Taking a dip in the talent pool

Human Resources is a term that no one likes. The best you can say about it is that it's a mild improvement over the sterile Personnel. In 1989, the the American Society for Personnel Administration changed its name to the Society for Human Resource Management "to reflect its broadened scope and influence in business and political worlds internationally." (Uh, okay.)

But many of us feel that Human Resources still has an artificial, impersonal feel to it that belittles the importance of the role. Last May, Karen Dempsey wrote a fine article on the topic in Personnel Today aptly called "What's in a name: 'HR' or 'personnel'? Does it really matter?" Karen asks:

But why this obsession with titles in HR? Other departments such as finance and operations don't waste their time wringing their hands and wondering what title will get them more credibility in the business. At the end of the day, does it really matter what outfit the HR profession is dressed in?

Back in November, British management consultant Scott McArthur covered the issue in his excellent blog McArthur's Rant, in a post called "It’s all in a name? – HR practitioners speak out":

There is no consensus (so far) apart from the feeling that it is up to the individual to prove their value to their respective organisation irrespective of their job title.

One of our first Gruntled posts ("How to save HR — Step 1 — Moving HR to "C" level") took a page from top business guru Tom Peters's book Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age — page 256 in fact. There (at least in the hardcover edition), Tom advocates for changing the name of HR to "Talent Department." (Or even the slightly more exuberant "Seriously Cool People who Recruit & Develop Seriously Cool People.") As I wrote back then:

You could do worse than to read Tom's chapter on Talent and implement half of his ideas for building HR into a strategic arm of the company, with a Chief Talent Officer reporting directly to the CEO.

Now another top business guru, Seth Godin, has brought back the topic with a great post on his eponymous blog. His post, "Marketing HR," gets to the root of the problem:

Understand that in days of yore, factories consisted of people and machines. The goal was to use more machines, fewer people, and to design processes so that the people were interchangeable, low cost and easily replaced. The more leverage the factory-owner had, the better. Hence Personnel or the even more cruel term: HR. It views people as a natural resource, like lumber.

Like it or not, in most organizations HR has grown up with a forms/clerical/factory focus. Which was fine, I guess, unless your goal was to do something amazing, something that had nothing to do with a factory, something that required amazing programmers, remarkable marketers or insanely talented strategy people.

Seth, author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable and The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), has this for a solution: "Change the department name to Talent." Seth concedes that this might make people uncomfortable because it sounds like "spin." And he's right.

But if we're going to insist that the function of "human resources" is as important as we say it is, then we should be prepared to defend a more highfalutin name. Many leading companies have already done this; Apple, Citigroup, Deloitte & Touche, and even a law firm, Sheppard Mullin (no relation), all have Chief Talent Officers.

Your company — whether it's a hospital, a software company, a bank, a paperboard mill, or a law firm — does not work without the talent that makes it work. Put someone in charge of finding and keeping that talent, and then recognize that person's job with the proper title: Chief Talent Officer.

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[HR Wench]

And for heaven's sake pay them what they are worth!