Talent Management - Challenges

In today’s rapidly moving, extremely uncertain, and highly competitive global environment, firms worldwide are encountering numerous global talent challenges (Schuler et al., 2011). Global talent challenges are significant (strategic and high impact) HR-embedded business issues that focus on managing a firm to ensure just the right amount of the right talent and motivation, at the right place, at the right price, during all economic and financial ups and downs in a very competitive world for the purposes of balancing the workforce with the needs of the firm in the short term, and positioning the firm to have the workforce needed in the long term (Schuler et al., 2011).

 

Talent management is a recent, practitioner-generated term covering a range of long-standing practices that aim at getting the right person in the right job at the right time and these include workforce planning, succession planning, employee development, and career management (Cappelli and Keller 2014). The phrase dates from a 1998McKinsey report (Chambers et al. 1998), which argued that variations in the performance of executives explain a great deal of the variance in overall performance across businesses. It has become the dominant human capital topic of the early twenty-first century (Cascio & Aguinis 2008a).

 

The challenges associated with managing talent in modern labor markets are a constant source of discussion among academics and practitioners, but the literature on the subject is sparse and has grown somewhat haphazardly (Cappelli and Keller 2014).

 

In today’s rapidly moving, extremely uncertain, and highly competitive global environment, firms worldwide are encountering numerous global talent challenges. Global talent challenges are significant (strategic and high impact) HR-embedded business issues that focus on managing a firm to ensure just the right amount of the right talent and motivation, at the right place, at the right price, during all economic and financial ups and downs in a very competitive world for the purposes of balancing the workforce with the needs of the firm in the short term, and positioning the firm to have the workforce needed in the long term (Schuler et al., 2011). Global talent challenges emerge in the context of a dynamic environment. Among the many factors that shape the specific challenges and responses of particular firms are: (a) globalization, (b) changing demographics, (c) demand for workers with needed competencies and motivation, and (d) the supply of those needed competencies and motivation (Beechler & Woodward, 2009; Scullion & Collings, 2011).

 

Figure 1: Shows the Framework for Global Talent Challenges and Global Talent Management Initiatives

Source: R.S. Schuler et al. / Journal of World Business 46 (2011) 506–516

  

Despite the growing practice of outside hiring, most organizations still think of talent management as being about current employees, which is right at the traditional practices context which forms the core of talent management practices are aimed at existing employees, and despite the attention in the literature to strategic jobs, many of the major concerns in the practice of talent management have to do with identifying individuals for development and future advancement. (Cappelli and Keller 2014).

 

Although most of the attention in talent management has been on internal talent, the focus in practice and increasingly of new research has disproportionately been on outside talent, the growing reliance on external hiring has led to a burgeoning literature on inter-organizational mobility in management, albeit outside of the traditional HR field, however, the institutions that support external labor market strategies have also received attention (Cappelli and Keller 2014). The actions that firms can take to influence the quantity and quality of external applicants have been documented in recent reviews of the external recruiting literature (Bonet et al. 2013, Breaugh 2013, Dineen & Soltis 2011).

 

Several barriers to the use of HR policies and practices for global talent management have been identified, and many of these barriers to successful GTM initiatives exist for domestic firms, but they become more complex and difficult to overcome in global firms, including: (1) The fact that senior managers do not spend enough time on talent management, perhaps thinking that there are other more pressing things (e.g., finance, market share, product attributes) to be concerned with; (2) Organizational structures, whether based regions, products, or functions, that inhibit collaboration and the sharing of resources across boundaries; (3) Middle and frontline managers who are not sufficiently involved in or responsible for employees’ careers, perhaps because they see these activities as less important than managing the business, and/ or because they require such a long-term perspective; (4) Managers are uncomfortable and/or unwilling to acknowledge performance differences among employees—a step that is required in order to take actions to improve performance; (5) Managers at all levels who are not sufficiently involved in the formulation of the firm’s talent management strategy, and therefore, have a limited sense of ownership and understanding of actions designed to help manage the firm’s global talent; (6) HR departments that lack the competencies needed to address the global talent challenges effectively, and/or lack the respect of other executives whose cooperation is needed to implement appropriate HR policies and practices; and (7) There exists a ‘‘knowledge-doing’’ gap that prevents from managers implementing actions, even though they might know that they are the right things to do (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006).

 

While there are many barriers to overcome, multinational firms such as IBM, HSBC, P&G, Novartis, ThyssenKrupp, and Schlumberger have shown that success is possible with the commitment, leadership and involvement of the top management (Farndale et al., 2010; Lane & Pollner, 2008; Palmisano, 2007).

 

 

List of references:

 

Beechler, S., & Woodward, I. C. (2009). Global talent management. Journal of International Management, 15: 273–285.

 

Bonet R, Cappelli P, Hamori M. 2013. Labor market intermediaries and the new paradigm for human resources. Acad. Manag. Ann. 7(1):341–92

 

Breaugh JA. 2013. Employee recruitment. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64:389–416

 

Cappelli, P. and Keller, J.R., 2014. Talent management: Conceptual approaches and practical challenges. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 1(1), pp.305-331.

 

Cascio WF, Aguinis H. 2008a. Research in industrial and organizational psychology from 1963 to 2007: changes, choices, and trends. J. Appl. Psychol. 93(5):1062–81

 

Chambers EG, Foulon M, Handfield-Jones H, Hankin SM, Michaels EG III. 1998. The war for talent. McKinsey Q. 3:44–57

 

Farndale, E., Scullion, H., & Sparrow, P. (2010). The role of the corporate HR function in global talent management. Journal of World Business, 46: 161–168.

 

Guthridge, M., Komm, A. B., & Lawson, E. (2008). Making talent management a strategic priority. The McKinsey Quarterly, January: 49–59.

 

Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. (2006). Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: profiting from evidence-based management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

 

Schuler, R. S., Jackson, S. E., & Tarique, I. (2011). Framework for global talent challenges: HR actions of global talent management. In Scullion, H. and Collings, D. (Eds) Global Talent Mangement. London: Routledge.

 

Schuler, R.S., Jackson, S.E. and Tarique, I., 2011. Global talent management and global talent challenges: Strategic opportunities for IHRM. Journal of world business, 46(4), pp.506-516.