A Study on

“TALENT MANAGEMENT”

A Project Report submitted to Osmania University, Hyderabad in

partial fulfillment for the award of the Degree

Bachelor of Commerce

Submitted by

KUMAR S BIRADAR
Hall Ticket Number: -129419401056

Under the Guidance

of Mrs. KAVURI NAGALAKSHMI M.Com,
Lecturer in Commerce

Department of Commerce
HAINDAVI DEGREE COLLEGE
(Affiliated to Osmania University)

25/3RT,OPP SBI SR NAGAR, AMEERPET, HYDERABAD

2021-22
 HAINDAVI DEGREE COLLEGE
(Affiliated to Osmania University)

This is to certify that, this is the Bonafide record work Mr. KUMAR
S BIRADAR Bearing Hall Ticket Number 129419401056 has
satisfactorily completed “TALENT MANAGEMENT” prescribed by
the Osmania University for the 6TH semester of B.com during the
academic Year 2021-22.

Internal Examiner Principal External Examiner

Mrs. K.Nagalakshmi Mrs.S. Gayathiri

Lecturer of Commerce

ii
 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this project report entitled “TALENT

MANAGEMENT” is a bonafide work done by me for the award of the
degree of “BACHELOR OF COMMERCE” from Osmania University done
under the esteemed guidance of Mrs.Kavuri Nagalakshmi Department
of Commerce, during the academic Year 2021-2022. I also declare that
this project is a result of my own effort and that it has not been
submitted to any other University for the

Award of any Degree or Diploma Place: Hyderabad

Date:

iii
 ACKNOWLEGEMENT

First and foremost, Iam thankful to Mrs. S.Gayathiri, PRINCIPAL

of HAINDAVI DEGREE COLLEGE for giving me permission for
taking up my Project Work.

I also thank to Mrs. K. Nagalakshmi Department of commerce

for giving me the opportunity to take up the project work and
helping me out throughout.

I would also like to Thank Mrs. Madhavi and Mrs. Mamatha,

Department of Commerce for their valuable guidance and
support for the completion of my Project.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Income Tax &

GST department, Banks and GHMC Hyderabad for giving me
permission to do my project work in their Organizations and
helping me meticulously in all aspects of my project work.

Finally I would also like to thank my entire staff member in the

Department of Commerce of HAINDAVI DEGREE COLLEGE (For
their enduring support throughout my B.Com Course)

KUMAR S BIRADAR
Hall Ticket Number:129419401056
CHAPTER CONTENT NAME PAGE
NO. NO.

1. INTRODUCTION 5

2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE 19

3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 37

4. EMPIRICAL FINDINGS & DISCUSSIONS 47

5. CONCLUSIONS 55

6. SUMMARY AND SUGGESSTION FOR 64

FURTHER RESEARCH

7. BIBILIOGRAPHY 68
FIGURE NO FIGURE NAME PAGE NO
1 INTRODUCTION 7
2 BACKGROUND 9
3 TALENT 21
4 TALENT ACQUISITION 25
5 TALENT MANAGEMENT 26
6 IMPORTANCE OF TALENT 29
MANAGEMENT
7 TALENT MANAGEMENT 35
PROCESS
8 TALENT MANAGEMENT 38
FRAMEWORK
9 CHALLENGES FOR 40
TALENT
10 DATA DRIVEN TALENT 45
MANAGEMENT
11 DATA ANALYTICS 46
12 TALENT MODEL 58
USE AS SAMPLE INDEX FOR YOUR PROJECT
 CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

What if you could attract your competitor’s best employee for few extra
bucks?

Sounds easier than done! Attracting high-worth individuals from the

competitors is not everyone’s cup of tea. Targeting them and finally
hiring the test of your competencies experience, personal traits and brain
application. This is where the strategic approach plays an important role.
A full-fledged department, precisely Talent Management (a part of
HRD), especially dedicated to the purpose is required to recognize,
source and poach them.

However the process doesn’t finish here. It is a never-ending course of

action that requires continuous effort. Let’s read further to explore and
understand the concept.

1. Talent Management, as the name itself suggests is managing

the ability, competency and power of employees within an
organization.

The concept is not restricted to recruiting the right candidate at the right
time but it extends to exploring the hidden and unusual qualities of your
employees and developing and nurturing them to get the desired results.
Hiring the best talent from the industry may be a big concern for the
organizations today but retaining them and most importantly,
transitioning them according to the culture of the organization and
getting the best out of them is a much bigger concern.

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Talent Management in organizations is not just limited to attracting the
best people from the industry but it is a continuous process that involves
sourcing, hiring, developing, retaining and promoting them while
meeting the organization’s requirements simultaneously. For instance, if
an organization wants the best talent of its competitor to work with it, it
needs to attract that person and offer him something that is far beyond
his imagination to come and join and then stick to the organization. Only
hiring him does not solve the purpose but getting the things done from
him is the main task. Therefore, it can be said that talent management is
a full-fledged process that not only controls the entry of an employee but
also his or her exit.

We all know that it’s people who take the organization to the next level.
To achieve success in business, the most important thing is to recognize
the talent that can accompany you in achieving your goal. Attracting
them to work for you and strategically fitting them at a right place in
your organization is the next step. It is to be remembered that placing a
candidate at a wrong place can multiply your problems regardless of the
qualifications, skills, abilities and competency of that person. How
brilliant he or she may be, but placing them at a wrong place defeats
your sole purpose. The process of talent management is incomplete if
you’re unable to fit the best talent of the industry at the place where he
or she should be.

Some organizations may find the whole process very unethical

especially who are at the giving end (who loses their high-worth
employee). But in this cut-throat competition where survival is a big
question mark, the whole concept sounds fair. Every organization
requires the best talent to survive and remain ahead in competition.
Talent is the most important factor that drives an organization and takes
it to a higher level, and therefore, cannot be compromised at all. It won’t

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be exaggerating saying talent management as a never-ending war for
talent!

1.1 BACKGROUND

History of Talent Management– The term was coined by McKinsey &

Company following a 1997 study. It was later the title of a book by Ed
Michaels, Helen Hand field-Jones, and Beth Axelrod however the
connection between human resource development and organizational
effectiveness has been established since the 1970s.

The profession that supports talent management became increasingly

formalized in the early 2000s. While some authors defined the field as
including nearly everything associated with human resources, the
NTMN defined the boundaries of the field through surveys of those in
corporate talent management departments in 2009–2011. Those surveys
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indicated that activities within talent management included succession
planning, assessment, development and high potential management.
Activities such as performance management and talent acquisition
(recruiting) were less frequently included in the remit of corporate talent
management practitioners. Compensation was not a function associated
with talent management.

The issue with many companies today is that their organizations put
tremendous effort into attracting employees to their company, but spend
little time into retaining and developing talent. A talent management
system must be worked into the business strategy and implemented in
daily processes throughout the company as a whole. It cannot be left
solely to the human resources department to attract and retain
employees, but rather must be practiced at all levels of the organization.

The business strategy must include responsibilities for line managers to

develop the skills of their immediate subordinates. Divisions within the
company should be openly sharing information with other departments
in order for employees to gain knowledge of the overall organizational
objectives .The talent management strategy may be supported by
technology such as HRIS (HR Information Systems) or HRMS (HR
Management Systems).

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1.2 Purpose and Research Question
This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge of talent
management, through investigating talent management and related
concepts within the fields of human resource management and general
management. The purpose is to investigate how talent management
directed at specialists should be done, in order to advance the knowledge
on talent management practices for employees who are not in a
management career track. Another purpose is to construct a
comprehensive model that guides the execution of talent management at
a case study company in Norway, active in the oil and gas industry. This

5
model should shed light on to how organizations can work with talent
management at a strategic and systemic level.
4 The research question in this Master thesis is:
How should talent management be applied in organizations to retain and
manage technical specialists in a technical career? Here, we define a
technical specialist as a person who has a technical education (e.g. an
engineer) and works with technology in a specialist role (at all levels in
the organization) I This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of
knowledge of talent management, through investigating talent
management and related concepts within the fields of human resource
management and general management. The purpose is to investigate
how talent management directed at specialists should be done, in order
to advance the knowledge on talent management practices for employees
who are not in a management career track. Another purpose is to
construct a comprehensive model that guides the execution of talent
management at a case study company in Norway, active in the oil and
gas industry. This model should shed light on to how organizations can
work with talent management at a strategic and systemic level.

1.3 Delimitations:
This report is a Master thesis which means that the time span given to
finish the research project is set to roughly 20 weeks. Moreover, the
authors are based in Stockholm, Sweden, whereas the case study is
located in a city in Norway. This has led to our decision to increase the
empirical material of 17 interviews at the case study company, with
interviews at four other companies in Sweden, due to our connections to
people working at these companies, as well as for time and travel
reasons. However, Norway and Sweden could be said to have certain

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similarities, and moreover all companies participating in the study are
large companies that mostly employ engineers. The purpose of the
additional interviews was to investigate other companies’ thoughts and
intentions regarding talent management. A de-limitation here is that we
only had the resources to interview one person at each additional
company.

