Seth Godin wants to market HR.
He's not wrong, although he's thinking of things as a marketer. He wants to change the corporate mindset. So do I, but for different reasons. His idea is as good as any, but mostly I just want the name "Human Resources" gone. I find it absolutely fucking offensive. I'm not a piece of coal, I'm not some oil that somebody dug up, I'm not even some fabulous talent that somebody discovered. I work where I do because I wanted to work here and put my name in to the HR department, then somebody else hired me.
The name Human Resources is wrong because they and (by extension) administration / upper management may really see us staff as interchangeable cogs in a wheel. If you want to retain people, that's not the way to go about it. "If everybody's interchangeable, why am I still here again?" At my place of employment, as at many, we have yearly performance reviews that send quite the opposite message. Some people get bigger raises than others based on what they've accomplished relative to everybody else.
If we're not interchangeable cogs, why are we Resources?