Hilmar Schneider headed IZA as its CEO from March 2016 until May 2022. Afterwards he remained affiliated with IZA as a Research Fellow. Between 2013 and 2016, he was the Director of the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) after having served 12 years at IZA as Director of Labor Policy. In 2014, he was appointed a honorary professor at the Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education of the University of Luxembourg.

Hilmar Schneider studied Social Sciences and Economics at the university of Frankfurt/Main. After finishing his diploma as a Social Scientist he worked from 1983 to 1987 as a research assistant in the special collaborative program "Microanalytic foundations of social policy". He received his doctoral degree in 1987 with a dissertation on the determinants of unemployment duration. Then he held an assistant professorship from 1987 to 1993 in the department of economics in the department of economics at the university of Frankfurt/Main, giving lectures in statistics, econometrics and labor economy. In 1994, he became head of the labor market department of the Halle institute for economic research. Among else within this activity, he worked as a visiting scholar at the World Economy Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. His successful acting at the interface between economic research and policy advice is well documented by numerous research reports, journal articles and presence in the media. Moreover, he advises the German government, e.g. since 2007 as a member of the German Census Commission. From 2006 to 2008 he acted as a member of the National Council for Social and Economic Data. In 2011 and 2012 he operated as a principal expert for the Chancellor's dialogue on the Future of Germany.

Besides labor policy, his main research emphases comprise problems of social protection, wage policy and demography. His most important publications cover papers about the labor market effects of replacement wages, the labor market perspectives of East Germany, the efficiency of active labor policy in the transformation process, and the welfare state perspectives of Europe.