This meant that we interviewed three HR managers at the industrial

companies, and one HR consultant. Another de-limitation in this thesis
concerns the depth of investigation in each HR related area. Since the
purpose of the study is to construct a model that treats talent
management as a system, there is a larger need for covering all the
different aspects in this system, rather than to analyze each component at
a deeper level. This thesis leaves out the issue of employer branding and
diversity and inclusion, since the case study company seems to have a
good employer brand, and because the diversity aspect is a large area of
study. There is a field within talent management called global talent
management, which addresses the needs of companies active in multiple
parts of the world, e.g. emerging markets. This area is not covered in this
thesis since we believe that our model can be applied in all parts of the
world. A study of global talent management may also require a deeper
study of cultural differences between employees and company divisions.

1.5 Structure of the thesis

The thesis begins by a description of the research method in section 2, it
then moves on to the literature review in section 3, after which the
empirical material is presented in section 4.

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The empirical material begins with some statements regarding the state
of talent management from the eyes of a practitioner, namely the HR
consultant. It then goes on with the empirical material from the case
study, and the empirical material from the external companies
interviewed. Finally, there is a discussion in section 5; the conclusions
and the model are presented in section6. Finally, the recommendations
to the case study company are presented in section 6.2. The thesis ends
with a summary and suggestions for further research in section 7.

1.6 Methodology:
In this thesis, the goal is to detect the issues surrounding talent
management as they appear in real life. Therefore we choose to perform
a case study to gain a deeper understanding for one company. However,
we compare this company to a set of other companies to increase the
reliability of our results, we call these companies the external
companies, since they are external to the case company, and therefore
this part of the study is referred to as the external investigation.
The thesis is a qualitative case study paired with qualitative empirical
material from other organizations – similar to a smaller variety of a
cross-sectional study. The research in the thesis has been conducted with
an inductive approach– i.e. with the aim of developing knowledge from
observing the reality (Collis & Hussey, 2009, p. 8). The case study is
thus complemented by investigating three other companies similar in
size to the case study company and with similar competence needs (i.e.
engineers), and also one management consulting firm working with HR
related questions, to obtain information regarding the state of talent
management in the Nordic countries and in general.

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The reason for performing this miniature cross-sectional study is based
on the assumption that large organizations dependent on technology face
similar issues within human resource management (HRM) because of
their organizational complexity, and their need for technologically-
skilled human capital.
This inconsistent with Dicicco -Bloom & Crabtree 2006), who argue that
studies based on qualitative interviews should contain respondents that
are fairly homogeneous . The method is based on trying to solve the
problems that the case study faces, by making inferences using the
available theory and by comparing it to how other companies work with
similar issues. The aim is to contribute to the current body of knowledge
by investigating how companies can work with talent management
directed at technical specialists, and also to create a model for talent
management, which is based on empirical research and which also
embodies previous research in the field of talent management and
related fields in organizational science. The purpose of the study is also
to try to make recommendations to the case study company, on how they
should work with talent management, which entails an applied research
approach.

1.7 Empirical material

The majority of the empirical material in this thesis consists of
qualitative semi-structured interviews. These are used because it is
argued by Collis & Hussey (2009, p. 144f) and DiCicco Bloom &
Crabtree (2006) that semi-structured interviews are appropriate when
trying to understand the world of the respondent and to understand the
opinions and beliefs of particular matters and situations. The empirical
material in this Master thesis consists of two parts: the first part is

9
empirical material from a case study of a company active in the oil and
gas industry in Norway, while the second part complements this
empirical material with interviews made with HR professionals at four
companies in Sweden, active in different industries – namely industrials,
IT and telecommunication, energy and consulting. All empirical material
was collected during the spring of 2013. CASE STUDY there are three
types of empirical material n the case study. The most extensive material
is comprised of 17 in-depth interviews with individuals working as
managers, employees or HR professionals in the case study
organization; then we have the more randomly occurring informal
conversations, and lastly written material such as company documents
and other publications .The empirical material at the case study was
collected during two stages. The first stage consisted of six interviews
with managers, which had the aim of defining the research problem. The
second stage involved ten interviews, where five managers and six team
members in their respective groups were interviewed, in order to attain
more information regarding their work, perceptions of their work and
organization in a talent management context.

1.8 EXTERNAL INVESTIGATION:

There are two types of empirical material in the external investigation.
First, one in-depth interview has been conducted with an HR
professional at each company, totalling four external interviews.
Secondly, one of the respondents in the external investigation (the IT
and telecommunications company) has also provided us with written
material regarding their organization. These interviews treated talent
management and human resource practices as they are implemented (or
not yet implemented) at each organization. Since the study is qualitative
it is important to understand the background of the respondents (Collis

10
& Hussey, 2009, p. 143), and the mix of sources for all the empirical
material improves our understanding of the context which the
respondents are a part of.

1.9 Processing the empirical material:

The interviews were transcribed verbatim and the answers of
Norwegian-speaking interviewees were translated into Swedish when
needed, to facilitate the analysis. Analysis of the interviews was
performed by reading and rereading and looking for common
denominators and patterns in the transcriptions.
The analysis of the interviews was made after the literature research had
been completed, meaning that we had prior knowledge of the talent
management field before embarking on the analysis. Selected passages
of the transcribed empirical material was then structured thematically –
e.g. quotes regarding performance management, career management,
talent management, etcetera – and investigated by looking for e.g.
similarities and differences between the answers of the respondents.
Furthermore, the empirical material was compared to 8 and analysed
with the literature in the literature review. The empirical material was
then adapted to text for the major part of the chosen passages, but we
kept the quote form for the passages that were especially interesting, to
reflect the thoughts and ideas of the respondents with as much
objectivity as possible. All quotes in the thesis have been translated into
English as a service to the readers of the report. The model presented at
the end of the thesis is a result of the analysis of the empirical and
theoretical material.

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1.10 Limitations of the method:
The credibility of this study can be assessed through the concepts of
validity and reliability. The validity of this study is high due to the fact
that the in-depth interviews provide us with a thorough understanding of
the reality of the interviewee.
Through conducting semi-structured interviews we have been able to get
a comprehensive picture, which gives us higher information content than
e.g. a survey sent by mail. The recording of the interviews may play a
part in lowering the validity of the study – we cannot know if the
respondents are telling the truth since they might not want to divulge
anything compromising to us. Furthermore, one HR partner participated
in three of the interviews held with managers, and this may have
affected the managers’ answers. Interviewing individuals with different
roles and responsibilities in the organization permits us to get a diverse
set of points of view on how the organization perceives or handles talent
management. The in-depth interviews allow for an analysis that provides
a more profound understanding.

A consequence of choosing the case study approach - conducting a

limited set of longer, in-depth interviews in the same organization -
elevates the validity, but it also means that we compromise with regard
to the reliability of the study .We do not have the resources to repeat the
study at another company, which limits the general ability of this study.
However, the addition of the interviews at the other organizations can in
part make up for this shortcoming. A limitation with the case study
approach is according to Collis & Hussey (p. 83, 2009) that it may be
difficult to fully understand the events and the actions taken by the
interviewees, since we do not know their full history or context. We

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have tried to redeem this fact by including informal conversations into
our research method, since these off the record conversations could
provide more and/or different information than a formal interview. This
difficulty may impair the efficacy of our interview questions and
subsequent analysis of the empirical material. Another limitation is the
recording of the interviews. Some interviewees may feel intimidated or
uncomfortable by the voice recorder , which could have the effect of
losing valuable information. Before asking whether we could record an
interview, we introduced ourselves, informed them of their anonymity
and the purpose of our study, and also chitchatted a bit with the
interviewee, to create a pleasant atmosphere.

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 CHAPTER 2
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
2.1 WHAT IS TALENT?
Talent means a natural ability or expertise in a particular area that can
solve problems or make work easier or better in an organization.
Talented employees are particularly very important for organizational
growth.

Talented not only makes the work easier but also improves the
operations of a company. A talented employee uses his/her talent
depending on the type of industry to improve work, raise revenue, or
enhance the public image of the organization.

Employers need to find their own way to attract and develop talent in
accordance with their business activities and goals. Talent selection
differs from company to company.

For example, if we are trying to improve in some domain and have high
aspirations, we are continually reaching the edge of our current skills.

Whenever we sense we are at this “edge,” and our performance is judged

relative to others, we can interpret the relative feedback as evidence for a
lack of talent or instead think of talent as being our rate of improvement.

The latter interpretation helps us persist, while still allowing for talent
differences. It is the classic tortoise and the hare story—others may be
speeding rabbits in our domain, but given that we aspire to excel, we
may plod along like the tortoise, eventually reaching our goals with
deliberate effort.

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Talent and skill describe related properties, but they’re not exactly the
same. Talent comes naturally while skill is something you develop
through learning.
Talent definition: a natural aptitude, an inner quality that emerges
effortlessly
Skill definition: an acquired ability, learned with effort.
According to research, genes play a significant role in talent. They form
the way individuals respond to certain stimuli and how they seek out
specific experiences.
The environment is equally important for talent identification and
development. For example, a child with an ear for music does not
necessarily become a musical genius without access in musical
instruments or a good tutor. A talent becomes an enduring ability only
with effort and practice.
Recruiters and HR professionals use new technology and recruiting
methods to discover potential talent for their companies and create the
so-called ‘talent pools’.

