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The year: 2005
PrismHR is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025. To commemorate the occasion, we will periodically share stories related to workforce trends over the past four decades. In this blog, we head back to the early 2000s to see how much technological progress we have made since then.
In 2005, PrismHR began the year still operating as F.W. Davison & Co. By the way, 2005 also marked the second-annual HRPyramid User Conference, which you now know as PrismHR LIVE! Awesome then, awesome now.
So pull out your old velour tracksuit or “skinny” jeans and graphic Tees from the closet, and let’s return to 2005.
Read our 1985 and 1995 posts, and stay tuned for 2015.
Popping in on Pop Culture
In 2005, the video “Me at the Zoo” debuted.
Never heard of this classic? You’re definitely not alone. The 19-second recording from Jawed Karim is significant not for its style, filmmaking, originality or elephants in the background but because it was the first video ever uploaded to YouTube.
That’s right. The powerful video platform started with a quick clip of Karim announcing, “Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants.”
Not nearly as exciting as the highly polished and graphically stunning content you can find on the platform now, but we guess you could call it the herd heard round the world.
Also debuting that year was Guitar Hero, the popular videogame where players get to channel their favorite rock or pop heroes and jam with the band without having to worry about knowing how to play an instrument. Rock on!
While one iconic platform was just beginning, one was ending. That year, the band Destiny’s Child—with Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams—announced they had released their last album together and would go their separate ways. We wonder how that worked out for Beyoncé …
OK, safe to say it worked out for her. And concertgoers must have felt a little “Déjà Vu” when Beyonce reunited with her former bandmates in Las Vegas at the last stop of the “Cowboy Carter” tour.
Speaking of déjà vu, the top TV shows in 2005 included American Idol (Nos. 1 and 2), Grey’s Anatomy (No. 5) and Survivor (No. 11). Hello, déjà vu! These shows still exist today with Survivor coming in at 52 and 59, respectively; American Idol at 67; and Grey’s Anatomy at No. 76 for the 2024-25 TV season.
And while Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith dominated the box office, a modestly budgeted film ($30 million) more than doubled its money highlighting the life of a former basketball coach from a small California high school, who made national news by forcing his top-ranked team to forfeit games until they boosted their GPAs.
Did we mention that same coach was a keynote speaker at PrismHR LIVE 2025? Coach Ken Carter, who was played by Samuel L. Jackson in the film Coach Carter, told us at LIVE the importance of being able to “Reset your preset.”
We’re all set!
Trouble Measuring
Back in 2005, the book Human Resources Effectiveness was published. Chapter 2 was of particular interest: “Why Measure HR Activities?” As the book states, human resources “needs to demonstrate why and how all resources are used, but most personnel departments have rarely monitored how they use people, time or money. Unlike finance, there are no accepted conventions. Some feel uncomfortable with the notion that all activity can be measured and the quality of service assessed. This may be due to fear of the results or concern about how to go about it in the first place.”
2005, we’d like to introduce you to 2025 Performance Management.
You got this.
So let’s take a stroll down memory lane to see how much things have changed from 2005 …
2005 At-a-Glance
| Item | 2005 Cost | 2005 Cost, Adjusted for Inflation | Current Cost |
| First-Class Stamp | $0.37 | $0.63 | $0.73 |
| Movie Ticket (Avg.) | $6.41 | $10.84 | $11.31 |
| Concert Ticket (Avg. Top 100 Tours) | $57 | $96.41 | $120.43 |
| Gas Price (Avg. Per Gallon, July) | $2.32 | $3.83 | $3.14 (As of July 28, 2025) |
| Lenovo ThinkPad | $2,249 | $3,713 | Starting at $1,209* |
*ThinkPad L14 Gen 6
Sources: 24/7 Wall St., Lenovo, The Numbers, Pollstar, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED, U.S. Postal Service
3 Trends From 2005 and 2025
1. Then: While the Professional Employer Organization (PEO) and HR Outsourcer (HRO) concept traces its roots back to the late 1960s, by 2005 HR outsourcing was indeed fully in vogue.
