Navigating Talent Management: Exclusive vs. Inclusive Approaches

This research is credited to Ahmad Fuad Al Hattab

​Introduction
 
It is important to choose the right approach to talent management, and what would be the decision-shaping factor when making the right choice. These are some questions that may not necessarily have been in the focus of attention a century ago. Still, the intense competition of modern time has actualized these questions (Caplan, 2011, CIPD, 2015).

Even though the majority of approaches in the field of HR management have been used since the middle of the previous century (Cappelli, 2015), talent management has been in the focus of theorists and practitioners for a shorter period of time (Johnason, 2009). A modern business can rarely be effective and successful without considering these seemingly theoretical issues. Talent management practices have proved to be highly effective when cutting organizational expenses on hiring ineffective workers, building the loyalty of the employees, and thus avoiding unnecessarily high turnover (Michaels, 2001).
 
Exclusive approach vs Inclusive approach
 
It is possible to significantly improve the retention rate by properly dealing with talent. This will optimize the resources, needed for recruiting and training new personnel. However, for an organization, it may appear to be worthwhile investing in the training of existing loyal employees, since their education is an important part of talent management.

In this respect, it is the most important task of talent management effort to, first of all, grow the talent and then to harvest its fruit (Paauwe, 2009). But which approach of talent management should the company prefer? There is no universal answer to this question. A lot depends on the leadership style, which is accepted within the company, upon the type of relations which are accepted within the organization, upon what is oftentimes referred to as organizational culture (O'Sullivan, 2014).
 
There are other factors which may also come into play, but the ones mentioned above appear to have primary importance. Prior to continuing the discussion, it is worthwhile defining the exclusive and inclusive approach to talent management. As it has been mentioned above, for the majority of organizations, it is reasonable to provide training to their employees and in such a way to grow talent within the company instead of investing into costly and exhausting talent hunting.

However, organizations differ in their approach to this training. Some believe that for them it is more beneficial to provide training to all of their employees and gradually increase their professional level. Such organizations will save by paying less for the training of a single employee, and will, at the same time, make sure that all their employees are progressing in their professional growth (Shukla, 2009).
 
However, there are organizations which prefer to look out for peculiarities of their employees, for exclusive talents, into further development of whom the organization will invest. Such exclusive training will definitely cost more to the company; however, through investing in exclusive training, the company will obtain a strong, well-trained specialist, maybe a leader, who will then effectively manage a team of employees or cope with a complicated project (Silzer & Dowell),

There is no universal solution that would work equally well for any organization. Instead, when choosing between the inclusive and exclusive approach to talent management or considering any combinations of these two, it is necessary to consider the realities of the company.
 
The benefit of the inclusive approach is great for the companies, which have big staffs, consisting of people who need to work with the customers or take decisions. An example of such an organization would be a call center. Here, the majority of the company’s employees would need constant training in order to grow professionally and to improve their performance.

Such training may be arranged for larger groups of employees, and thus the expenses for training one employee would be minor. It is always a good idea to tie the goals of the company to those of the employees, to motivate them to learn more effectively (Michaels, 2001). This can be done by means of promoting the employees once they reach a certain level in their professional training.
 
Another reasonable thing to state about the benefits of inclusive approaches is that it allows the entire team to grow, and thus provides for more diverse talent in the company. Such diversity allows finding non-typical, creative solutions. For other companies, the situation may be different.

There are companies that depend upon the performance of a small group of people—managers or informal leaders—who push the development of the entire company. It may be reasonable for the company to constantly encourage the improvement of their performance and enable it by means of investing in their professional growth through constant, personally tuned training programs (Conaty & Charan, 2015).
 
This may be the case for the companies with a high turnover rate. For instance, fast food restaurants, which heavily depend on the work of students and youth immediately after their graduation, are not very interested in providing intensive training for the entire team. It is known from the start that the majority of their employees will leave for good very shortly.

They only start their career at companies like McDonald’s; they do not see their future in the company and will be looking for better opportunities as soon as possible. Working for such a company in their case is merely a matter of survival, living through a certain period in their lives when the need for money is especially dire and ways of earning it are limited.

