Talent management in academia: the effect of discipline and context on recruitment

Although talent management is widely discussed in large for – profit organisations and multinationals, it has been little discussed in relation to higher education. This paper examines one aspect of talent management, recruitment, in academia in accounting, in two different countries, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland. It frames the study around three dilemmas–transparency versus autonomy, the power of human resources versus the power of academics, and equality versus homogeneity. It considers the recruitment context and drivers, what this tells us about how talent is defined, and the insights that can be gained from comparing recruitment across different disciplines and geographical contexts. By examining recruitment in one discipline across different contexts, we show that recruitment is influenced by a complex interplay between subfield and context which can be linked to the strategic priorities of universities in the three contexts, resulting in different definitions of talent.