15
Here are the most common definitions of talent functions related to HR:
Talent acquisition refers to attracting and recruiting skilled employees.
Talent management is the process of developing and retaining
employees with skill training and succession planning.

2.2 TALENT ACQUISITION

Talent acquisition is the process of finding and keeping highly qualified
employees. A company's talent acquisition team often consists of a
group of human resources and talent acquisition specialists that focus on
hiring employees and increasing employee retention , or the rate at
which employees stay at a company over time. Employee retention is
important because companies spend money, time and effort hiring and
training team members. The longer a team member stays at a business,
the higher return that business can receive from the investment.
In many cases, organisations use the process of talent acquisition to find
candidates for specialised roles that are more difficult to fill, like
executive and technical jobs. This specific part of talent acquisition

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consists of building long-term relationships with a network of
prospective candidates. Some fields that commonly use talent
acquisition include technology and health care.
When employers select candidates thoughtfully, the new hires are more
likely to excel within the business and improve the company's brand. If
you are skilled in planning, organisation and teamwork, a job as a talent
acquisition specialist may be perfect for you.

2.2.1 TALENT ACQUISITION STRATEGIES

Talent acquisition strategies can vary greatly based on the company's
size and needs. Here are three different size-based acquisition strategies:
Large companies: Big companies with over 1,000 employees usually
have a large pool of candidates to choose from, even for the most niche
roles. To ensure they can continue to hire and keep the best employees,
they focus more on improving their brand and on-boarding process.
Mid-level companies: Businesses that have between 500 and 1,000
employees try to expand their selection of candidates by building brand
awareness and actively taking part in recruitment methods like job fairs
and networking events.
Small companies: Start-ups and small companies typically need to be
heavily involved in the recruitment process and building their brand.
Many start-ups do not have the resources to devote to talent acquisition
immediately, so they devote most of their time filling immediate
vacancies rather than building a candidate network.

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2.2.2 HOW TO ACQUIRE TALENT
The talent acquisition process usually follows these seven important
steps:
1. Write a job description:
The first step to acquiring proper talent is determining what your
company needs. Collaborate with colleagues and supervisors to identify
gaps in a business's structure and create job titles and descriptions that
could fill those gaps. For example, if your company is having difficulties
with financial record keeping, you may want to hire an accountant.
It is important that your job description outlines the duties and
requirements of the role. Think about whether you are looking for
candidates with a certain amount of experience, educational level or skill
set. You can also briefly explain the company and provide a link to the
company website in the job description so candidates can learn about it.

2. Develop the company's brand:

Before seeking potential candidates, make sure your company's brand is
strong. One way to ensure this is to optimise your company website, as
this is one of the first places candidates may check to explore the job
opening. Make sure the website is easy to navigate, and includes an
about section with the organisation's history, mission and values. You
might also want to create a professional card with the company website
and your contact information. You can give this to qualified candidates
to help them remember you and the job opportunity.

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3. Source leads:
Next, source leads, or form relationships with promising job candidates.
Post the job description on online job boards, niche recruitment
websites, local community pages and your company's careers page.
Most organisations also seek active opportunities to connect with
candidates by attending.
. Job fairs
. Networking events
. Industry conferences
. Community events
4. Recruit talented candidates:
Once talent acquisition specialists have a large group of candidates to
choose from, they can narrow down their search. If your company does
not need to fill an immediate role, you can stay in contact with strong
candidates until the business is ready to move forward in the hiring
process. If you need to hire someone immediately, you can select a small
group of the most qualified candidates to interview. The selection
process may involve reviewing the resumes, cover letters and profiles of
the candidates.
5. Choose the best candidate:
Based on interviews, qualifications and references, the talent acquisition
team chooses the most qualified candidate for the role. When the
business is ready to hire, human resources sends an offer letter and
makes negotiations. The team can have two or three backup candidates
ready to contact in case the first applicant does not accept the offer.
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6. Interview prospects:
Depending on the role, the size of the company and the number of
qualified candidates, the acquisition team could interview anywhere
from five to over 50 people. When there is a large group of applicants,
you can start by screening candidates with a 15-minute phone call.
During this call, ask basic questions about availability, salary
expectations, education and experience.

2.3 TALENT MANAGEMENT

Talent management is an integral part of a healthy organization on many
levels. Competition is fierce in today’s corporate world, with many HR
professionals agreeing that there’s an on-going “war for talent” —many
open positions with not enough high-quality candidates to fill them. “We
are in a tight job market, which means hiring can be a long, expensive
process that may not yield results,” Robinson says.

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“With the current war on talent, if you want to attract and retain top
performers, you have to get the talent management piece right” . “People
are your largest asset and what will make you successful. If you’re not
leveraging your people properly, if you don’t have a people strategy that
aligns with your business strategy, you’re leaving your business results
up to chance.”
Talent management also works to keep current employees and advance
them to higher positions in the organization. This saves money that
could otherwise be lost to high employee turnover. “It makes much more
sense to develop and retain key talent than source, hire and train new
ones. These dynamics make the HR work vital,”

2.3.1 WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TALENT MANAGEMENT

Talent management typically begins in the HR department, but leaders
across the organization need to be on board if they want their initiatives
to be successful. Though HR management is ultimately accountable for
talent management, employees working in areas such as staffing,
compensation and leadership development also have responsibilities.
“Non-traditional areas also play a key role, like workforce analytics,
which provides the data to make fact-based decisions on talent.”

“Business leaders must

believe and understand the
value of their people and
have a vision on how they
are going to motivate,
engage and retain them.”

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Only with strong leadership and vision can others in the company do
their part to build a successful talent management strategy.

2.3.2 IMPORTANCE OF TALENT MANAGEMENT

The simple answer is because it capitalizes on employees — arguably,
the most important asset of your company.
Talent management helps you maximize the value of employees.
1. It helps businesses improve performance:
With top specialists in your organization, you can reach any goals.
Talent management is most effective of all when it combines three key
components: rapid talent allocation, positive employee experience, and a
strategic HR team.
2. It allows companies to stay competitive:
By hiring and developing talented employees, your organization
becomes stronger and better prepared to face changes and risks.
3. It drives innovation:
New technologies are always hitting the scene, whatever your industry.
Talented employees are able to find ways to harness the capabilities of
new tools and solve problems or come up with original ideas.

4. It helps form productive teams:

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The appropriate talent management strategy will allow you to form a
more productive team. This is far more useful than just having a bunch
of creative and talented people in your organization.
5. It decreases turnover:
When employees feel valued at a company, when they know they will
have plenty of opportunities to grow in the business, they are less likely
to seek work elsewhere.
6. It leads to strong employer branding:
Talent management brands your company as an employer. This helps
you to attract the best candidates for future hires.
7. It motivates others to grow:
Having inspiring talent on your team will motivate other employees and
help them grow.
1. It gives you the best of both worlds.
2. It also allows you to take advantage of a combination of new hires and
existing talent.
3. Having top talent and potentially good specialists (e.g. young
employees) will help the specialists grow faster and motivate them.
4. It leads to knowledge transfer — top talent can teach other employees.
All the same, there is one con:
If you have specific requirements (such as you are in urgent need of
growth or if you are on a tight budget), sticking to a single strategy may
be more appropriate.

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2.4 SUMMARY OF LITERTATURE REVIEW
In the literature it is argued that talent conveys a meaning of gifts of
static nature, but regarding talent as a concept it is argued that talent is
something that can be developed. Therefore talent management refers to
the development of talents within the organisations, as opposed to
harvesting of talents one could assume from the linguistic meaning
inherent in the name of concept. Even though there is a debate regarding
the definition and purpose of talent management, talent management is
said to be needed for a number of reasons: the advent of the knowledge
economy, new generations entering the workforce, organisations in need
of new tools for managing their human resources, the role of the HR

25
manager is changing and middle managers are becoming more
responsible for the personnel.
Talent management is also the result of the development in the field
HRM and the developments in the management philosophy. HRM has
gone from welfare work to strategic human resource management,
whereas organisations are becoming less bureaucratically managed in
favour of management based on core corporate values and culture.
In the knowledge economy, human capital has replaced physical capital
as the most important source of competitive advantage. Moreover
organisations have lost their hierarchical structures and have become
flatter with fewer managers in the chain of command and therefore there
are not many career opportunities within management as there were
before.
Companies also try to increase their competitiveness in their markets
and as well as labour markets. This has led to new needs for
organisations to manage their human resources.
Talent management emerges as the answer to a lot of these problems – it
can ensure competitive advantage, development and retaining of
valuable employees and is a strategic redefinition of human resource
management.
Talent management in an organization aims at ensuring employee
recruitment, training and development, performance reviews and their
compensation. Working towards enhancing a good talent management
system in the organization ensures these components of human resource
contribute to the success of the organization. The advantages that the
components bring to the organization also outweigh the disadvantages
considering organizations benefit from these approaches. These ensure
the organization attracts highly qualified employees and finds it easy to
26
retain them and hence improving their human resource element. Talent
management enhances reviews that prove vital in developing employees.
They reveal employee weaknesses and result in the development of
training needs and programs that will improve the skills of the
employees hence maintaining their talents.
Employee talents also develop and change with changes in the
organization needs hence increasing and improving their ability to
execute their roles. Therefore , the application of talent management
proves an ideal approach in employee development and improving the
performance of each personnel.

