Human resources is the set of individuals who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector or an economy. "Human capital" is sometimes used synonymously with human resources, although human capital typically refers to a more narrow view; i.e., the knowledge the individuals embody and can contribute to an organization. Likewise, other terms sometimes used include "manpower", "talent", "labor" or simply "people".
The professional discipline and business function that oversees an organization's human resources is called human resource management (HRM, or simply HR).
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or resources:
“Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)