Human Resources has been constantly evolving since it first began. Starting with Personnel departments, whose initial roles were to maintain paper and files and make sure people got paid on time to expanding their scope to an almost gatekeeper status in some organizations determining who was hired and fired and promoted. Personnel turned into Human Resources and cries for “a seat at the table” began in earnest, the function worked to better understand the businesses they worked in and establish ways to “add value.” Human Resources began to edge its way into Human Capital Management where savvy professionals worked to not just understand the business but integrate with it, contribute to the organizational strategy, and to lose the reputation of being nothing more than a necessary burden and cost center. Human Capital Management is on the verge of something new, but to understand that next iteration it’s important to look at the evolution of Talent Management.
Staffing became recruiting. Then organizations started to understand the value of not just hiring people but also developing them and training functions started popping up. Recruiting became talent acquisition. Training became employee learning and development. Organizations started to see value in building skills and knowledge beyond an employee’s current job. Employee discussions evolved into performance appraisals into talent reviews into performance management. These various foci started to circle around one another then bump into each other. Like a star being formed these bumps became collisions and soon all these separate parts exploded into something “new” – talent management.
Talent management became an “it” field, it was the hot place to be (it was the place I cut my teeth for a good part of my career). Talent Management became the focus of Human Resources and Human Capital Management functions far and wide. But a new generation of savvy professionals (along with past generations of the same ilk) have started to look beyond their own sandboxes, realized that people costs are their largest expense, and started to ask some important questions:
- How can we increase efficiencies and effectiveness?
- How do we create a performance culture?
- What do we offer to employees (both current and prospective) that others don’t?
- How do we help employees understand the value of their contributions and connect to our “why“?
- How do our employees see us (the organization, the leadership, the business) and how can we shape that perspective?
- What can we do to enable our teams to work smarter? More collaboratively? More innovatively?
Writtent by Erik Smetana via Talent Culture