27
 CHAPTER 3
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Talent Management is a process which involves the interrelationship
between the following issues:
(1)Man Power Planning: Manpower Planning which is also known as
Human Resource Planning consists of putting right number of
people, right kind of people at the right place, right time, doing the
right things for which they are suited for the achievement of goals of
the organization. Human Resource Planning has an important role in
the area of industrialization. It has to be a systems approach which is
carried out in a set procedure. The procedure is as follows:
(a) Analysing the current manpower inventory
(b)Making future manpower forecasts
(c)Developing employment programmes
(d) Design training programme

(2)Performance Management: Performance management of individual

includes the following: planning work, setting goals, offering
feedback and reviews, offering opportunities to learn more in one’s
field, and rewarding employees who perform well. Rewards and
incentives can be monetary or in the form of recognition. Rewards
and recognition will lead to promotion of the employee.
(3)Motivation: Performance is considered to be the function of ability
and motivation. Ability is influenced by various factors like
education, experience and training. It is a long run process to develop
ability, where as motivation can be brought by positive
reinforcement, effective discipline and punishment, treating people
fairly, satisfying employee needs, setting work related goals and
restructuring jobs.
28
(4)Succession Planning: Succession planning is a process whereby an
organization ensures that employees are recruited and developed to
fill each key role within the company. Succession planning is the
outcome of employee retention and engagement. Succession
Planning should not be simply restricted to projections and charting
on papers rather steps must be taken to develop the hierarchies by
retaining talents and engaging them in activities that will match their
skills and abilities.
(5)Leadership Development: Leadership development is a long and
continuous process which shapes the personality of individuals by
developing their individual characteristics, providing genuine
leadership support and building programmes which will continuously
monitor the quality and nature of leadership development
programmes and change it according to the changing environment.

3.1 TALENT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES FOR HR

29
 The workforce is changing rapidly, and many organizations are
struggling to update their talent management process to keep pace
with new workplace cultures. Organizations that can’t keep up with the
expectations of today’s employees will see a decline in engagement and
a corresponding decrease in their bottom line. Below, we share the
three talent management challenges for HR.
1. Creating a culture of engagement: successful organizations will
focus on a talent management strategy that takes these new
priorities into consideration. Creating a culture of engagement to
increase retention will be management's primary talent
management challenge.
2. Adjusting the frequency of feedback: A key talent management
challenge for HR is gathering feedback on a regular basis.
Employees have indicated that they are dissatisfied with the
traditional yearly review process. Instead, they are interested in
real-time feedback, both positive and negative, that is delivered at
least once a month.
3. Attracting top talent: Attracting top talent will be a significant
challenge as companies struggle to retain current employees, as
well as fill any vacancies quickly. Other challenges faced when
implementing Talent Management initiatives, are as follows
•Frontline leaders in many organizations are not competent in
applying talent management tools and processes. Selecting and
developing talent is the most critical job for leaders—and they are
failing.
• Most organizations lack an accurately assessed pool of ready
talent, which is critical to effectively promoting the right people
into critical leadership positions.

30
 • The majority of organizations fail to properly measure the
outcomes of their HR development initiatives. Without metrics it is
almost impossible to know which practices are working and how to
improve them.
• Organizations generally don’t have a clear understanding about
how talent management strategy supports business strategy.
Harris, Stewart, & Turner (2006) confirmed the aforementioned
challenges and added that, “the main barrier could be that strategy
making in areas of HR are limited generally, usually being done for
operational not strategic reasons”. Moreover in their research on
Lebanese institutions, report that “the main gap in Lebanon is that most
companies are applying some components of Talent Management but
not all together in an integrated manner”. As with all human resource
strategies, a talent management program should be an integral piece of
an organization’s human resource agenda, and must align with the
company’s vision, culture and overall strategy .However, the Human
Capital Institute & Hewitt Associates (2008) assert that companies still
lack the ability to integrate Talent Management programmes and assess
the return on their talent investments. However as the employment
market changes, organizations must adjust talent management strategies
to meet and exceed employee expectations. Those that fall short find
themselves with a disengaged workforce, which quickly cripples their
ability to remain competitive.

31
3.2 TALENT ANALYSIS

32
Put simply, talent analytics – also referred to as workforce analytics,
human capital analytics, or human resource analytics – is the analysis of
employee data, facilitated by the use of statistics and tech, with the
purpose of making better business decisions. It typically involves the use
of software that gathers insights into a company’s current workforce and
potential employees, allowing talent acquisition teams to understand
what motivates their workers and potential hires. That’s in addition to
getting a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. All of
this info is essential for adopting strategies that improve performance
and productivity. Does talent analytics make a real difference? Well,
Bain & Company research found a 40% disparity between the
productivity of organizations who’d invested in talent focused analytics,
and the rest. Why such a gap? because talent analytics can help increase
employee productivity by balancing efficiency with employee
engagement. It addresses the biases, and measures the things that matter
most to your business. But in order for analytics to be beneficial i.e. help
recruiters make better hiring decisions, talent acquisition teams need to
know what type of talent data they should be collecting in the first place.

3.3 WHAT TYPES OF TALENT DATA YOU SHOULD

COLLECT?

Using a data-driven recruitment approach can help you increase your

quality of hire, decrease the cost of hire and early attrition rates, and
increase employee engagement and satisfaction. However, despite the
numerous benefits of data-driven recruitment, it is still common –
especially in the volume hiring space – for HR departments to habitually
collect vast amounts of data, the majority of which goes unused. This

33
happens mainly because of out-dated processes, a lack of skills, or no
clear overview of the bigger picture.

So, what types of talent data should you collect when implementing a
talent analytics solution? We’ve divided the different types of data into
categories to help you structure your approach and get you started:

Sourcing data:

In volume recruiting, you need to track multiple data sources to enable

the TA team to make hiring decisions. Sourcing data you should be
collecting includes data from:

Job boards:

Tracking data from job boards will give you a better insight into how
your adverts are performing. For example: How many applicants are you
getting? Which job boards yield the most candidates? Where are the top
candidates coming from? Which job boards deliver the best ROI? What
devices are applicants applying from? What are their demographics?
Their locations ? How many people are seeing your job advert? What’s
the cost per application?

Social media:

Social media is a great way to connect with younger applicants, but you
need to track data to know if your recruitment strategy is working.

34
For example: Which channels are the most effective? Which channel
yields the top candidates? How many candidates does each channel
generate? What’s your cost per hire capture?

ATS (applicants tracking system) data:

The reason for having a talent pool is so you don’t have to constantly
source new candidates. A smart ATS will instantly match suitable
candidates to open roles. But to do that, your ATS needs to track data
such as: where have applicants come from? What role did they apply
for? Where are they at in your application process?

CRM (candidate relationship management) data:

To consistently deliver outstanding candidate experience when volume

recruiting thousands of applicants quickly and efficiently, requires CRM
data .

Data to track includes: application abandonment rate, where candidates

drop out of the application, how many candidates are in your pipeline
and talent pools, how long applicants are spending at each stage of the
application, cost to hire, time to hire, time to commitment, quality of
hire, referral rate etc.

Recruitment analytics data:

Manually screening resumes and sifting candidates by hand introduces
bias into the hiring process, not to mention being a colossal waste of
recruiters’ time. So what’s the alternative?

To use recruitment tools that have built-in reporting functionality.

Especially in volume hiring, it’s critical to have real-time data on
matching results, automated decision points, and candidate experience

35
data, all in one place to break down the silos between phases of the
hiring process. 

For example, brings data from the entire hiring process together and
creates a command centre for all things hiring. Whether it’s sourcing
data coming from job boards or social media job listings, assessment and
interview data, or performance data, all the information is collected into
a single source of truth, making it easy to see the full picture of your
recruitment process and to spot inefficiencies.  

In general, when it comes to recruitment analytics, you want to collect

data that gives you:

 operational insights, to understand how efficient your process is

and where the bottlenecks are
 hiring insights, to understand why candidates drop off, and which
parts of the process require improvements
 personality insights, to understand what types of candidates apply
to your open roles, and compare them to your top performers
 matching or scoring insights, for assessment results
 multi-location insights, as these help you understand if you need to
route candidates between locations, for example, or to better equip
your hiring managers in a specific area
 candidate experience insights, to understand how your brand and
application process is perceived

Employee data
36
 Data collection doesn’t stop once you’ve hired candidates.
Employee data provides recruiters with a check in opportunity to
make sure the recruitment process is working as it should be.
Employee data will yield results allowing you to tweak the hiring
process where required . For example, if after 6 months of
employment it turns out that 85% of top performing hires scored
highly on culture fit, say, that might mean you weigh the pre
selection process to favour candidates who also score highly on
culture fit.

While employee data will vary with your industry, in general, data
you might want to track can include: employee attrition rate,
employee satisfaction, employee engagement, benefit participation
rates, etc.

3.4 HOW TO VISUALIZE YOUR TALENT DATA

How you represent the data will depend on the answer to one simple
question: what would you like the data to show?

