Selected aspects of talent management in companies in Slovakia

Talent management is now an important aspect of human resources development in enterprises. It represents strategic view to the human resources management. The paper accents the necessity of the talent management process and carrier planning in successful management process. It focuses on the evaluation of the talent management application in enterprises of Slovakia. Main phases of the talent management process (talent identification, talent assessment, talent development and talent retention) are examined in this paper in line with the corporate and human resources strategy. Each phase will be assessed according to the survey of 288 companies operating in Slovakia. It goes to identify dependencies between the level of talent management and determinants (the size of the company, the existence of foreign capital in the enterprise, economic situation) and the establishment of the organizational entity for human resources management). In the conclusion, suggestions to improve the work with talents are provided which resulted from the interviews with managers of selected companies.


Introduction
The role of human resources in organizations is still very important.Capital and material sources are important but human resources are the main sources in each company.Only high quality people can create added value leaded to competitive advantage on the market.McKinsey group used the phrase the War for Talent in 1997 and it was the starting point for the research topic of talent management in practitioner and academic sphere.The fact that talent management is an attractive and developing academic topic was main motivation for writing this paper.We would like to clarify some relationships between talent management and selected determinants.
Talented individuals can help a lot in process of successful management and it is a reason why we can name talent management as a key component to business success in the current economic conditions.Money allocated to the human resources development must be named as an investment, not as costs.Recruitment of the top talents in an organization can help to increase productivity which leads to better economic results and part of the profit can be invested to support talented individuals in the company.

Talent and Talent Management
There are many definitions of the term talent.Thorne and Pelant (2006) define talent as someone who has ability above others.These people excel with easiness and grace.We agree with definition by Gagne (2000) who designates talent as the superior mastery of systematically developed abilities and knowledge in at least one of the field of the human endeavour.
Talent management is defined as a systematic and dynamic process of discovering, developing and sustaining talent (Egerová et al. 2015).According to Armstrong (2006) talent management should not only focus on the high-flyer, but it should concern all the assiduous and efficient workers.
Talent management introduces new strategic goals to streamline hiring and leadership succession processes using the employee lifecycle model.The issue of talent management has become an important area for research (Ashton andMorton, 2005 andSparrow et al., 2004).European perspectives of talent management are investigated by Collings, Scullion & Vaiman (2011).Talent management is likely to challenge many traditional management practices and attitudes which continue to dominate in the period of transition to a market economy (Skuza, Scullion & McDonnell, 2012).Talent management brings a requirement to create new human resources management tools, methods and processes to provide the necessary co-ordination systems.(Kim, Park, & Prescott, 2003).
Maximizing the talent of individual employees as a unique source of competitive advantage has been a central element of strategic human resources policy in recent years (Frank and Taylor, 2004 and Lewis and Heckman, 2006).It means that talent management became important strategic question.Strategic talent management as activities and processes that involve the systematic identification of key positions which differentially contribute to the organisation's sustainable competitive advantage, the development of a talent pool of high potential and high performing incumbents to fill these roles, and the development of a differentiated human resource architecture to facilitate filling these positions with competent incumbents and to ensure their continued commitment to the organisation (Collings and Mellahi, 2009).Investigation about effectiveness of talent management strategies has been provide by Bethke-Langenegger, Mahler and Staffelbach (2011).They found that the talent management focusing on retaining and developing talents has a statistically significant positive impact on human resource outcomes such as job satisfaction, motivation, commitment and trust in leaders.Moreover, talent management practices with a strong focus on corporate strategy have a statistically higher significant impact on organisational outcomes such as company attractiveness, the achievement of business goals, customer satisfaction and, above all, corporate profit, more so than any other areas that talent management focuses upon.Size of the enterprise as an important factor influencing human resources management is investigating in more scientific paper by Holátová et al. (2014) and Březinová (2014).
Excepting strategy, there are also other phases of talent management process.According to Silzer and Dowell (2010) model of integrated talent management includes following phases: strategy, talent identification, talent assessment, talent development, and talent retention.There have been several studies investigating firms' promotion decisions (Breaugh, 2011 andWaldman, 2013).Most of these studies focused on explaining promotion tournaments, that is, they study how managers compete among each other in order to be promoted to the next job hierarchy level (DeVaro, 2006).
Talent management should be the challenge for all companies which would like to grow and reach competitive advantage in the business.There are many factors that influences level of talent management.Talent management must be included into corporate strategy, business strategy, and human resources strategy to meet all goal connected with human resources development and with higher productivity. http://dx.doi.org/10.15414/isd2016.s12.09

