Spotlight On: Cheryl Richards, President & CEO, Catapult Employers Association

December 2025 — In an interview with Invest:, Cheryl Richards, president and CEO of Catapult Employers Association, highlighted how current economic pressures are influencing corporate strategies, why organizations are increasingly listening to their workforce, and noted the growing demand for outsourced HR services and AI training. “All the predictions we had for 2025 were essentially set aside in January. Over the past year, Catapult and employers across the region have had to pivot significantly in response to workplace challenges and policy changes we never imagined,” Richards said.

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Over the past year, what changes or milestones at Catapult stand out for their impact on members or your strategy overall?

The world has changed dramatically in the last 10 months or so. At our executive roundtables, we discuss what executives have planned to do for the upcoming year. In October 2024, I asked them about their plans for 2025. Our members told us they were concerned about cybersecurity, talent acquisition, talent retention, developing future leaders, and competitive wages.

Then 2025 came, and we experienced dramatic changes affecting the workplace, including immigration policy changes followed by inflation, which has continued to plague employers. We encountered new, unplanned developments from the federal government, such as the Department of Government Efficiency, which led to federal workforce cuts, state workforce cuts, and corporations re-evaluating their own workforce. We also saw nonprofits and their funding impacted. In just 10 months, all the workplace norms we’ve expected for decades around diversity, equity, and inclusion suddenly became taboo.

In the backdrop, businesses were dealing with tariffs and trying to decide what to invest in, weighing supply chain investments against human capital investments. This, along with economic conditions, led to increased tension between employees and employers. While we entered 2025 with employees in the driver’s seat due to the decline in the workforce population over the last decade or so, this started to change with the rise of AI.

Additionally, the new dynamic of political strife entered the workplace. By midyear, we saw situations where employers were concerned about what employees were doing in their personal time. We saw this dynamic play out with the misconduct of a CEO and a CHRO at a concert, which led to extensive conversation around employee behavior during non-working hours.

It happened again during the Charlie Kirk assassination, with employers from airlines to governments, universities, fast food companies, and sporting teams firing people for statements made on their personal social platforms that were inconsistent with company values. The rise of artificial intelligence has emboldened employers to replace workforce gaps with technology, and this has led to a shift toward job-hugging, with people opting to stay in their positions for job security. 

It is a truly interesting inflection point that 2025 has become, predicated on numerous factors including economics, social shifts, workplace policy, labor market changes, and the intersection of human capital and technology. All the trends we predicted would happen still did, but we also had to pivot significantly and change at a new rate of speed we never imagined. 

How are employers across the Southeast adapting to today’s workforce dynamics? What is changing in how they recruit, retain, and lead?

Employers are still concerned about talent, but it’s shifting in some ways. We surveyed many of our members and asked them about the biggest challenges they are facing, and staffing remains a top priority. Employers are focused on recruitment, retention, and compensation to attract the best and brightest talent.

However, economic conditions are challenging how they approach this. The days of double-digit wage increases have tapered down from 10% to around 3%. We believe employers are planning for 3% to 3.5% increases in compensation next year. Employers are still looking for a highly skilled workforce, particularly in the trades and blue-collar jobs, and they are valuing skills over degrees. This has subsequently impacted their approach to white-collar jobs, which is reflected in unemployment statistics for college graduates, who are now facing their highest rate of unemployment in decades.

While recruiting has shifted to a focus on skills and experience, employers remain interested in growth, career paths for young professionals, and leadership development.

What are you seeing in terms of employer demand for HR outsourcing versus in-house expertise? Where is that line shifting?

We are experiencing a dramatic rise in outsourced HR or fractional HR at Catapult. By Q3 of 2025, we had exceeded our budget predictions for this line of business, and we predict it will achieve an all-time revenue high by the time we wrap up the year. This tells us that more companies are leaning into fractional human resources and outsourcing their human resources needs. This is particularly true for companies that range in size from 20 to 250 employees. It is often more cost-effective for them to outsource human resources to an organization like Catapult rather than hire in-house human resources professionals at six figures per person and then provide benefits on top of that.

The surge we are expecting in healthcare costs will likely drive this outsourcing trend even further since organizations tend to spend between 30%-40% per employee on benefits. To reduce personnel costs, employers can hire an organization like Catapult to manage their human resources and enjoy flexibility in services, reduced costs, and the expertise of an experienced strategic partner.

What blind spots do you think CEOs and HR leaders still have when it comes to building resilient, high-performing teams?

Employers are still investing in leadership training and soft skills, but training in artificial intelligence is certainly an area on the rise. We know the AI genie is out of the bottle, and artificial intelligence will continue to be prevalent in workplaces. We see a wide continuum of AI adoption among our members. There are the early adopters who are leaning into artificial intelligence, and they are pushing their workforce to use generative artificial intelligence and agents to help augment their work. One of our members has tasked their employees with finding 25% efficiency in their roles by using AI agents.

We also have members on the other end of the spectrum who tell us that artificial intelligence will never replace their business, asserting that their work is human-centric and cannot be leveraged by artificial intelligence. There is a question regarding how much artificial intelligence will impact our workplaces. It’s hard to predict if there will be fewer jobs because of artificial intelligence, but we know for sure that there will be opportunities for employers to find more efficiency because of artificial intelligence. I think the blind spot may be what training they should provide their employees and how deep they should go with this training.

We believe human resources must have a prominent seat at the table during discussions about artificial intelligence, so we have started developing new content to help human resources professionals navigate this landscape. It is not just a technology tool; it is a workforce augmentation tool. Consequently, we are developing new workshops and classes on artificial intelligence training for human resources professionals and for the workforce in general.

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