Talent management and organizational diversity: a call for research

Talent management (TM) represents one of the fastest growing areas of both academic research and HRD practice. Since proclamations of a “War for Talent” in the late 1990s, talent management has become one of the most common terms in the managerial and HRD practitioner lexicon (Minbaeva & Collings, 2013 ). An increasing array of TM services features increasingly in consultancy offerings. In May 2014, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) renamed itself the Association for Talent Development (ATD). Professional HRM Associations such as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in the United States and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in the United Kingdom have recognized increasing interest in this area and have commissioned extensive research into its use and practice in organizational settings. With the notable exception of Collings ( 2014 ), TM has achieved less attention in the HRD scholarly literature. This editorial aims to address this “disconnect.” Drawing on Collings ’ ( 2014 ) call for mature talent management to move beyond an overemphasis on shareholder value and initial scholarship in the TM arena and contributions to scholarly discourse we encountered at the European University Forum for Human Resource Development (UFHRD) 2015 conference, we pose provocative questions that we hope will stimulate critical and robust examination of TM from an HRD perspective, with a particular emphasis on the implications of TM for organizational diversity.