Was recently chatting with a friend of mine, who works as a program manager in one of India’s giga IT services companies. He was saying that he needs to keep scrambling for people. He also mentioned that the HR functions in his company have great sounding names; Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, Talent Deployment (no Talent Layoff yet, thankfully!) But the work does not get done and the people he gets after all the scrambling cannot be called “Talent” by any stretch of imagination.
When I had started working, “Personnel” was the operating word; Industrial Relations was factory, HRD was OD/ Training and everything else was Personnel. I was pleasantly surprised to be called an Assistant Manager HRD, when joining the IT industry in recruiting. It appeared as if the HRD label was being applied a little more liberally, but why should I complain!
Personnel vanished as it meant “Administration” and HRD took sway; you can do payroll administration and still be called HRD. HR gurus as usual were unhappy with this. Unless you bring in a new framework and model, how to consult? And HR is a fertile field for nomenclatures at least.
McKinsey walked bang into this with their “War for talent”; Talent is a basic English word to which McKinsey gave a new lease of life. Suddenly the messy activity of recruitment became the battlefront of this war. Pudgy mid 40 executives suddenly started thinking of themselves as generals on the battle field. Suddenly Human Resource looked passé’. “People are talent! How can they be called as Resource as if they are oil and gas?”
So Talent became the operating word. Now, we use talent very differently in sports. A talented player is someone who has shown positive signs, but is yet to perform to that level. Take cricket. There are the average players, average players who with hard work perform ( Anil Kumble), talented players ( Rohit Sharma) and talented players who perform. ( Sachin Tendulkar)In sports, talent means a higher potential. ( For a brilliant take-down of the talent paradigm by Malcolm Gladwell go here: http://gladwell.com/the-talent-myth/)
McKinsey also used talent as a marker of high potential and performance. Such people are few and have to be fought for. In parallel, the GE concept of normalization sprung up. Terms like Top talent, Top Vital Talent, Middle Vital talent gained currency.
Recruitment became talent acquisition, resource allocation became talent deployment and employee relations became talent engagement. HR executives were as happy as when I was to be called HRD doing recruitment.
Such name changes seem to happen every 5 years in HR and the conceptual frameworks are supported by product vendors. Today, ERP vendors have done more to popularize talent management terminology than anyone else.
However, mindless adaption creates its own problems. For a long time, Training and Development was sufficient. Then someone figured out, training is what we do; learning is the outcome. So, T&D became L&D. Brilliant. But you go to a review of L&D and the first chart you see will be of person days of training delivered. L&D and all that is fine, but we cannot still figure out the increase in learning; So I will measure training but call myself learning.
Some of this is done in good faith, but sounds like chicanery. Think about this; Sales, continues to be called Sales. They have not gone and renamed themselves as Client Acquisition; There is business development, but it is not Sales. Sales professionals do not feel ashamed of their titles as they know where the power lies. Accounting is accounting and a balance sheet is a balance sheet. It is important without being called Asset deployment sheet or such fancy stuff.
Some of the nomenclature change is driven by a bit of insecurity unlike Sales or Accounting. Some, based on solid principles that are not easily scalable. It is wonderful to look at people as talent or people as human capital. The reorientation of systems and processes is a lot of work; So, we put names and try what we can.
Reminds me of a time I used to go to a restaurant in my younger days. For lunch, we had Gobi Manchurian for a week. Then the waiter offered Gobi 65. Sounded catchy and so I ordered it immediately. To my disappointment, it was the same Gobi Manchurian, rebranded!
Resource Allocation is important. Reengineer the process, identify improvement opportunities and deliver against goals. You will be more of a success and the customer won’t really care if you call yourselves anything. Google calls it “ People Operations” but are still successful.
Keep the same old process and rename glamorously; Customer senses chicanery as the case above.
( I had shared the same article on LinkedIn blogs as well)
hr3by2 
Simply awesome!!
I had similar experience like “Why should I complain” when I shifted from Manufacturing to IT industry. The irony is the depth that the Manufacturing organisations go, in terms of HR is remarkable compared to the superficial IT industry. When I started my career in 2000, my role was Executive Trainee – OD. I was exposed to 360 degree feedback, MBO based PMS which eventually migrated to Balanced Scorecard, Variable Pay, Competency framework, end to end Training & Development, Change Attitude Management Systems, etc.
After 15 years, the organisations that I have worked for recently (including the Tier 1 companies) are far from any of the above practices though they have fancy terminologies. Its like transition from Home made foods to junk fast foods (quicker, tastier but not healthy)!