A Novel, Competency-Based Approach of the HRM-Related Definition of Talent: A Suggestion Based on Theoretical and Empirical Findings

Talent management (TM) has gotten more and more attention recently, but definitions/approaches to talented employees still confusingly differ. Therefore, talent definitions were collected from selected peer-reviewed TM articles, and corporate talent conceptualizations were examined through empirical data. For the systematic literature review, we examined 507 English-only publications published until the end of 2018 in the Web of Science database containing “talent management” in the topic field. Empirical data was collected from Hungarian corporations; the answers (n = 67) to the relevant questions of the online questionnaire were also analyzed. The results show that there are still TM articles without any kind of conceptualization of “talent,” while in other cases different talent tensions/approaches and further inconsistencies are observable. Such tensions/approaches are, for example, the object versus subject ones. All of them can be explicitly or implicitly connected to competencies; thus, they can also become measurable via measuring competencies. This paper offers a comprehensive and consistent solution by suggesting the application of a well-known competency model in the TM context. This proposed competency-based approach can become such a first step of any comprehensive corporate TM initiative that would serve and synchronize all the further ones—substantially contributing to the overall success of HRM.