In March 2005, Inc. wrote an article about HR outsourcing costs. It explained, “Business from smaller clients is growing, however, as outsource vendors’ ability to serve them improves. As such, over the last two years, HR outsourcing among small businesses has gone up considerably.”
A researcher from the Everest Institute explained how HR outsourcing offers smaller companies the “best functionality” at a “lower expenditure.”
Now: Twenty years later, HR outsourcers can say the same thing, but the innovation has shifted into high gear. Today’s high-tech HRO solutions allow smaller companies to compete for talent with the big guys like never before. HRO tech brings enterprise-level payroll and benefit functionality to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to help them be more efficient while allowing them to make better business decisions. And through a state-of-the-art Application Programming Interface (API), a la carte integrated options are available to HR outsourcers to help them retain clients and acquire new ones as well with added functionality and efficiency that meets their and their clients’ needs.
2. Then: In 2005, minimum wage was $5.15, which it had been since 1997. It wouldn’t hit $7.25, the current federal minimum wage, until July 24, 2009. An ad for a part-time certified nursing assistant that paid “$6.05 per hour plus credit for experience” in the Minneapolis Star Tribune might have garnered some interest.
What piqued our interest was that every ad on the page—from “Office Help” at a pest control company to “Oncology Research Nuse”—had a phone number or physical address included. Not one of the ads on the page included an email address or URL. And there were dozens of ads. For the record, Gmail launched in 2004 and AOL “You’ve Got Mail” email had been around since 1993, so most people had access to electronic mail at the time.
Now: Neither “snail mail” nor email is common these days when it comes to answering job ads. In fact, the vast majority of jobs are posted on job boards, like LinkedIn and Indeed, these days. Advanced Applicant Tracking Systems help streamline processes for HROs and their clients so they can tap into top talent easily and efficiently. Good for the businesses—and good for the candidates, too. You’ve Got Applicants!
3. Then: CIO magazine reported about the AcceleGlove, which used sensors they called “accelerometers” to translate American Sign Language into speech. This was designed to help people who sign to communicate with people who do not use sign language. “The translations can be relayed through speech synthesizers or read on PDA-size computer screens,” the article explained.
Personal digital assistants, remember them? The AcceleGlove inventor explained how the challenge was keeping up with fast signers, so he incorporated “intelligent predictors” into the devices that would anticipate the next words being spoken to help the translation keep up with conversation.
Now: You can’t type a sentence on your keyboard without your device suggesting what you might want to type next—unless you turn off that functionality. Artificial Intelligence is not new, but it’s clearly starting to enter its prime in 2025 with AI tools popping up just about everywhere these days—from generative AI tools like ChatGPT to agentic solutions like Microsoft Copilot Studio. AI can draw pictures and write blog posts in seconds, and do all sorts of cool things these days. Of course, AI still requires human participation to ensure the quality of the work is what you hope it would be.
AI is also changing the game in Applicant Tracking, allowing HR outsourcers and their clients to make faster, smarter hiring decisions. And this is just the tip of the iceberg for AI in the HRO space as there’s much more headed our way.
And in case you were wondering, companies like Nvidia are using AI to bridge learning gaps for the deaf community and companies like Slait offer ASL translation solutions today.
Next Time on PrismHR 40th Anniversary Reminiscing …
In our next installment in the series, we revisit 2015, a year filled with many changes. Late night TV saw the exits of popular late-night hosts like David Letterman and Jon Stewart from their hosting gigs—OK, Jon’s back again—while popular series like Glee and Parks and Recreation said their farewells. We also got to revisit with a triumvirate of old friends—namely Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher—as they reprised their iconic roles as Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Gen. Leia Organa, respectively, for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. They also brought the Droids we were looking for with them …
2015 was also a huge year in the HRO tech space. The world said hello for the first time to the brand we all know as PrismHR, and that started a chain of events that we still feel today in terms of HR tech innovation. And the evolution continues …
Until next time, why not binge some Big Bang Theory or Blacklist episodes in between learning about HR automation …
It will give you “all the feels.”
James Tehrani is PrismHR’s content marketing manager. He is an award-winning writer and editor based in the Chicago area.
