Answer extracted from The Josh Bersin Company podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How should human capital research actually be tailored to your organization?
Effective human capital research must deliver actionable solutions specific to your industry, location, and company size rather than applying generic best practices from large enterprises. What works for Google or Walmart may not be relevant to a fast-growing tech company or small retailer—which is why comparable case studies from organizations like yours become the foundation of truly applicable insights.
The risk of one-size-fits-all research is real. When you study how a global multinational manages performance, you might learn something interesting, but the operational reality of your organization often demands a completely different approach. Location, industry dynamics, and scale create distinct constraints that make generic frameworks insufficient.
As Bersin explains in the episode, the solution is to build research on a foundation of nearly 1,800 real-world case studies spanning different industries, geographies, and company sizes. These cases serve as mirrors—when you find organizations with similar characteristics to your own, their experiences become immediately relevant to your situation.
Over close to 30 years of studying how companies actually manage their people, this research has identified 95 distinct functional capability areas of human capital. For each area, the research includes maturity models, benchmarks where appropriate, assessments, and most importantly, case studies from real implementations. That empirical foundation transforms research from theoretical to practical.
Why generic benchmarks miss the mark
A retail distribution company in the UK faces supply chain realities, hiring cycles, and operational pressures that differ fundamentally from a SaaS startup burning through growth capital. A fast-growing tech company prioritizes scaling rapidly while managing turnover; a legacy manufacturer focuses on stability and retention. The same performance management system, succession planning approach, or organizational design simply will not work equally well across these contexts.
The research model described in The Josh Bersin Company podcast reverses this logic. Instead of asking "what do best-in-class companies do?", it asks "what do companies similar to mine do?" That shift—from aspiration to applicability—is what makes research actionable.
"The purpose of this research is to give you actionable solutions to problems in your industry, in your location, in your company size. If I tell you how Google or Walmart does performance management and you're a fast-growing tech company or a small retailer or a retail distribution company in the UK, it may not apply at all."
Josh Bersin — Founder and CEO, The Josh Bersin Company. Bersin has spent nearly 30 years researching human capital management across thousands of organizations. He has identified 95 functional capability areas of HR and management, developed maturity models and benchmarks, and compiled nearly 1,800 case studies to make research relevant to organizations of all sizes and types across multiple continents.
The depth of this research ecosystem is itself the key differentiator. Bersin's research team has indexed and categorized these insights across industry, geography, and company stage, making it possible to surface examples directly comparable to your own situation. When you're evaluating how to restructure your HR function or implement a new performance system, you can examine what actually happened in organizations shaped like yours—not in unicorns or century-old conglomerates.
The research membership model: making context-specific insights accessible
To monetize and distribute this knowledge systematically, the research operates through a membership model. Rather than selling one-off reports, members get access to an evolving library of frameworks, maturity models, vendor analysis, and case studies—all filtered and searchable by industry, location, and organizational size. This allows practitioners to pull exactly the relevant slice of the research at the moment they need it.
The case study component is particularly vital. The research framework includes continuous interviews with companies and vendors, capturing not just what was implemented, but why it worked—or didn't—in their specific context. That narrative context is what transforms data into wisdom.
See also
How does AI enable HR to shift from transactional to strategic value delivery?
By automating routine operational work, HR teams free capacity to focus on higher-value activities that develop their strategic capability and impact organizational outcomes.
What foundational elements must precede successful AI implementation in HR transformation?
Before implementing AI, organizations need strong fundamentals in place: data governance, process redesign, and knowledge management provide the essential foundation for transformation to succeed.
What operational improvements result from digitizing HR service delivery and automating routine work?
More than 90% of employee interactions consolidated onto a single platform, compared to being fragmented across email, phone, fax, and other channels—dramatically improving response time and consistency.