14 Jul Talent Management
Talent management emerged in the world of HR practitioners about two decades ago (in the late 1990s) with ‘The War for Talent’ as its major impetus (Michaels et al., 2001). The talent management focus of HR was a global-local endeavor to ensure that the strategic choices and operational functional HR activities were geared at achieving a competitive advantage through people. Talent management as practiced by global and innovative firms came to be understood as ‘‘a set of sustainable organizational strategies that use human capital to the competitive advantage of the organization, as well as a portfolio of integrated HR activities that result in putting the right people with the right competencies in the right job in the right place, and at the right cost’’ (Claus, 2013). Talent management encompasses both strategic and tactical elements and draws its applications from concepts and tools developed beyond HR in other management disciplines such as marketing, with a focus on employer branding, employee value proposition and employee segmentation (Michaels et al., 2001); management science with an emphasis on pivotal positions and yield curves (Boudreau and Ramstad, 2007); operations management focused on matching talent supply and demand while reducing uncertainties (Cappelli, 2008); strategy emphasizing strategic differentiation of the workforce (Becker et al., 2009); and global management using a globally integrated approach (Ready and Conger, 2007; Claus, 2013). By focusing on the acquisition and performance of talent (as opposed to transactional HR activities), talent management became the core of strategic HR practice.
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