It’s not about Talent itself — but about Detecting, Identifying and Selecting Talents?

Abstract

While it is widely taken for granted that talent — the thing itself — is a ‘core competitive asset’ for companies and teams, ‘talent’ — as a word — has no clear meaning, no stable semantic value. However, this has not kept talent management from applying the term with great frequency and enthusiasm. Quite the contrary: models have been developed and methods implemented in order to detect (and recruit) talents, and to maximize the performance potential of people who possess them. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how talent management is guilty of maintaining this semantic ambiguity by unintentionally switching its focus from talent as a concrete, observable entity to talent as defined in a certain managerial view, in a modern interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew. I will then show how this switch has affected various approaches to talent management.