MANAGING

TALENT
Contemporary Issues in Human Resource
Management
Lesson 2

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WAR FOR TALENT • Organizations are struggling to hire the best
talent that will help them see potential threats
and uncover new opportunities.
• It seems like the war for talent is never-ending.
• Ever since the dawn of modern business,
organizations have been seeking to attract and
retain the best possible people they could.

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 • At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century
WAR FOR TALENT
there is a growing recognition of the significant changes in
how, when and where we work.
• Concepts such as the ‘gig’ economy, which has undermined
traditional organizational models in well-established industries
supported by an increasingly globalized and deregulated
economic, growth, are re-framing the nature of work and
employment as we know it.
• However, it is interesting to note the emergence of talent and
management, and the ‘war for talent’ in the late twentieth
century, remains a constant in the field of management.
(Michaels et al., 2001)

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What is Talent Management???
• Talent and its management appeared to have gained
a greater strategic role.
• What is also interesting is the lack of consistency
about what we mean by talent management (TM) or
managing talent.
• It would be assumed that the field of TM was a
well-defined and researched area of management.
• However, the lack of definition and scope of TM
has led to confusion Like Ashton and Martin
(2005), they lament the lack a of clear concise
definition.
• TM as one of the fastest growing areas of academic
research in the field of management but still lacking
in clarity.

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Main Two Issues

1. Talent management is a never-

ending issue.
2. Lack of clarity and consistency
about what we mean as Talent
Management.

As a contemporary HR people, we must have a proper framework on TM

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 Talent Management Approaches in 21 st Century

Exclusive Approach (Only consider internal employees available in the organization)

The influential work of Michaels et al, (2001), defined talent into categories – ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’.
1. Category A: being the top performers – the stars of the organization, who they argue should be
heavily invested in.
2. Category B: being competent or the bedrock of the organizations who facilitate or enable the
Category A stars to perform and finally category.
3. Category C: the bottom performers who ideally need to be developed to become ‘B’ or ‘A’
performers, but more likely are managed out.

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Talent Management Approaches in 21 st
Century Inclusive Approach (Considering
internal organizational context and external
(Cont’d)
labor market)

Focused on the value an employee provides the

organization, noting importantly that an
employee may be of relatively low value from
an external labor market perspective but high
value within the context of their organizational
role.

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Talent Management Approaches in 21 st Century
(Cont’d)
• These approaches focused the recognition of TM as based upon the individual employee as the
primary source of competitiveness.
• As a result of this focus on the employee, the HR function has the potential to assume an
increasingly critical, strategic and dynamic role in generating sustainable competitive advantage.
• This infers that the strategic management of talent has become a core imperative for organizations,
particularly multinational corporations as such failures in TM are an ongoing source of concern for
executives in modern organizations.
• This is a fundamental issue that goes to the heart of the emerging world of work in the twenty-first
century. If organizations are wanted to develop sustained competitiveness, the management of
talented employees will be a central focus and fundamentally different to that of the twentieth
century

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 How to Reconcile TM and Strategy?

• TM has also coincided with that of strategic human resource management.

• As Lewis and Hackman (2006) argue, TM should be part of the architecture of organization; as
such, strategic human resource management could be the ideal vehicle for its integration into the
organization’s ‘DNA’ systems.
• As such we can look at the core theories of strategic HRM to better understand how a framework
can be developed.
• TM has become an increasingly significant aspect in building sustained competitive advantage.
• Focus on strategic HRM provides potentially what TM is lacking: a solid theoretical perspective.

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 Attraction & Retention
Human Capital Theory
• It links investment in the organization’s key asset, its employees, to increased productivity and

sustained competitive advantage.

• The strategic aspect is the long-term enhancement of the firm’s human resource base by linking

employees’ skill development with retention through training and development, career management,

and progression.

• Skill enhancement can move people into more valued positions.

