Human resource management (HRM) is a broad concept that even includes personnel management. This discussion will provide an excellent understanding of the difference between personnel management and HRM. Before making the distinction, this is important to define the two terms.

Defining personnel management and human resource management

Personnel management is concerned with obtaining, utilizing, maintaining, developing, and compensating the human resources of an organization. On the other hand, Harvard Business review defined that human resource management is a broad term. This relates to the implementation of HR policies, recruiting, training and developing the HR and finally supervising if the human resource of a company are capable to achieve the organizational vision.

Key differences

Firstly, personnel management is a part of human resource management. Personnel management deals with the individual contributions, performances of the employees. On the contrary, HRM investigates if the existing HRM is capable enough to reach the vision of the organization.

Secondly, HRM adopts a proactive approach to employee management by determining how much expertise is needed to carry out the mission of the organization. On the contrary, personnel management is a reactive approach by reacting the actions of HRM.

Thirdly, personnel management considers that employees are same as tools or machines. In contrast, human resource management perceives considers the psychological elements of each employees. This is a significant difference because personnel management evaluates the facts and figures only. Whilst HRM is more of a qualitative approach.

Fourthly, the difference between personnel management and human resource management is from motivational perspectives. Personnel management motivates the employees with good compensation, incentives. On the contrary, HRM motivates employees with strategic advantages such as strategic vision, job creativity and innovation etc.

Finally, personnel management does not bring in a complete management of personnel in a workplace. The reason is that this subject matter only manages a fraction of the human resource management. On the other hand, human resource management carefully manages the complete perspective of human resources in an organisation. From the above discussion, this is clear that personnel management is a part of human resource management. This shows that there are obvious difference between personnel management and human resource management.