Glossary
What is HCM (human capital management)?
Also known as: Human Capital Management.
HCM, human capital management, is the broad category of software and practice for managing people across the whole employee lifecycle, from hiring through development and pay to exit, usually aimed at larger organisations.
HCM is the widest of the three terms. It takes in the HRIS core and the HRMS modules and adds the strategic layers a large organisation cares about: talent management, workforce planning, succession and analytics across the whole population.
In practice the word signals scale. Enterprise suites tend to call themselves HCM platforms; a product for a lean or distributed team is more usefully described as an HRIS or an HRMS, because that is the problem it solves.
Related on Capstan
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