Are Organizations Made Up of Talent, Capital or People?

Over the past 8 years there has been a growing trend to using new buzz words in HR. We no longer refer to employees as people, now we call them ‘talent’ or ‘capital’; we refer to executives as the ‘C-Suite’ and attempt to apply a financially oriented return on investment (ROI) to literally everything related to Human Resources.

Is it any wonder that managers, candidates and employees feel disengaged and frustrated with their experience with the people that work in HR? If the people of HR continue this trend of referring to people in this manner the concern is that we move further and further away from what our purported roles are. Whatever happened to facilitating the ability of the management team [people] to attract, retain and develop people? Remember the right people, in the right place, at the right time? I have yet to speak to a non-HR CEO or Manager that refers to the people that work for them as talent or capital-they call them people if referring to groups, or by name if referring to individuals.

Talent, in the form of competencies, skills and abilities come as a complete package, they are attached to people. We can not afford to forget this and by replacing the words people and human with talent and capital what message is being sent? People are far more complex that the set of skills they bring to the workplace and people who work in HR must be conversant with this complexity and understand how it affects the culture of the organization, the engagement of the people who work for the organization, and the future of the organization.

Instead of focusing on catchy new ways to describe what we do, why not focus on simply doing it better?