Using the membership directory at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) as a proxy sample of HR professionals, I searched for SHRM members by state and recorded the results. To allow for a simple visual comparison, I have color-coded the results on the following map:
California (22,530) and Texas (19,834) have the most HR professionals by a wide margin. The next highest state, New York (14,748), has roughly 5,000 fewer HR professionals than Texas. States with the least HR professionals are Vermont (682) and Wyoming (465), with seven other states whose number of HR professionals do not reach 1000 (South Dakota, Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, North Dakota, and West Virginia).
The map looks kind of cool, but in terms of useful information, the raw numbers don't really give us much. In fact, the number of HR professionals and overall state populations (taken from census.gov) are almost perfectly correlated (over 92%).
But what if we look instead at the proportion of HR professionals in each state? I took the number of SHRM members and divided it by the total population of the state to determine the overall percentage of each state's population that are SHRM members/HR professionals. The results of this analysis are found in the following map:
This map looks markedly different from the first. The highest percentage of HR professionals (.0041%) is found in Washington, D.C. - I know, it's not really a state - followed by Alaska and Virginia (both around .0014%), and then New Hampshire, Maryland, and North Dakota (all .0011%-.0012%). States with the lowest percentage of HR professionals are California, Hawaii, Nevada, West Virginia, and Mississippi (all .0004%-.0059%).
These results are a little more informative. First, we see that some of the lowest states in terms of raw numbers are actually relatively well-represented in terms of percentages (e.g., Vermont, North Dakota), while some that were highest in terms of raw numbers do not really have a high relative percentage of HR professionals (e.g, California). Second, for some reason, there seems to be more HR professionals relative to the general population as you move farther North in the U.S.
Finally, these data also reveal one of the potential weaknesses of using SHRM members as a proxy for HR professionals. SHRM's headquarters are in Virginia, just over the river from both Washington, D.C. and Maryland. Virginia, D.C., and Maryland were three of the top 5 in terms of percentage of SHRM members, which may reflect the local reach of SHRM more than the true proportion of HR professionals in each state.
The other thing that both sets of data make clear is that I am a huge nerd.
But if you happen to be one of the 682 HR professionals from Vermont and find yourself in a conversation with one of the 22,530 HR professionals from California, you can use this data to assert your state's HR superiority.
