Introduction: why this book?

The origins of this book can be traced back to a symposium held in Chicago at the 2009 US Academy of Management on the topic of Global Talent Management: Understanding the Contours of the Field and the Challenges for HRM. A group of academics from the UK, the United States, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Australia got together to explore what they felt were the emerging challenges in this field, which was in the infancy stage of development. Under the umbrella term of global human resource management (GHRM), they identified the need to understand an increasingly wide range of challenges, including a changing set of academic contours that were being placed around their field, and a range of innovations in practice. Their historical interest in how organizations exported talented expatriates around the world had been taken over by the need to look at multiple resourcing options – organizations were now combining the use of assignments with efforts to localize management across new global operations. They were capitalizing on international commuters and business travel, short-term assignments, international projects, knowledge management exchanges, building centers of expertise, moving people from countries or regions into these centers and then exporting them back out again, using passive recruitment to pick up potential talent in globalized labor markets or global cities, and attracting skilled migrants. In short, they were trying to build skills and capabilities around the world. They might not be managing these multiple ways of moving talent and their insight around the world very strategically, but by default this was what they were doing. Who knows how to solve these sorts of problems? Were the new contours of talent management making it a branch of knowledge management, global leadership, and international human resource management (IHRM) strategy, we asked?

Introduction

In this chapter, our aim is to combine insights from employer branding and career management to explain some of the issues facing the talent- and reputation-management agendas in organizations. More specifically, our objectives are:

1. to propose a revised model of employer branding and its links to talent management and organizational reputations, which are key elements in effective career management

2. to analyze links between employer branding and career management

3. to reflect on some of the problems raised by the interdisciplinary nature of employer branding in practice and the consequent implications for careers.

Previous research into employer branding and organizational reputations by one of the authors (e.g., Martin and Beaumont, 2003; Martin and Hetrick, 2009; Martin, Gollan, and Grigg, 2011) has led us to accept a working definition of an employer brand as:

Introduction

The previous chapter laid out some of the developments in talent management when seen in a global context. In this chapter we look at the strategic context in the largest emerging market – that of China – through comparison of practices with those in the United States. Corporations in China and the United States differ greatly in many ways. United States’ firms typically are older and more global, thus it is not surprising that some research suggests that Chinese HRM policies and practices differ from Western HRM practices. In particular, there is evidence that HR functions allocate less time to strategic activities and play a less strategic role (Wei, 2010). However, there is some evidence of a two-speed system in China, whereby a small number of firms have highly sophisticated systems, while a much larger proportion has only very basic HR systems. This has been attributed to the difference between the relatively advanced management systems of large state-owned enterprises and the more basic systems characterizing smaller private firms.

The development of Chinese HRM has occurred in several phases (see Wei, 2010). During a Soviet-style traditional phase (from 1949 to 1979), there was little HR presence in organizations because much of HR management was dictated by state rules that required similar treatment across organizations, and with little worker movement across them (Naughton, 1996; Warner, 1996). This phase was followed by a reform phase (from 1979 to 1995), following the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee in late 1978. It allowed private ownership and foreign investment. It included greater profit incentive for enterprises, allowed for more experimentation with employment arrangements, and allowed the importation of HR practices by the Western firms that were investing in China (Wei, 2010).

Introduction: key learning points from the book

We complete this book by reviewing some of its key learning points, and summarizing the implications of these for the future development of practice and research. Chapter 1 provided a brief historical review of how the field emerged and developed and showed that while the field of strategic talent management is still very much in its infancy, it is becoming of growing significance to top managers as well as academics. We noted the range of recent special issues on the topic. It is also interesting to note that two out of the three most downloaded papers in 2013 from the Journal of World Business were about talent management. However, we also questioned what the contours of this new and emerging field will be, or should be.

In the opening chapters we asked a number of important questions about the emerging field of strategic talent management:

1. What do strategists think about the debates about talent management?

2. What should be the role of expert knowledge in the assessment of talent?

3. How should talent-management functions best think about strategic workforce planning and talent pipelines in an era of high levels of uncertainty?

4. How should the field of talent management best draw upon marketing concepts when articulating concepts such as employee-value propositions or employer brands?

5. How should organizations think about the strategic configuration of the talent-management practices that they need to put in place?

Introduction

As noted in the previous chapter, there have been a number of different philosophies that have come to dominate the field of talent management. Collings and Mellahi (2009) helpfully outlined these different philosophies as follows.

1. People approach: talent management as a categorization of people.

2. Practices approach: talent management as the presence of key HRM practices.

3. Position approach: talent management as the identification of pivotal positions.

4. Strategic-pools approach: talent management as internal talent pools and succession planning.

These are often presented as competing approaches to talent management, or definitions of it, alternative conceptualizations, and better or worse ways of doing it.

In this chapter we:

• use this way of categorizing approaches to talent management to organize our discussion about the nature of strategic talent management

• build on the categorization by showing how each philosophy has come about and evolved, its essence, and some of the assumptions it is based on

• lay out the different assumptions they make about organizational effectiveness, how they have shaped mainstream thinking, and the different strategies they argue are necessary to achieve it

• provide a range of critiques of talent practice, notably the people philosophy

• put the four philosophies into a framework to help think about, and position, the design of different organizational talent-management systems and determine when each should become most dominant.