Edinburgh Napier University

  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 the term ‘talentmanagement’ has become one of the most common terms in the managerial and HRD
practitioner lexicon (Minbaeva & Collings, 2013). An increasing array of TM services feature in consultancy offerings. In May 2014, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) re-named itself as the Association for Talent Development (ATD). Professional HRM Associations such as SHRM in the US and the CIPD in the UK 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 Colling’s (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.