professionals meaningful exposure and real accountability, they grow quickly and we, as organizations, benefit from their energy, ideas, and fresh thinking.

Yet these experiences with interns also highlight a bigger issue: we are still not doing enough.

The problem: HR is closing its own front door

As HR practitioners, we often:

• Hire for fully formed capability instead of potential

• Over-index on prior experience instead of transferable skills and learning agility

• Treat internships and placements as “nice to have” rather than core talent strategies

• Prioritize developing leaders and mid-level talent while neglecting to build true entry pathways into the profession

Campus recruitment is valuable, but it’s also limited:

• It tends to favour larger employers that can afford formal programs.

• It’s usually confined to specific academic institutions.

• It primarily reaches students at a particular moment in time, missing career changers, newcomers, and non-traditional candidates.

The result? We create a bottleneck: a profession that says it values inclusion, equity, and talent development, but offers very few real, accessible entry points to people trying to get in.

What I’ve learned from early-career HR internships

Across these internships, I’ve seen how intentional design of early-career HR roles can work in practice.

Real work, not busy work

• Ownership of specific tasks and processes

• Opportunities to support end-to-end HR activities (for example, from posting a job to supporting onboarding)

• Exposure to both the strategic and operational sides of HR

Structured learning, not sink or swim

• Setting clear objectives for their time with us

• Providing coaching and feedback, not just assigning tasks

• Bringing them into cross-functional conversations so they see the bigger organizational context

Mutual benefit for both employer and student

• Increased our capacity on critical projects

• Brought new perspectives on technology, communications, and employee experience

• Challenged our assumptions and nudged us to modernize processes

Why this matters for the profession

If HR is serious about being a strategic function, we cannot ignore the sustainability of our own talent pipeline. The professionals we complain are “hard to find” curious, tech-savvy, inclusive, business-minded HR practitioners don’t just appear. They are developed.

And development starts with access.

A call to action for HR: widen the gate

My experience working with interns over the years has convinced me that we can, and must, do better. Here are concrete steps HR teams can take:

1. Create intentional entry-level HR roles

• Design roles that truly are entry-level, with no hidden requirement for years of experience.

• Clearly define what will be learned and how capability will be built over 6 to 12 months.

• Build in a mix of administrative work and exposure to more complex projects.

2. Leverage internship and funding programs strategically

• Use government-funded programs and co-op placements as structured pathways into HR, not one-off experiments.

• Treat these roles as a first step in a longer relationship track high-potential interns and consider them for future roles.

3. Share the work of development across the team

• Make skill-building a shared responsibility in your HR function, not just the manager’s job.

• Pair interns or entry-level hires with mentors across different HR specialties, such as recruitment, employee relations, learning and development.

4. Broaden where and how you recruit

• Career changers

• Newcomers to Canada

• Candidates from non-HR academic backgrounds with strong transferable skills

5. Measure impact, not just output

• Track what skills interns gained and how they contributed.

• Ask whether this experience made them more employable and whether it improved your HR function.

• Use those insights to refine and expand early-career opportunities.

Building the next generation is part of our job

These internship experiences have shown what’s possible when we open the door and invest in emerging HR talent. Interns carry forward tangible skills and confidence. We, in turn, benefit from their contributions and perspectives.

As HR leaders and practitioners, we need to treat early-career development not as an optional extra, but as a core responsibility of our profession.

If we want a future where HR is innovative, strategic, and deeply human-centric, we have to start by giving people a real way in.

We owe it to our organizations, to our profession, and to the talented emerging professionals who are eager to contribute, to widen the gate.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of my employer or any other organization.