The most striking shift in HR focus during the latter part of the 20th century was the broadening of the responsibilities of the personnel executive inside large corporations. Led by the example of General Electric and several other progressive employers, companies began recognizing that people were their most important asset and the key factor in creating competitive advantage. The portfolio of industrial relations vice presidents was broadened far beyond labor and employment issues such that they became human resource vice presidents and were increasingly made part of the senior management team of the nation's largest companies.

By the turn of the century, compliance matters had largely been absorbed into the fabric of HR operations. Chief human resource officers then began turning their attention to a series of new challenges, namely rapidly rising health care costs, deteriorating pension and retirement systems, and the scrutiny being given to executive compensation and corporate governance matters as a result of the scandals of the dot com era and the new Sarbanes-Oxley law.

Reflecting those shifts, LPA was changed as well. The association at that time was chaired by William J. Conaty, who served as Senior Vice President of Human Resources at GE for CEO's Jack Welch and then Jeff Immelt. Under his leadership, the organization was transformed into the HR Policy Association and its agenda broadened to address the new challenges of health care, executive compensation and retirement strategies. At the same time, J. Randall MacDonald, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at IBM and the current chair of the Association, began a series of path breaking initiatives that, for the first time, enabled the membership to use the purchasing power of large employers to drive improvements in both the HR marketplace as well as human resource strategies, policies and practices.