 Is it a comparison? 
 Are you highlighting a relationship? 
 Are you demonstrating composition? 
 Are you showing distribution of items or variables?

When you’re operating at scale and carrying out volume hiring

routinely, having reams of data is one thing, but being able to visualize
the results in one place is key to making fast and efficient decisions.

For this reason, deciding which system will be your single source of
truth is possibly the most crucial part of collecting and analysing data.
37
And that’s because effective data visualization is incredibly powerful,
while poorly visualized data will only make volume hiring harder. It will
confuse viewers, send the wrong messages, enable biased decision

making, and fail to make an impact.

The problem, however, is that too many organizations who try to do

talent analytics, struggle with data visualization. Data is, after all, only
valuable if it’s easy to use and easily actionable. For example, includes a
self-service analytics suite called Insights, powered on Google Cloud. It
streamlines all data collection from across every channel and platform,
from job boards to interviews. It then amalgamates all candidate
selection data into one single source of truth that every member of the
TA team has access to.

38
 CHAPTER-4

4. Empirical findings

In this section the empirical material is presented by first providing a

snap shot of talent management as an HR consultant sees the field
evolving today, then the case study is presented, and lastly the external
empirical material is presented.
4.1 Industry insights regarding talent management:

According to one Stockholm-based management consultant within HR,

the main assets of the companies of the business world of fifty years ago
39
were machinery, real estate and capital. Back then, the business was
dependent on these factors, while nowadays, the main asset is human
capital. In order to have a competitive advantage, you have to attract the
right person to the right place, and to be able to do that you need to
know which jobs you have, how these are to be performed, how to
attract the right kind of person, and how to retain him/her. Furthermore,
the company needs to have an idea on how to handle their employees on
the day they decide to leave. This means that talent management is very
important for modern organizations, since it manages all the aspects of
the employee life cycle and because it will be impossible for the
organizations to deliver on their company strategy without it.
Furthermore, the consultant notes that there is an antiquated view in the
Scandinavian countries that the HR department is only an administrative
unit. In the USA and UK, HR is seen as strategic, and this is not
questioned. The consultant states that especially production companies
in the Scandinavian countries have the idea that HR is only about
administration. The consultant says that the field of talent management
is at the moment “very trendy in the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish
markets”, while Finland is ahead of the rest of the Nordic countries.
Many companies in the Nordic region have had performance reviews in
place for a long time, but these have not necessarily been connected to
compensation, development and career opportunities. The consultant
states that it is important for the processes that they are transparent and
are rooted in the reality of the organization. Furthermore, the consultant
notes that performance management systems are often viewed as solely
an HR process that has to be completed, and this view arises from the
fact that the result of the performance process is not perceived as
something that matters – e.g. for promotion. “There is no incentive for
the managers to do this whole-heartedly because they do not see how
this helps them in their business day.” HR consultant based in

40
Stockholm The consultant says that the most common flaw that
companies have in their talent management work is that they do not
connect the HR processes: “I would say that what they [the companies]
are lacking in is to connect all these – when it comes to people
management – to connect all these different processes that surround an
employee […]. Pay for performance is virtually a non-existent concept
in Scandinavia. And again, this is about the fact that we do not like to
segment [the employees][…].” HR consultant based in Stockholm The
consultant notes that it may be because of the national culture in the
Scandinavian countries that companies are reluctant to segment the
employees and label some as better than the others. Moreover, she says
that it is common that the HR department is split into two, parts, where
the compensation and benefits-part have their ways of working, which
differs from the talent-part of the department. This becomes problematic
when the HR department needs to communicate with the rest of the
organization, since they lack a common language. According to the
consultant, the next thing to cover on the map is competencies, and how
to work strategically with competencies in order to plan for the
competencies that will be needed in five years or so.
4.2 Case study:
In this section we present the empirical material from the case study.
First, some information regarding the background of the case study is
presented, since this provides important information regarding context
and culture of the organization. Then a section on strategy in the
organization is presented, since the literature highlights the role of the
corporate strategy and strategic positions within talent management.
Next the managers’ views on what talent is for them is presented, since
this according to the literature can be an ambiguous concept. Thereafter
follows an account of recruitment, development, performance

41
management, career management and incentives, since these are key
processes within talent management and retaining and managing human
capital. Then, the final section treats the technical specialists and their
views on choosing a career within technology – which is an issue
included in the research question.

4.2.1 Case study background:

In 2012, the petroleum sector represented more than 23 % of the
Norway’s total value creation (Norwegian Petroleum Directorate,
2013).The oil and gas industry in Norway is currently expanding, with
more oil being found and investment rising, despite economic turmoil in
other parts of the world. The petroleum industry has managed to
maintain a strong growth in the Norwegian economy. The oil and gas
industry provides 250 000 jobs (both direct and indirect jobs) in
Norway, and is therefore one of the most important employers.
(Norwegian Oil and Gas Association, 2012).
The market for the company in the case study is affected by the oil price
and demand is driven by the world’s consumption of oil and gas. It is
expected that the oil consumption will increase, and combined with the
decline in oil reserves and production in the world, there is need for
investment in both existing and new oil fields. (Annual report , Case
study company, 2012) The organization in the case study is one of the
divisions in a large Norwegian company, active in the oil and gas
industry. It is situated in a small Norwegian city, where there are three
companies in the same business as the case study company. There are
also many smaller competitors in the area.
 ORGANIZATION OF THE COMPANY:

42
The division that is studied in this report has 3000 employees around the
world, where 1300 are located in Norway, in three different cities. Our
investigation considers the employees in one of these cities, where the
head office of the division is located. This organization is spread out on
three different offices, where the staff functions are located in the city
centre, the project organization is located nearby, and the production
unit is located outside of the city. The staff unit employs persons that
work with HR, strategy formulation and the managers of the division.
The project organization works with large projects which involve the
construction and assembly of offshore drilling platforms. The production
unit develops and tests the parts for the drilling platforms. The
professions represented in the organization are mainly project managers
and engineers. The work conducted in the organization is 80 % project
based, and 20 % line based, according to an HR manager. In the projects
many employees from different departments communicate with each
other and work in multidisciplinary teams, nevertheless, it seems that the
respondents do not have a full overview of the roles and responsibilities
in other departments. Furthermore, there are sometimes communication
issues between the project organization and the production unit. The
organization has recently gone through major organizational
restructurings in order to become more flat. Furthermore, the project
organization has grown considerably, which has

43
affected the managers in the way that some are now doing up to 100
%administrative work, when they before were working in projects as
well.
 Incentives:
The company does not wish to compete with salary to attract new
employees from the competition, since this does not benefit any actor in
the industry. There is therefore a silent agreement between the
competitors to keep the wages at the same level. Many employees are
aware that there is no pay increase when changing departments if there
is no change in the level of complexity of the roles. According to an
employee at the HR department, pay increases are connected to taking
on heavier jobs and when you become responsible for your staff.
 External materials:
The following is a section on the external empirical material which was
collected for the sake of comparison with the case study organization.
Since this part of the report treats interviews made with HR
professionals at the external companies (see Table 9) it is organized
differently than the case study. Here the focus is put on how the external
companies work/want to work with talent management, from the HR
professionals’ point of view. First, a section on strategy is presented,
since the literature highlights its importance. Then, a section on the
different takes on talent management found in the external companies is
accounted for. Thereafter follows an account of recruitment,
development of talents, performance management, and career
management, since these are key processes within talent management
and for retaining and managing human capital. Finally, the role of the
HR departments at the different companies is presented. This section
highlights the challenges within talent management for the HR

44
department, which are connected to communication, overview of roles in
the organization and managing the talent management process.
 Strategy:
The HR consultant says that in the Scandinavian countries, there has
been insufficient attention to planning for the competencies that the
companies will need in the future, e.g. in a five-year perspective. The
consulting firm calls this strategic workforce planning, which refers to
how the business will look like in the future, how the workforce will
look like, if the company can deliver on its strategy and if it needs to
modify the competence – e.g. deciding whether to buy new competence
or to develop that competence. The HR department at the energy
company receives the corporate strategy and tries to connect the strategy
with talent management and key positions. At the large Swedish IT
company, the company strategy for technology is a product of the CTO
(Chief Technical Officer) and the R&D department. They highlight a
couple of strategic areas of focus, for which it is important for the
company to have a clear position in. This strategy is put into place about
10-15 years before the commercial launch. Furthermore, the IT company
have identified key positions, which are resources that the company
cannot lose to e.g. the competition.
These resources are not aware that they are classified as such, since there
is a risk that the competition might find out and try to recruit them. This
is an example of not telling the whole strategy out loud because of
running the risk of that a competitor tries to copy it. However, the
respondent does note that being transparent about these positions might
be good from a career path perspective. However, these important
positions are limited in number and not everyone can occupy these. At
the industrial company, the strategy is cascaded from corporate level to
all areas and from these to each department. This means that the