Data and Methods
The way of the research implementation and the methods used in the research are described in this section.Selective survey was used as a method for data collection.It means that the chosen data are only part of the basic file and therefore the accuracy of the results is limited.(Munk, 2013).A scaled questionnaire was used as a tool of collection that contained 41 items (divided into 5 field according to talent management process phases) and other classification items such a size of the company, economic situation, foreign capital, and existing of HR department in the company.In this paper, only some of the most interesting were used.Here is the list of the items with marks used in the paper.

Table 1: List of the items and their marks I 1
Talent management is an important part of the corporate mission I 2 Human resource strategy is clearly defined.

I 3
Strategy for talent management is clearly defined.

I 4
There is looking for talent in each newly employed person.

I 5
Jobs are divided into key and others.

I 6
Recruitment system allows you to get a person of the highest growth potential.

I 7
We know what kind of talents will be needed in the future.

I 8
There are carried out special activities focused on talent acquisition.

I 9
Talent management is linked to the reward system.

I 10
There are no clearly defined criteria for evaluating employees.

I 11
The above-average abilities and skills are not taken into account in the process of recruitment.

I 12
It is the system of career development of talented employees well thought.

I 13
There is not enough time to develop the talent of employees.

I 14
Enterprise has sufficient financial resources to develop the talent of employees.

I 15
Retention of talented employees is successful.

I 16
There is a communication problem with talented employees I 17 We do not use specific procedures to support talented workers.
Source: own processing according to questionnaire The items of the questionnaire were scaled according to Likert from 1 to 5, where 1 means absolute disagreement of the respondent, 5 means absolute consensus and figure 3 expressed irresolute attitude of the respondent.We added also figure 0 enabled the respondent not to comment on a given item.The questionnaire was distributed electronically via online form.This questionnaire was created by group of scientists collaborated on common project and it was used in papers of scientific journals (Egerová et al., 2013).
Reliability of the questionnaire was verified by means of Cronbach´s alpha.According to Nunnally and Bernstein (1994) the evaluation of scales is based on examining the correlations between the individual items or measurements in relation to the variability of the items.The values of Cronbach´s alpha higher than 0.7 shows on sufficient scale consistence.In our case Cronbach´s alpha reached level 0.83.
We formulated following hypothesis and research questions: http://dx.doi.org/10.15414/isd2016.s12.09 Hypothesis No. 1: The strategic approach of talent management process represented by human resources strategy (item 2) is determined by the all selected factors (size of an enterprise, foreign capital, economic situation, and HR unit).
Hypothesis No. 2: The strategic approach of talent management process represented by talent management strategy (item 3) is determined by the all selected factors (size of an enterprise, foreign capital, economic situation, and HR unit).
Hypothesis No. 3: There is statistically significant difference in carrying out of special activities focused on talent acquisition (item 8) between enterprises with and without HR unit.
Hypothesis No. 4: The assessment of the talents representing by special reward system (item 9) is determined by the economic situation of the enterprise.
Hypothesis No. 5: Level of sufficient financial resources for talent development (item 14) is determined by the foreign capital allocated in the enterprise.
Non-parametric statistical methods were used because of the data structure and data nature.
Existence of statistically significant differences between individual groups of respondents were tested by the Kruskal-Wallis test, Jonckheere-Terpstra test and Mann-Whitney test.All identified differences are highlighted in the tables.

