A few decades ago, Human Resources was mainly centralized around managing personnel, policing corporate policy and keeping records.  As HR has evolved it has come to mean many things with many off-shoots under the Human Resource umbrella, and in some cases, the development of entire departments to manage separate areas.  For example, in some organizations Talent Management is its own entity that focuses on strategic functions such as inventorying the available talent pool, optimizing this individual talent to increase the organization’s ROI, and motivating employees to increase engagement (which increases retention which increases productivity).  In other companies, working in Talent Management means that you coordinate and execute training modules. The title Talent Acquisition may mean implementing tools like specialized testing, emotional intelligence assessment, and succession planning development where in another organization it’s simply a title for an entry level recruiter.

Think about the different organizations you know.  Are the industry buzzwords such as organizational development, performance management, learning and development, workforce optimization, and on boarding used in different ways to mean different things.  Are they sometimes interchangeable from one company to the next?  Many of these have been considered part of HR for awhile now but as more emphasis is being place on human capital, is this still true.

There is a lot of confusion around these buzzwords.  Each may have a different meaning, be a subset of HR or have evolved into a stand alone department.  But is this a negative thing?  Is it preventing Human Resources from showing itself to be a strategic business department that aligns its Human Capital with strategic business objectives? Do some of these functions like I/O psychology and process management have their own place to stand alone and then appear in individual departments such as operations and finance?  Is all this verbiage a good thing for HR only as long as it remain within HR?

Is each organization run differently using various definitions? I would love to hear your experiences and opinions in the comments.