There was no such thing as “human resources” before 1958, when the term first appeared in print in an academic paper. The art of keeping one’s workforce in good order used to be called “personnel management” or “industrial relations,” and before about 1920 there was no such thing as that, either. It was not thought to be a separate type of management or something one could specialize in. For most of human history, workers and their bosses had face-to-face relationships. Only when corporations became so large that an owner could no longer learn the names of all of his employees did anyone start to talk about “human resources” in the abstract.
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