Personnel Management (PM) & Human Resource Management (HRM)

Personnel Management 

Personnel Management was the traditional way of managing the workforce, in the early days before human resource management, personnel management was the term used for how to manage the people in an organization. In personnel management employees are considered as a cost to the organization and they were dealt as a tool for the organization’s operation (Surbhi, 2018).

Human Resource Management

HRM has a wider view of how to manage people and it was evolved from personnel management to fulfill the short comings of PM (Surbhi, 2018), which accounts people as resources and HRM is improved version of PM in treating people well by understanding the benefits of doing so and HRM plays a main role in strategic planning of the organization (Armstrong, 2006).

According to Armstrong (2006), below are the similarities and differences between Personnel Management & HRM

Similarities Between PM & HRM	Differences Between PM & HRM
Personnel Management Strategies & HRM Strategies are part of business strategies	HR Specialist are considered as business partners not just as managers
Line managers are in charge for managing their subordinates while getting the support from the upper management	HRM considers line managers as HR policy implementers as well
Similar in training people to get their maximum, which benefits both the people and the organization and respecting people by considering their needs	HRM gives more importance to managing organizational culture and commitments
Mainly focussed on finding out the best fit for the organization's need and training and placing them for the suitable positions	HRM focuses more on strategic fit and integration as well
Similar techniques are used in selection process, performance management, training and rewarding	HRM considers employees as a resource/asset not as a cost

And I have distinguished Strategic HRM and HRM in one of my previous blog posts (What is Strategic Human Resource Management?), there you can see that SHRM is evolved from HRM and SHRM has wider view regarding the organization’s goals and objectives so it is clear that SHRM evolved from HRM and HRM evolved from Personnel Management. Even though people and their behaviours are almost stay rigid, concepts and way of managing people changes/evolves time to time.

References

Armstrong, M., 2006. A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. 10th ed. London: Kogan Page Limited.

Surbhi, 2018. Difference Between Personnel Management and Human Resource Management. [Online]
Available at: https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-personnel-management-and-human-resource-management.html
[Accessed 11 June 2019].