45
corporate strategy is translated to e.g. the R&D department, and
thereafter to the HR department of the R&D department. Similarly to the
case study organization, the Swedish industrial company has troubles
recruiting people with experience. The company has a number of
defined strategic areas for which they expect to need competent people
in 2030. This plan is called a technical roadmap and also involves
collaboration with universities. In the shorter five-year perspective, HR
does not have a strategy in place, but the managers know if they will
have a shortage of some competence in the future. HR does however ask
the managers if they need some kind of specific competence profile
when it is time to recruit new employees.
 Takes on talent management:
The external companies in this part of the study all work with talent
management, but their definitions of and ways of working with this
concept differ. The HR consultant important that an organization has a
common definition for talent and talent management, and that they use a
common language for speaking about these. “[…] I would say the
largest Swedish or Scandinavian misconception is that talent
management is only about segmentation. So talent is only the top talents,
[but] talent management is everything. It’s the whole square of
employees that you have. [It] also includes processes to handle the poor
performers.[…] HR consultant based in Stockholm The consultant also
states that it is up to every company to decide for itself what their
definition of talent management should be.
A common denominator within all the companies in this study is that a
talent has drive and is able to find his/her own way through the
organization. At the large Swedish industrial company they choose not
to use the word talent and talent management, but they do use the
expression “high potentials” for their up and coming managers. The

46
energy company chooses to label some employees as talent. The HR
manager at the energy company state that it is easy to forget the talent
within the technical specialist areas, and to only focus on the manager
talents instead. “[…] We [at the industrial company] say high potentials
about the people that are in our management career, that are brilliant so
to speak, that we really should take care of and work with. So we don’t
say ‘talent management’… for me, talents are…as I said we all have
some talent, but for some [organizations] talent management is the same
as high potentials when you speak about the brightest shining stars[…]”
HR manager at the R&D department at a large Swedish industrial
company.

4.3 Discussion:
In this section we present the general findings and discuss these using
the literature and the empirical material.
4.4 Choosing an approach to talent management:
Before implementing talent management in an organization, there has to
be an agreement on the scope and purposes of it, which the consultant
also underlines. Blass’s (2009) strategic perspectives and operational
dimensions are a guide to how an organization can implement talent
management, see Table 1 and Table
2. The R&D department at the Swedish IT company has chosen a mix of
the process perspective and the competitive perspective, due to their

47
specific contextual factors. The company’s line of business is
characterized by hard competition and a need for continuous innovation.
They need to recruit the best of the best in their research areas, develop
and nurture their talents, and avoid losing them to their competitors. The
R&D department at the Swedish industrial company has adopted the
process perspective, in which they believe that their success is dependent
on their human capital. This company separates itself from the case
study, since the industrial company is more focused on the individual
and his/her competencies, than the role he/she currently has. An
employee at the industrial company can receive a higher competence
classification without the need for a vacant role. An organization
adopting talent management also has to decide whether to be transparent
or not when labelling employees as talents. The IT company chooses to
not be transparent due to strategic reasons, while the energy company
chooses to be transparent but carefully manages the expectations of their
talents. According to Wikström (Talent management IFL Executive
Seminar, 2013), there are pros and cons associated with both sides, see
Table 3. The energy company stresses the importance of how the
communication is handled within the talent management work. As can
be seen from the different talent management approaches of the
companies in the study, talent management needs to be adapted to the
company in question and to its specific circumstances and strategy.

4.5 Talent management needs to be connected to the strategy:

From the empirical material in the case study it is clear that it is a
challenge for the company to cascade the strategy to department-level.
This may be a result of the complexity and size of the company. Half of
the respondents in the case study do not know the strategy and therefore
do not know which actions that they are to perform in order to execute
48
the strategy. In the literature, it is asserted that talent management
practices that have been found to be successful are the ones which have
a strong focus on the corporate strategy. Therefore, we conclude that an
important prerequisite for successful talent management is that the
strategy work is done carefully before implementing talent management.
Furthermore, it is stressed in the literature that talent management should
be adapted to the strategy of the company, and not be based on best
practices, since these do not give the company a competitive advantage.
The cascading of the strategy can be done in different ways –compare
e.g. the industrial company and the IT company – but the main idea is
that the strategy should be clear enough to lead to defined actions, that it
can help the middle managers in their work with identifying the
competences needs, and the 68 subsequent development of the
workforce. The importance of basing talent management in the strategy
leads to our conclusion that talent management is a tool for
organizations to work proactively (in line with the strategic goals) with
their human capital, which will ensure competitiveness.
 Talent management is to be controlled through measures:
The HR consultant says that the companies that are successful in talent
management measure their efforts. The reason for their success is that
they know which efforts work and which efforts do not work, which
gives them insight into what it is they need to improve. We argue that
measuring talent management is like having control over your cash
management, it tells you how well you are using your (human) capital.
The literature states that HR in its new role needs to be able to collect
and analyse data that can guide the work of the department. Under the
banner of “what gets measured gets done”, it is the responsibility of the
HR department to control the talent management efforts and assure that
it is aligned with the strategy – this involves finding key performance

49
indicators that the workforce can be measured on. Moreover, HR needs
to be accountable for the human resources budget and measured on how
well its work supports talent development and talent strategies.
The literature stresses that companies should not implement best practice
measures just because they are best practices; they have to be relevant
for the organization. We also mean that to be successful in measuring, it
is important that the measurements are relevant and not too many. An
example of this is the turnover measure: when measuring turnover for
the whole organization, there is no segmentation between high and low
performers, or between different jobs. It is more relevant to measure the
talent turnover or the turnover in strategic positions, since it is more
important for the organization to have a lower turnover in these matters.
In contrast, a high turnover in low performers may be beneficial. To
understand the composition and dynamics of the workforce of the
organization, HR could try to analyse flows of employees: how many
rotate internally, where do they go, how many leave the organization,
from where do they leave, which departments only recruit from the
external labour market, etcetera. The HR department should also
investigate the talent management dimension of this data. This
aggregated information may pinpoint problems in the organization.

50
 CHAPTER - 5
CONCLUSION
According to the research, talent management has a substantial
association with employee commitment. Talent acquisition,
development, engagement, and retention are four variables that influence
the talent management process. The IT business, which is eager to
compete, is one of the fastest growing segments in the service sector.
Because of the fast-paced nature of competition, businesses should
speed their talent development. Because of increasing growth
expectations and employee mobility, it has become more challenging for
companies to retain staff. As a result, the firm must develop competitive
advantages that cannot be imitated by competitors. In this environment,
each organisation needs a multi-skilled, adaptive staff whose unique
talent and competence cannot be duplicated by competitors. So,
organisations should be cautious in obtaining and developing people by
engaging individuals based on their skills and meeting their social and
psychological needs, which leads to talent retention and is linked to
talent management. It is concluded that talent acquisition and
development have a substantial impact on talent management, which
eventually leads to top talent engagement and retention, as well as
employee loyalty to the organisation. To achieve organisational success,
it is therefore critical to nurture people and provide them with profitable
career options within the firm.
The thesis's research question is "How should talent management be
applied in organisations to retain and manage technical specialists in a
technical career?" because two major issues in the case study are that
technical specialists do not find the technical career appealing and that
managers express a need for specialists who stay within the technical
domain. We conclude that a new management approach for technical
51
professionals is required, and we have studied how talent management
might be used to address these difficulties in this thesis. Our response to
the study question is that the company should use talent management to
improve the technical career's self-perceived status, which may raise the
possibility that talented technical specialists stay in their technical area
of competence and pursue a technical career. We suggest that talent
management is a tool for managing talented workers by, for example,
integrating HR processes and tying them to the business strategy,
allowing these employees to contribute to the achievement of business
objectives. Our argument is that adding people management will clarify
the strategic contributions of technical roles and provide a fresh
perspective on what a career truly entails. This new perspective is
necessary because today's flat organisations no longer allow all
employees to advance to managerial positions.
Furthermore, our decision to focus on talent management specialists is
necessary because businesses tend to focus on managers when
discussing themes like development, career, and talent. This discovery
might be applied to specialists other than technical specialists, which is
what this thesis is about. The increasingly competitive business
environment has prompted the evolution of HRM. Organizations can use
talent management to turn their people capital into a strategic asset and
compete more effectively. It is not enough to best practice because this
will not provide you a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Furthermore, firms must manage their specialists so that they may
become the strategic asset that they can be. Organizations cannot
continue to focus solely on managers as they have in the past.
In terms of how businesses should manage technical specialists, we
believe that development should be primarily linked to strategy and
should also be work-based. A community of practice is a mechanism for
52
fostering the development of specialists in a group setting by allowing
them to learn from one another.
Resistance to separating employees and jobs is a problem in the
companies surveyed. Making the technical profession more apparent
requires segmenting these. We believe that technical careers should be
focused on achieving strategic roles and developing personnel to fill
such positions. We also emphasise the need of middle managers in
making talent management function in practise. It is their obligation to
find talents, develop them, and manage employee performance so that
individual goals are matched with the company's strategic goals. It is
obvious at this point that talent management is a holistic and strategic
approach to human resource management. We believe that talent
management should be viewed as a system, because we have discovered
that firms cannot effectively implement talent management techniques
without a balanced approach. We decided to depict this in a model,
which is based on theoretical and empirical data. In addition, the talent
management system must be monitored and controlled through proper
procedures.
5.1 Model for talent management:
We define talent management as a strategy for managing people in a
differentiated manner through workforce segmentation. To be
competitive, firms must connect their strategies with their human
resources, according to talent management. Four areas for good talent
management have been outlined in this thesis. These can be observed,
for example, in parts Talent management and strategy, setting up a
successful talent management system, Industry perspectives on talent
management, Measuring the impact of talent management efforts. We
can observe from the empirical information from the case study that a
lack of strategy hinders the functioning of middle managers in areas
53
such as performance management. Furthermore, according to the HR
consultant, firms that fail at talent management do not connect staff
management procedures and do not measure their talent management
activities. According to our findings, talent management should be
considered as a system with four components: strategy, talent, employee
management, and measurement. With these four areas, we build a
model. We believe that each area should be tailored to the organisation
in issue. Because the model is generic and may be used to a wide range
of organisations, there are degrees of freedom in each of the areas
specified. However, any organisation interested in implementing talent
management should analyse all four parts of the system to ensure
consistency.
We progress through the model from the highest levels of strategy and
talent through staff management and finally to a feedback mechanism
that feeds information into the talent management system. Even if the
processes may occur at the same time, the arrows reflect the flow.
The first area is to establish the strategy and the strategic competencies
and positions that contribute the most to the plan and the second is to
define which talent aspects are most critical for executing the strategy,
for example in a talent map, and define what defines talent for the
company. It's critical that this definition includes the ability to grow.
Then, determine the organization's talents. The third element is to ensure
that employee management processes are coherent and internally
consistent. This is portrayed in the model as a continuous circular
process that includes all important employee management parts. The
middle manager has the most responsibilities in the employee
management wheel. The circle starts with a determination of the
organization's talent needs, which may lead to a choice on recruiting or
development, and then carries on as the arrows are directed. Finally, the