Results and Discussion
In this paper, we would like to refer some important relationships between the level of talent management and some important determinants.We focused on the determinants such a size of the company, existence of foreign capital in the enterprise, economic situation and existence of human resources unit in the enterprise.
This quantitative research study was conducted between June 2013 and November 2015.
Research sample consisted of 288 companies operating business in Slovakia.In the determinant size of the enterprise, the intervals were set according to the EU´s enterprise size typology (see table 2).Each enterprise was represented by owner, or employee responsible for human resource management.As we can see in table 5, there are 64.6% of enterprises where is any organizational unit providing human resources management (for example department of human resources management, or supervisor for human resources).On the other hand, there is 35.1% without any organizational unit of human resources management in our research sample.In these enterprises, there is human resources management providing by owner or randomly by any person.One representing person did not answer on this item.As stated in the table 6, we examined the determinant size of the enterprise in our research.
There exist statistically significant differences in items 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, and 17.Size of the enterprise is an important factor influencing strategic approach of the talent management representing by human resources strategy (I 2), and by the strategy of talent management (I 3).We consider that the strategy of talent management is more often and on higher quality level formulated in medium and large companies.It will be call for further research to test it.Size of the enterprise is a significant factor influencing identification of the talents representing by the knowledge about talents needed in the future (I 7) and carrying out special activities focused on talent acquisition (I 8).In the process of talent assessment we did not find item influenced by the size of the enterprise.Process of talent development is influenced by the size in two casesthat above-average abilities and skills are not taken into account in the process of recruitment (I 11) and there are sufficient financial sources for talent http://dx.doi.org/10.15414/isd2016.s12.09development (I 14).We consider that development is connected with better carrier opportunities in medium and especially in large companies.Testing of this will be other subject of our further research.Last phase of talent management process is talent retention.Size of the enterprise is determinant of the item about success in talent retention (I 15) and item connected with using specific procedures to support talents (I 17).Regarding the factor of foreign capital we can see statistically significant differences in items 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 17 (see table 7).Foreign capital allocated in the company is important determinant influencing strategic approach of the talent management representing by human resources strategy (I 2), and by the strategy of talent management (I 3).We consider that the strategy of talent management is more often formulated in companies with foreign capital.It will be call for further research to test it.Foreign capital influences also identification of the talents representing by carrying out special activities focused on talent acquisition (I 8).Differences in talent assessment system we can see in companies with foreign capital compared to companies without foreign capital (I 9, and I 10).Development of talents is also determined by existence of foreign capital in the enterprise.We can see differences in system of carrier planning (I 12), in the time spent for talent development (I 13), and in sufficient financial sources for talent development (I 14).Foreign capital is also determinant of the item connected with using specific procedures to support talents (I 17).We consider that better support activities for talent individuals could be seen in companies with allocated foreign capital.It will be call for our further research.Economic situation was another searched determinant of talent management process.
There is a difference in the system of recruitment oriented on talents with the highest potential (I 6).We consider that recruiters are more motivated to find higher quality talent in the enterprises with better economic situation.It should be other subject of the research in the future.Success in retention (I 15) is also determined by economic situation.We consider that companies with better economic situation have better opportunities to retain talented individuals who are motivated with higher salary.We should test it in further research.9).We would like to name some interesting differences found in this factor investigation. Existence of HR unit is an important factor influencing strategic approach of the talent management representing by human resources strategy (I 2), and by the strategy of talent management (I 3).We consider that company with any HR unit can name some people to be responsible for formulation of the strategy and they are able to spend more time for this process.All these factors cause differences in the process of talent management.Existence of HR unit, foreign capital, and economic situation determined nine searched items.And the last factor size of the company determined 8 items.When we look to our hypothesis, all of them were confirmed (see table 10).

Conclusion
We examined relationships between determinants (size of the enterprise, foreign capital, economic situation, and existence of HR unit) and phases of the talent management process representing by some special activities (17 items).This research contains 288 enterprises of Slovakia.There were some interesting findings identified as a results of our research.We can conclude that the strategic approach of talent management process represented by human resources strategy, and by talent management strategy is determined by the all selected factors (size of an enterprise, foreign capital, economic situation, and HR unit).There is statistically significant difference in carrying out of special activities focused on talent acquisition between enterprises with and without HR unit.The assessment of the talents representing by special reward system is determined by the economic situation of the enterprise.Level of sufficient financial resources for talent development is determined by the foreign capital allocated in the enterprise.
We identified only the existence of difference, so there are some limitations of our research.The ambition of the team is to continue with this research and find more interesting findings.We would like to examine if the strategy of talent management is more often and formulated on higher quality level in small, medium or large companies.Then we would like to test if it is true that better support activities for talent individuals could be seen in companies with allocated foreign capital.Other possible question for further research is connected with success in talent retention process if it is more successful in companies with better economic situation, because we consider that companies with better economic situation have better opportunities to retain talented individuals who are motivated with higher salary.