The role of HR is beginning to move from simply recruiting to being strategic players in an organization. Time was when an organization's HR was concerned with a little deskwork and sending out information to employees on some occasions. In line with this change in their functions and expectations, there has been the change in thinking about what organizations want out of their personnel. People are now seen as the organization's capital, and making the best out of them is what is called human capital management, or HCM.

HCM is about looking at people differently

The concept of human capital management has evolved with the understanding that people can be developed and trained to do much more than their routine tasks. As a result, many managements look at people as resources, rather than employees who carry out the work assigned to them. These resources, which form the key part of an organization's human capital management, are considered extensions of the core of the organization.
Organizations don't hire people merely as employees, but as transformers of the organization who have a stake in its growth and development. To bring this about, management has to look at people at a very different level and from a completely different perspective. This is what looking at them from a human capital management perspective is essentially about.

HR has a major role in this transformation

When organizations decide to implement human capital management, the department that has the highest role in this is HR. Human resources has the onus of making this exercise, which is about a new transformation in the organization, happen. Why the task is best left to HR is that it is HR that is directly involved in both recruitment and employee development. Because it plays such a vital role in selecting the resources for the organization, HR is placed in a vantage position to identify the resources that are best suited for the organization's human capital management.

How does HR do this?

For HR to be the vehicle through which an organization implements human capital management; it has to reinvent itself first. The change that the management in the organization wants to implement has to begin with HR. It has to look beyond the horizon and stretch its thinking from a mundane to a strategic one. It is only when HR looks at the whole prism of human capital management from a strategic and long-term perspective that it can hope to bring about this change.