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 Attraction & Retention
(Cont’d)

Resource Based View (RBV)

• The focus of the RBV is on an organization retaining and developing
these human resources through investments such as human resource
development (HRD) strategies.
• This retention and development will ensure that these assets become
valuable, rare and difficult to imitate, thus further enhancing the
organization’s sustained competitive advantage.
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Holistic Definition of TM

“TM can be described as the activities and

processes that involve the systematic
attraction, identification, development,
engagement, retention and deployment of these
talents in order to create strategic sustainable
success”.
(Thunnissen and Gallardo-Gallardo, 2017, p.
3)

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Managing Talent in Contemporary Workplace
• TM has become an imperative (essential) in the face of an increasingly complex and dynamic
environment.
• In the same context of strategic HRM and its framework theories of human capital and the resource-
based view of the firm, what is required to underpin its successful development is a culture of
cooperation and communication of managers through all levels of the organization.
• TM processes at all levels need to include workforce planning, talent-gap analysis, recruitment,
selection, education and development, retention, talent reviews, succession planning, and evaluation.
• Only through integration and alignment of these processes will the framework for sustainable success
be developed.
• By assessing available talent and by placing the right people in the right place at the right time,
organizations can survive and thrive.
• This is where strategic HRM plays a significant role in bringing TM to the senior management level.
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Managing Talent in Contemporary Workplace
(Cont’d)

• It is becoming increasingly clear that talent and TM is seen as a critical driver in sustaining
corporate performance, and an organization’s ability to attract, develop and retain talent will be a
major factor determining competitive advantage in the future.
• Therefore, it is required to invest significantly more resources in the battle for talent.
• Michaels et al. (2001) identifies five key areas for organizations to act upon if they are going to
make talent a source of competitive advantage.
1. Embracing a talent mindset
2. Crafting a winning employee value proposition (EVP)
3. Rebuilding their recruitment strategy
4. Weaving development into their organization
5. Differentiating and affirming their people 14
EMBRACING A TALENT
MINDSET

• TM is a critical role for the CEO; a role that could not be delegated.
• Authors have proposed several key actions that leaders must take as
follows:

• Involvement in people decisions

• Developing probing talent reviews
• Gradually developing a talent-focused mindset within the
organization
• investing real money in talent
• being accountable for TM.

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 • An EVP is everything an employee
experiences within an organization,
Crafting A Winning
including intrinsic and extrinsic
Employee Value Proposition
satisfaction, values, ethics and culture.
• It is also about how well the organization
fulfils the employee’s needs, expectations
and aspirations.
• The key issues included job satisfaction,
challenging, exciting work and
development.
• To get the best talent out of each
employee EVP is vital.

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Rebuilding Recruitment Strategy
• When managers restructure a recruitment strategy, it can be understood that there is a critical issue within
the new workforce.
• Even during downturns in the market, there is a need to maintain a creative recruitment-and-selection
strategy, as the TM is a long-term proposition.
• This the only way organizations able to continue, absorbing of new talent.
• In terms of attraction, along with the primary areas of recruitment and selection, values and ethics act as
important sources of attraction as employees become increasingly discerning about their employers.
• For example, there are websites that allow potential employees to find out about real organizational
culture and values.
• Employees also search about value & culture of our organization. Therefore, organizations must
demonstrate their values and culture and let them know who are the people organization looking for.
• An understanding of how potential employees view or obtain information about the organization can
enhance the match between the person and the organization, increasing person- organizational fit and17
retention.
Weaving Development into
Organization

• Organizations must develop their talent at all

levels and weave it into the culture.
• This requirement is closely linked to areas
such as job design, job analysis and team
building, which contribute to the day-to-day
experience on the job, determining what
people do at work and how effectively they
do it.

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Differentiating and Affirming People

• We can link approaching the workforce as a diverse set of resources to what are called the ‘hard’
and ‘soft’ approaches to HRM.
• In terms of soft HRM, organizations,
• Invest heavily in star performers (the A team)
• Develop solid employees (the B team) to contribute their best to retain them
• Help poor performers (the C team) to improve their performance.

If the technique of soft HRM fails to change the performance of the C team, the organization will
use an exit strategy – hard HRM.

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Summary
• ‘War for talent’ becomes increasingly intense.
• The new workforce is discerning and skilled.
• Potential employees are exploring whether the
organization pays enough attention to them in terms of
both opportunities and resources.
• It appears that organizations are, actively pursuing the
management of talent as a source of sustained
competitive advantage.
• In order to be effective and create long-term
organizational success, TM strategies must align to
business goals, integrate all related processes and
systems, and create a talent mindset.

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Activity

“Talent Management and Gig Economy”

- Explain what is talent management
- Explain gig Economy
- Explain how to manage talent in gig
economy (is it challengeable or not, what are
the complexities)

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Thank You

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