Talent management in a new research context: Main issues and peculiarities

This paper presents a thorough analysis of different talent management practices implemented by local companies from Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine. In particular, I pay special attention to the country-specific environments that shape the peculiarities of talent management practices and provide discussion about its future perspectives within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) context. All of the case studies presented in this review illustrate how different companies from the specified countries deal with such key issues of talent management as the attraction, recruitment, indoctrination, development, motivation and retention of high-potential employees. Specifically, I demonstrate that organizations from Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine share a common feature of talent management policies, systems and practices being more formalized and highly regulated especially compared to Western – more developed – countries. It is also revealed that in Belarusian and Kazakhstani companies open performance appraisal systems are unpopular and performance-based remuneration mechanisms remain underdeveloped. Meanwhile, in Ukrainian companies, there are a persistence of elitist talent definitions and a preeminence of talent retention practices, whereas in Belarusian and Kazakhstani companies there is a prevalence of Universalist talent definitions, with former concentrating on specific aspects of talent management, i.e. the attraction, development or retention of young specialists, and the latter focusing more on talent development practices. Finally, I conclude by demonstrating that talent management is influenced by a number of factors, some of which are rather specific to Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine, but at the same time can be featured as common for the CIS context.