54
fourth and final area is to develop meaningful measurements that can
indicate how well the organisation is implementing the strategy through
talent management, as well as which actions should be made if
improvements are needed.

5.1.2 STRATEGY:
To be able to establish a clear strategy, you must first analyze the
organization's value chain. There are processes in the value chain that
are more valuable and are tied to earnings. The preceding shows the
company's existing strategic areas; however, future strategic areas must
also be considered. The company can design its strategy after identifying
these regions. The plan must be succinct, measurable, and distinct from
the competitors. The company must then determine its strategic
capabilities, as well as the overall organisational factors that enable it to
55
function effectively and how talent drives these capabilities. At the
highest level of workforce differentiation, strategic competencies have
been defined as specific roles within the business, referred to as strategic
occupations.
5.1.3 TALENT:
To investigate how skill affects financial objectives A talent map is
recommended by Becker, Huselid , and Beatty (The differentiated
workforce, 2009, p. 40ff). This diagram depicts how the appropriate
skills can help you achieve your financial goals. The talent map shows
where abilities are needed throughout the organisation. Certain habits, as
well as prior and potential performance, are preferred in these roles.
These aspects must be considered while defining organisational talent.
Following that, a talent discovery method can be used to identify
employees with desirable habits and performance.
5.1.4 EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT WHEEL:
The next step in the talent management system is to determine
organisational requirements in order to achieve the strategy's goals.
Needs should be identified in the context of the strategy, and needs
should be stated as the skills and ability required to achieve the strategic
objectives. If the organisation is short on people with ideal behaviours
and performance, the middle manager must determine whether to
develop an employee in-house or recruit externally and then develop the
new employee. These steps in the personnel management wheel are
linked to the logic of Lepak b& Snell (1999) in their idea of HR
architecture since the organisation has identified which positions are
strategic and which competencies can be obtained more easily. They say
that competencies that are unique to the company and have a high value
should be developed internally wherever possible.

56
Even though not every employee is deemed talented, they should all be
managed for performance. The most significant component of the
performance management process is matching individual goals with
organisational goals. Furthermore, performance management
encompasses more than just yearly performance meetings; it
encompasses the entire process, which should be repeated more
regularly. The essential components are feedback and goal renewal.
Generation Y values feedback and clear chances for long-term
advancement, therefore managers and employees must set clear goals
and evaluate them on a regular basis. A successful talent management
system requires rewards that are tied to performance and encourage the
proper behaviours.
According to the research, non-linear career paths are the outcome of
changes in organisational structures. It is critical for the business to be
able to demonstrate a clear career path to the new generation of
employees. Instead of focusing on a vertical management career path,
we believe that businesses should focus on achieving strategic positions
inside the organisation. This shift in focus could elevate the prominence
of those who implement the plan. Succession planning is the ultimate
step in the personnel management wheel. Companies in today's world
must be prepared for employees to leave, especially if they are members
of Generation Y. Succession planning can also be viewed as a tool that
aids the middle management in the development of personnel both
within the team and for future advancement to other teams.
5.1.5 FEEDBACK THROUGH MEASURES:
Since "what gets measured gets done," it's critical to track talent
management activities at all levels. Measuring the impact of talent
management on strategy execution and, as a result, on how effectively

57
the organisation uses its human resource. Actions that fail to execute the
strategy can also be identified and corrected.
5.2 Recommendations to the case study company:
To fit the new structure of modern businesses, the term "career" needs to
be reinterpreted. Because of the structural changes, fewer management
positions have become available, reducing the number of personnel
eligible for management positions. Furthermore, the case study
company's managers affirm the value of maintaining and developing
technical specialists, which the company recognises and strives to
enhance. Meanwhile, businesses want increasing technological
expertise, but because the technical job route is vague, it does not appeal
to Generation Y individuals seeking clear career paths. A new career
path must be created that will lead to strategic jobs, and employees
should be motivated to pursue this route because strategic positions are
seen as high-status positions. As a result, the goals of a career should not
be to expand administrative and personnel responsibilities, but rather to
advance to a position where one can make a greater contribution to the
strategy. The shift in prestige among technical professionals is partly a
talent management issue and partly a cultural one. As a result, this
modification is unlikely to occur overnight.
5.2.1 Strategy:
To remain competitive, companies that rely their business concepts on
technology must focus even more on the technical career and remove
themselves from best practises. It is critical that technical roles be
recognised and that employees profit from choosing these positions in
order to elevate their standing. Some employees at the case study
company agree that strategic occupations exist, but others believe that all
positions are equally significant. A manager discovers that people in

58
crucial roles are undervalued, despite the importance of their
contributions to the organisation. This is a problem that must be
addressed.
Cascading the strategic objectives of the company will clarify which
actions and competences that are needed to execute them. According to
our investigation, the daily work of the teams could be better grounded
in the strategy of the case study company. Cascading the strategy will
also simplify the identification of the strategic positions.
5.2.2 Talent:
Labelling a group of individuals as talents has both positive and negative
implications for the company. To reduce the risks, it is critical that the
talent definition is linked to the behaviours and knowledge that the firm
requires - this ensures transparency and grounds the definition in the
organization's reality. According to the literature, an individual can be a
talent in one situation but not in another, because different settings
require different actions and knowledge. To put it another way,
businesses can have multiple definitions of talent as long as they are
explicit and strongly linked to their specific strategic goals. Managers at
the case study firm appear to have a comparable definition of talent. The
next step could be to gather various perspectives, develop a broad
definition, and then concretize that description into a few behaviours and
performances.
Becker, Huselid, and Beatty (The differentiated workforce, 2009, p. 7)
argue that if a company wants to prosper and survive, it must separate
itself from its competitors through its strategy. They show how this
might be done in their model. Integrated talent management model
depicts the four stages of workforce differentiation. The case study
company should gradually increase its level of employee differentiation.

59
It's also worth noting that not all occupations can be totally separated;
just the differentiation of crucial roles is important for better strategy
alignment. This is because other roles are not as affected by an
employee's better performance as strategic positions are.
5.2.3 Employee management wheel:
To strategically prepare workers to take on strategic tasks, clear
succession management/planning is required. The most significant
learning for developing talents comes from daily labour, such as
extending assignments and projects. It is possible to develop abilities
fast with the correct assistance from co-workers, for example, through
projects, as demonstrated in the project organisation, where a newly
hired employee was given the opportunity to manage his own projects.
This may, however, be used more regularly for staff identified as
prospective talents. Employees appear to be leaving too quickly in some
departments, emphasising the need of knowing both the needs of the
individual and the needs of the organisation. Employee engagement may
be improved through finding challenging assignments and forming
communities of practise.
The performance management process is a mechanism for aligning
employee goals with organisational goals. It is critical that employees
and their managers understand the relationship between performance
management and daily work. Measurements can help people realise the
link between their everyday job and the company's performance. The
case study company has a strict performance management system in
place, which is updated twice a year. Even now, managers struggle to
find time for all of their performance meetings. According to research,
having frequent performance management meetings where goals are
revised and feedback is offered is critical. To enhance the frequency and
usefulness of performance management meetings, they cannot be overly
60
broad; the focus should be on strategy-related assignments and
development rather than organisational values. The size of the group is
another factor that could make the performance management procedure
more difficult to repeat. The goal at the IT firm is to have teams of no
more than ten individuals with one manager. Another option is to assign
these meetings to experienced team members.
We believe that in order to attract and engage people with technical
knowledge to stay with the organisation, the status of strategic technical
jobs must be elevated. This adjustment in focus will almost certainly
result in a more defined technical career path. The case study business's
new career management system, which is now being implemented,
might be utilised to identify strategic jobs inside the company. The
altered focus will most likely inspire specialists to pursue a modern
career in the technological field, aiming for strategic technical positions.
It is also crucial for the organisation to compensate personnel who are
critical to the strategy's execution; otherwise, the company will be
unable to retain these experts. Employees in strategic roles require
additional incentives beyond pay, such as membership in a community
of practise, which might include both internal and external communities.
Employees and the organisation can both benefit from participating in a
technical community of practise.
5.2.4 Feedback through measures:
When the influence of various actions in the organisation is measured, it
becomes evident which procedures contribute to the firm's strategy and
which do not - this does not make those jobs less vital, merely less
strategic. It is critical to have accurate and precise measurements in
place. Companies who have successfully implemented talent
management systems have also been able to track the contribution of
talent management actions and hence have only effective processes in
61
place. Furthermore, there should not be too many measurements, and the
measurements that are in place should answer pertinent questions. In
other words, best practise measures should not be implemented simply
because they are best practises; they must be relevant to the
organisation. The metrics should show how successfully the organisation
executes its strategy and be linked to actions that can improve outcomes.
If a company is in need of talented people, for example, the corporation
could analyse how many talented employees a manager has developed.