For such companies, the exclusive approach to talent management will prove to be much more effective. It will allow companies of this sort to detect those of the employees who care to build their career within the company and educate them in accordance with their interests and abilities. Definitely, training for a single specialist for such a company will appear to be much more costly. However, there will be only a small percentage of the company’s employees who will need such “customized” training.
 
Thus, the overall cost of such training for the company will not be very significant, and the investment will pay back very quickly. But in order to do that, the company needs to arrange for the employees to have an opportunity to easily demonstrate their talents and their interest in dedicating their effort to working for the company.

This may be the responsibility of junior supervisors. Training of such junior specialists, who directly deal with the regular workers, is one of the most important things at which training programs for such junior specialists ought to be aimed. As it becomes obvious from the explanations above, there are advantages and disadvantages to each one of the two approaches, and it is the task of the company’s senior managerial staff to correctly identify the needs of their company and thus to build an effective talent management strategy.
 
Evaluation of talent management in a company I am familiar with
 
In order to better illustrate these processes, I would like to briefly discuss a company, with which I am familiar and talent management strategy adopted by them. The company is focused on web development. They design and develop web sites, fill it with content and provide services of further promotion and search engine optimization.

The team is not very big. It consists of about twenty specialists. There are two departments: web development department and content department. The former generates the code and design, while the latter is responsible for the content and SEO. Even though the company is small, and the majority of employees dedicate significant periods of their life to building a career within the company, the company practices exclusive talent management approach.
 
The point is that every specialist within the company is oriented at a very specific task, and collective training has proved to be ineffective. There is one HR specialist in the company. This person does not belong to either one of the two departments. But her goal is to detect the needs of the employees, identify the directions of further development, and design training programs to help the employees realize their abilities in full.

The HR manager herself has got very specific tasks before her, as one can see. She not only needs to be sharp at HRM but also needs to understand the basics of web development and associated disciplines in order to understand what the most promising vectors of development for each one of the employees are and how to help them grow professionally.
 
The company has put the performance of the employees into dependence from the company’s overall performance, and thus each one of the employees feels, that the work they are doing is not merely their job, their duty as an employee. They take their work very seriously, as their own business, or, rather, a business in which they have a fair share. And thus, the company is dynamically growing and so does each of its employees.
 
Conclusion
 
In conclusion, this shows how important it really is to identify which of the two approaches to talent management would work best for a given company. In fact, for some businesses, a mixed model may prove to be very effective. In such a case, the task of the person in charge of talent management is to create such a strategy in which both approaches would effectively complement one another. In modern realities, a wisely developed talent management strategy can easily be the key to a company’s success.
 


References
 
Caplan, J. (2011). "Talent Management in a New World: a Balancing Act.". 
 
Cappelli, Peter (July 2015). "Why We Love to Hate HR... and What HR Can Do About It". Harvard Business Review (July–August 2015). Retrieved 25 July 2015.
 
Conaty, Bill, and Ram Charan (2011). "The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers.". Crown Publishing Group.
 
CIPD (2015), "Resourcing and Talent Planning.". Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development: London. Available Online at:  https://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/resourcing-talent-planning_2015.pdf
 
Johnason, P. (2009). "HRM in changing organizational contexts.". In D. G. Collings & G. Wood (Eds.), Human resource management: A critical approach (pp. 19–37). London: Routledge.
 
Michaels, Ed; Handfield-Jones, Helen; Axelrod, Beth (2001). "The War for Talent". Harvard Business Press.
 
O'Sullivan, Mark. (2014). "What Works at Work". The Starbank Press, Bath.
Paauwe, J., & Boon, C. (2009). "Strategic HRM: A critical review". In D. G. Collings, G. Wood (Eds.) & M.A. Reid, Human resource management: A critical approach (pp. 38-54). London: Routledge.
 
Shukla, Ravinder (2009). "TALENT MANAGEMENT: Process of Developing and Integrating Skilled Workers". Global India Publications.
 
Silzer, Rob & Ben E. Dowell (editors) (2009). "Strategy-Driven Talent Management: A Leadership Imperative". J-B SIOP Professional Practice Series (Volume 28), John Wiley & Sons.