TALENT MANAGEMENT IN THE TIME OF CRISIS – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND STATE OF THE ART SURVEY IN CROATIA

In today’s environment of global economic crisis, companies must deal with one of the biggest challenges in managing human resources if they want to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and that is talent management. Paper explains concepts of talent and talent management, basic practices of talent management, and managing talent in crisis time. The empirical part of the paper assesses talent management practices in Croatian companies, and changes which occurred in the talent management practice as a result of a global economic crisis, which have been compared with changes in talent management practices due to the crisis in Great Britain, as a representative of most developed European countries. Results indicate that practices of talent management are partly developed in enterprises in the sample and that global economic crisis resulted in restrictive talent management practices, compared with practices used by successful European and other companies all over the world which were more flexible.