Is SHRM Still Worth It? Part Two: Behind the Curtain
This is Part Two of a two-part series. Part One — The Money, The Membership, and The Missing Voice — is available here.
This piece draws on SHRM's publicly available 2024 Form 990 filing and other public records. The numbers cited are documented. The questions are genuine.
The Vendors Behind the Brand
When an organization generates $233 million in annual revenue and spends aggressively to maintain its position, the vendor relationships that support that machinery are worth understanding. SHRM's 2024 Form 990 lists its five highest-compensated independent contractors. Three of them tell a story — and interestingly, the filing categorizes two of the most notable ones under the same broad label: "content services."
CGI Technologies and Solutions received $19.7 million for IT support services. This one is straightforward. An organization delivering digital content, certifications, webinars, online communities, and conference platforms at SHRM's scale has substantial technology infrastructure costs. IT spending at that level, for an operation this size, isn't the point of this conversation.
HEVE LLC — pronounced "heavy," because in their words great stories carry great weight — received $7.9 million, also listed under content services, though their work is very different in nature. HEVE is SHRM's full creative agency of record, handling brand marketing, video production, design, and media buying since 2019. To give you a sense of the scale involved: one of their campaigns for SHRM took over every one of the 72 LED screens at the Oculus — the iconic wing-shaped architectural landmark and transportation hub at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan that serves over a million commuters every week — plus all the screens at the adjacent Fulton Street subway station. The campaign featured ten short videos, each telling the story of a real person and a real workplace struggle, built around the message "It takes one honest conversation to change the workplace." The themes — pay equity, workplace culture, being underestimated — were genuinely relevant to the profession. Hundreds of thousands of commuters saw it daily. That's the level of brand investment member dues are underwriting.
And then there's Bully Pulpit Interactive — also listed under "content services" in the 990, which tells you something about how broadly that category is being applied — which received $5.3 million.
The Bully Pulpit Question
The name alone raises eyebrows — and your instinct to look more closely is the right one, even if the answer lands somewhere more interesting than a simple "dark side."
The name comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who used the term to describe using a position of authority as a platform to shape public opinion. Bully Pulpit Interactive — now Bully Pulpit International — was founded in 2009 by the digital marketing team behind Barack Obama's presidential campaign. They went on to manage the digital strategy for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and its joint fundraising operations with the Democratic National Committee. They have worked extensively for the DNC and affiliated Democratic political committees. Their services for corporate and nonprofit clients like SHRM include audience targeting, message development, narrative building, and reputation management — the same tools honed in political campaigns, applied to organizational communications. They have been a long-standing client of SHRM's, appearing in agency listings as far back as the early 2010s.
The question worth sitting with isn't dark or conspiratorial. It's simply this: what exactly is SHRM spending $5.3 million of member dues on in the category of reputation management and narrative strategy — and why does a professional association serving HR practitioners need that level of investment in shaping how it's perceived? Reputation management at that scale is typically deployed when an organization is actively managing how it looks to an audience that may be skeptical. The 2024 filing covers a year in which SHRM dropped "equity" from its DEI messaging, renamed its Inclusion conference to "Blueprint," and was navigating the discrimination lawsuit that would result in an $11.5 million jury verdict in December. The timing is what it is. Draw your own conclusions.
What "Free" Actually Costs You
Here's where the conversation gets personal for most of us.
SHRM's genuinely substantive educational content — the certification prep materials, the in-person seminars, the eLearning programs — comes with a real price tag. The Learning System study materials for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP run between $820 and $1,330 for online access, and up to $1,940 for instructor-led programs. The exam itself costs $495 to $695 depending on membership status. All in, first-time certification can represent an investment of well over $1,500 to $2,600 before you've paid for a single hour of continuing education. Annual membership on top of that. Recertification fees every three years on top of that.
Against that cost, the "free" content SHRM makes available to members is supposed to feel like value. And sometimes it is. But too often it isn't — and most of us know exactly what I'm about to describe.
The webinar where the host and the panel are clearly reading from a script. The perfect set, the soft lighting, the glazed eyes tracking back and forth across a teleprompter. No live audience. No real questions. Recorded, edited, and pushed out as though it were a genuine conversation about an important topic. This is what a bad HR soap opera looks like — and it's the vehicle that gets passed off as professional development when the content is actually underwritten by a vendor with something to sell.
