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In the global economy, organizations compete with each other mainly on the basis of talent in the organization. Talent management, therefore, becomes the top priority for the leaders of any organization (Huselid, 1995). Leading human resource institutes such as CIPD defines talent management as the company’s ability to acquire, develop and retain high performing individuals to accomplish future business goals and implement strategic initiatives (CIPD, 2017).
Talent management is broadly divided into three main stages of an employees’ lifecycle in an organization (Lewis & Heckman, 2006). The first stage is called talent acquisition wherein organizations attract, identify and recruit high potential individuals for open positions in the company. The second stage is known as talent development wherein organizations nurture and grow their employee skills for the current and future needs such as achieving a higher growth rate, market expansion or leadership succession. The final stage is talent retention wherein organizations motivate high performers to stay engaged with the organization and in turn reduces talent attrition (Tarique & Schuler, 2010).
There are no one-size-fits-all guidelines for talent management and different organizations deploy various strategies for effective talent management. Technology enabled talent management is one such strategy that, over the past decade, almost all human resource (HR) departments of the organizations are experimenting with (Stone et al., 2015) and are characterized by Social networks, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud technologies (popularly referred to as SMAC technologies) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Technology and Talent management are the key drivers of change in future human resource management (Stone et al., 2015). There are many studies discussing the talent management and its role in organizational performance (Ingram, 2016; Cappelli & Keller, 2017; Munasinghe & De Alwis, 2017; Sparrow, & Makram, 2015; Sparrow et al., 2015; Mohammed, 2016; Walisundera & Arachchige, 2016). However, meager academic research is available in the domain of talent management technology and its impact on organizational performance (Farley, 2005; Lewis & Heckman, 2006; Benitez-Amado, et al., 2015). The research in this domain is at a nascent stage (Stone et al., 2015; Kuhn, 2016; Parry & Tyson, 2011; Marler & Parry, 2016; Nayak et al., 2018). Organizations are increasingly using the technologies available for talent management and in such a scenario it is imperative to understand the role of technology in talent management and how it contributes to the organizational performance (Al Ariss, et al., 2014), as technology requires large amount of financial investment. However, some studies discuss the contribution of technology towards talent management (Farley, 2005; Benitez-Amado, et al., 2015; Nayak et al., 2018) which are lacking in examining the contribution of technology towards organizational performance.
The research considers the existing literature on technology for Talent Management (Bersin, J., 2018; Stone et al., 2015; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2018), talent metrics and analytics (Lewis & Heckman, 2006; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2018; Kuhn, 2016; Harris, et al., 2010) and strategic HR business partnership (Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015; Reilly& Williams, 2016; Harris, et al., 2010) to examine its contribution to the organizational performance. These factors are considered from existing studies of talent management (Harris, et al., 2010; Ingram, 2016). The study aims to conduct in-depth interviews of the HR managers using the grounded theory approach to support the literature and develop a model for the usage of technology for talent management and its contribution to organizational performance. Hence the following research question was formed: