Talent Management

Talent Management and the Competitive Advantage

Talent Management is the most critical issue facing business today, and for many organizations, the challenges that leaders expect to resolve with these programs are urgent, but the approaches and strategies they implement ensure their efforts fail. Top leadership should spend at least 25% of their efforts on Talent Management to offset business challenges and to leverage their staff’s capabilities to gain competitive advantages.

Talent Management is a term synonymous with Human Resources since it entails many of the activities performed by this group including identifying, attracting, integrating, developing, motivating, and retaining key personnel. However, it has taken on greater meaning and importance with top leadership in recent years with additional focus on performance management and succession planning, talent reviews, and workforce planning (Heinen & O’Neill, 2004). There are different approaches leaders take when creating a Talent Management strategy and they include an Inclusive and Exclusive approach. In the Inclusive approach, all employees are perceived to be talent. In the Exclusive approach, only high potential or high performing employees are considered to be talent (Egerová, 2013). One approach is not necessarily superior to the other since it depends on the needs of the company. However, it is vital that these needs, along with a systematic identification of key positions, are developed by key stakeholders because this will be the foundation of the Talent Management strategy and the basis for the competitive advantage.

There are several reasons why Talent Management has become a passionate topic around boardrooms and one of the most critical issues for top leaders today. The first reason is the volatile economy and changing business climate. Both of these conditions bring greater scrutiny to performance, and companies must use all assets in order to gain greater efficiencies. The...