Vendor-sponsored content isn't hidden — it's typically disclosed in advance, and that's fair. But disclosure doesn't fix the underlying problem. When the same PDC badge appears on a genuinely educational practitioner-led program and on a vendor webinar about why their platform is the answer to your problems, members are left to sort out the difference on their own time. The badge makes the purchasing decision easier — members see it and know the content qualifies for their recertification credits without having to do extra verification work. That's good for vendors. Whether it's good for members depends entirely on what's actually in the content.
And here's the ask that actually makes sense given what we now know about SHRM's financial picture: if $233 million in annual revenue — generated from member dues, certification fees, conference registrations, advertising, and vendor partnerships — is flowing into this organization, why are the substantive, non-vendor educational programs still priced out of reach for practitioners who don't have an employer footing the bill? Not all of us have a training budget. Not all of us make $4 million. The revenue is there. The question is whether investing it in accessible education for working HR professionals is actually the priority.
Your Vote: Where Is It, and What Does It Mean?
Let me ask the community something directly, because the comments from within SHRM's own community suggest this question has been sitting unasked for a long time.
According to SHRM's own bylaws, every professional member in good standing is entitled to one vote in the election of the SHRM Board of Directors — the same board that approves the CEO's compensation package and oversees how member money is spent. Elections are conducted annually on a staggered basis, with roughly three seats opening each year. SHRM's board page currently notes they are recruiting candidates for three seats beginning January 2027.
The word "recruiting" is doing significant work there. The governance committee identifies and vets candidates before they appear on any ballot. By the time a member receives a voting opportunity, the field has already been curated by people already inside the structure. That's standard practice for many professional associations — it's not unique to SHRM. But it does mean that the practical choice available to members is often ratification rather than genuine selection.
The actual ballot, when it exists, lives at vote.escvote.com/shrm — a third-party online voting platform. Most members have never seen that URL. If you've never received a notification directing you there, you are in very good company.
SHRM does not publicly disclose member participation rates in board elections. I looked. It isn't there. That absence is worth naming — though to be fair, this kind of transparency gap is not unique to SHRM. Most professional associations in this space don't publish their governance participation data either. The standard isn't higher because SHRM is SHRM. The standard should be the same for any organization that asks members to trust it with their credentialing, their professional development, and their dues dollars — publish the numbers, make the process visible, and treat member governance as something more than an administrative formality.
What happens when member participation is low? Practically speaking, the governance committee's curated slate wins. The board perpetuates itself. The same compensation committee approves the same CEO pay structure using the same independent consultant and the same undisclosed peer group. The cycle continues — largely invisibly, funded by dues, certification fees, and conference registrations from members who may not even know the election is happening.
What Would Meaningful Change Look Like?
I'm not writing this to watch SHRM fail. The profession needs a strong center and SHRM built something genuinely important. But the organization that claims to lead HR practice owes its members the same things it teaches HR professionals to provide their own workforces: transparency, accountability, and a genuine voice in decisions that affect them.
A few things would go a long way:
Publish member participation rates in board elections — and if the number is low, say so and tell members what's being done about it.
Make the ballot visible — a prominent notification through the member portal, separate from the promotional email stream, with a clear link to where the vote actually happens.
Disclose compensation comparability data — members fund the CEO's salary. They have a reasonable interest in understanding how the benchmark was built.
Invest the revenue in accessible education — if $233 million in annual revenue is flowing through this organization, the substantive non-vendor content should not carry price tags that exclude the solo practitioner, the small business HR professional, or the person investing in their own development without employer support.
None of this requires SHRM to become a smaller or less ambitious organization. It requires the organization to behave like it actually works for the people who fund it.
The Conversation Continues
Between these two pieces and the comments from within SHRM's own community, one thing is clear: this conversation was waiting to happen. HR professionals are analytically-minded, perceptive people who apply scrutiny to every organizational system they work within. It was only a matter of time before that scrutiny turned toward the organizations that serve us.
If you want to vote in the next SHRM board election — now you know where to go. If you didn't know the ballot existed — now you do. If you've been quietly asking these questions for years and assumed you were the only one — you are not.
The most powerful thing members can do isn't to cancel a membership in frustration. It's to show up. Vote. Ask questions publicly. Expect the same transparency from the organizations that serve HR that those organizations expect HR to provide.
That's not a fringe position. That's just good HR.