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 CHAPTER – 6
SUMMARY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The application of talent management in organisations to retain and
manage technical professionals in a technical career has been examined
in this thesis. Organizations have discovered that talent management is a
method to turn their human resource into a strategic asset.
According to the findings, there is a need for a new definition of a career
within businesses, one that is linked to the firm's strategy and strategic
skills. To accomplish this, we suggest that people and roles within the
business must be segmented in order to showcase the strategic
contributions of top performers in strategic positions. The new job
should be geared toward achieving a strategic position, which is a group
of positions within an organisation that contribute to the organization's
competitive advantage. This new career paradigm will include technical
specialists, who were previously deemed to have a "horizontal career,"
and it may also elevate the status of technical careers in the eyes of the
generation Y.
Furthermore, communities of practise are advised as a tool for technical
specialists' development as well as a way to reward them for their
efforts. Work-based development should be tied to the organization's
strategic needs. Middle managers are critical in helping staff grow and
expand in a purposeful direction.
Our strategic and systemic model of talent management is another
outcome of the thesis. This model can be used to visualise talent
management as a system, communicate talent management to managers
and executives, and guide talent management implementation. The
model has two key features: it is structured around the corporate
strategy, and new data flows back into the talent management system via
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measurements of how well the organisation is implementing the strategy
and talent management processes, providing advice on how to improve
these.
Naturally, testing and validating the model described in this thesis is a
suggestion for future research. Also, the aforementioned comments
about the status of technical careers and the possibility of advancement
through talent management should be verified. Furthermore, community
of practise research could be continued inside a talent management
framework.
The induction programme is critical in acquainting new employees with
the organisation. As a result, a well-designed and implemented induction
programme is required. The candidate's work profile and role should be
obvious to him so that he can readily decide what he wants, and job
clarity helps to attract prospects. Following the selection of a candidate,
background checks should be conducted to determine the individual's
social ties.
Allowing people to take risks should be given ample opportunity to
develop them through demanding tasks. So that the employee can make
his own decisions based on the situation and build problem-solving
skills.
Performance appraisals should be fair so that employees can identify
their own weaknesses with the support of their supervisors and take
steps to address them. A committee should be formed to oversee the
performance review process and avoid the ratter’s prejudice. To
accomplish this, the ratter should be well trained and informed about the
procedure.
IT firms must remain competitive in the face of the severe competition
of the twenty-first century, which includes dynamic changes in the
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workplace. In this case, the employee is carrying a high workload that is
sometimes above his capabilities. He doesn't have any other choice,
though. The workload should be proportional to the employee's abilities,
so that he can enjoy his work rather than see it as a burden. Furthermore,
the time limit set should be realistic in light of the employee's
qualifications.
Stress can be decreased by creating a cooperative workplace where job
loads are shared. In addition to specific skill training, other training such
as stress management, time management, and spirituality should be
provided to help the employee raise morale at a faster rate.
For the sake of expediency, an internal talent pool should be formed in
order to reduce the cost of recruitment to a large extent, and succession
planning should be prioritised.
Before embarking on a recruitment process, management should
consider the employees in the department where openings exist. The
recruitment procedure should be carried out after a collaborative debate
on the requirement. The recruitment process should include some of the
top performers.
In the IT industry, the quality of work life is poor. It usually causes
problems for dual-career couples. In this case, various strategies for
achieving work-life balance should be considered. Couples with dual
careers should be allowed the opportunity to work together in the same
organisation. Flexi time, a reduced work week, and telecommuting are
other ways to preserve a work-life balance. Workplace therapy is always
necessary to lessen life's stress.
Career advancement is an important aspect of one's professional life.
The company should finance higher education, give facilities for fearless
innovation, and guide them in their progress.
65
Employees in the IT industry are often thought to be well compensated.
Freshmen, on the other hand, have a lower take-home salary. Salary
expectations differ between generations X and Y. As a result, the
corporation should devise a policy to enhance take-home pay at the
junior level while saving at the senior level. As a result, both parties will
benefit.
Comparative analysis of different policies across rivals can be done to
identify own flaws, which should then be addressed with employee
input. Employees from many generations, such as traditionalists, baby
boomers, gen X, and gen Y, work in the IT business. In every situation,
they are distinct from one another. As a result, keeping them all in one
place is really challenging. It is management's responsibility to create a
welcoming environment with a fearless culture in which everyone may
be accommodated according to their needs and expertise.
Pay for performance culture is a new approach to be used in such
industries, in which employees are motivated to accomplish more. In
addition to wages, appreciation for an employee's commitment to the
firm can be expressed by monetary or non-monetary gifts such as gift
baskets, vacation packages, and so on.
All employees should be involved in developing strategies for investing
in the talent management process, which will result in effective talent
management. This will require a lot of participation from everyone.
Furthermore, when transferring to a different (technical) department, an
employee must start "from the ground up" to acquire a new technical
discipline, which motivates employees to stay in the same technical
sector - resulting in "technological path dependence." As a result, the
business overview of these persons who opt to stay in their field may be
insufficient. Because the work-based learning component in project

66
work at the project organisation may lessen the influence of this issue, it
becomes more essential in the case study company's production unit.
Future studies should focus on this topic.
6.1 FUTURE ROADMAP:
In today's competitive corporate environment, managing people is one of
the most important concerns that HR professionals/practitioners face.
The dynamic nature of work, changing demographic patterns, quickly
increasing technology, the shift to knowledge-based economies, and the
demand for innovation have made it even more challenging for
managers to plan and acquire, develop, engage, and retain talent for the
business. This research gives a practical and reasonable understanding of
executive talent management in these businesses, which will aid
researchers and practitioners in improving the process in the following
ways:
Focuses on the four primary components of talent management:
acquisition, development, engagement, and retention, resulting in better
personnel management.
Further investigation into the mutual link between the four parameters is
possible.
This will assist practitioners in implementing at least some adjustments
to their old and traditional talent management approaches.
Individual sectors of the IT industry can be studied separately.
Comparing Indian and foreign enterprises allows for a comparative
analysis of practises.

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 CHAPTER – 7
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Websites:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_management
 https://www.aihr.com/blog/what-is-talent-management/
 https://blog.workday.com/en-us/2020/understanding-basics-
what-is-talent-management.html
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7MYMVTQ_rg
 https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/glossary/talent-
management
 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
307626687_A_Study_on_Talent_Management_Practices_and_its
_Impact_on_Employee_Retention_in_It_Industry_in_Chennai_Dis
trict
 https://www.valamis.com/hub/talent-
management#:~:text=Talent%20management%20is%20a
%20constant,company%20in%20the%20long%20run
 https://splashbi.com/what-is-talent-management-in-hr/
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltjDJAF2yrQ
 https://www.slideshare.net/Amol30586/talent-mnagement-
mbahr-project#:~:text=Talent%20management%20(or
%20succession%20management,business%20needs%20of
%20that%20department.
 https://hr.uoregon.edu/recruitment/projects/talent-
management-system-project

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  https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-
and-surveys/documents/2006%20talent%20management
%20survey%20report.pdf
 https://www.scribd.com/doc/23962903/Talent-Management-
Employer-Questionnaire
 http://ethesis.nitrkl.ac.in/7900/1/2015_Talent_Rath
 https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/strategy/resourcing/talent-
factsheet#gref
 https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-
relations/pages/talent-management-trends.aspx
Articles and Journals:
 Becker, B. E., Huselid, M. A., & Beatty, R. W. (2009). The
differentiated workforce. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
 The Boston Consulting Group & World Federation of People
Management Associations. (2012). Creating People Advantage
2012. The Boston Consulting Group.
 The Boston Consulting Group. (2010). Creating a New Deal for
Middle Managers. Boston Consulting Group.
 The Boston Consulting Group. (2012). From Capability to
Profitability. The Boston Consulting Group.

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