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Introduction
Talent development (TD) is the process of ensuring that an organization has a pool of skilled employees ready when needed. It naturally follows that a key component of TD is employer-provided training [1]. One strategic option would be for an organization to focus (primarily) on developing a workforce via training (and other human capital enhancing processes), which we label as “making” talent. Alternatively, the opposite strategic choice would be to maintain a pool of talent by (primarily) hiring (i.e. “buying”) attractive workers, who presumably already hold the sought-after human capital or experience. While the strategic choice to “buy” vs “make” would seem to be an impactful one on its own for an organization, we postulate that it is also important to layer on some assessment of the external talent pool as well, since it would naturally follow that if an organization chooses to focus on buying talent, then that is dependent upon being able to find desirable applicants.
Employers need to make their training decisions in alignment with their assessment of the quality of job applicants to whom they have access. Too often, though, these two considerations are considered separately (or the second one not at all) by academics, even within the subdiscipline of talent management (TM). In this paper, training and applicant quality are considered concurrently. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between an employer's perception of the quality of available applicants and the employer's choice (1) to “buy” qualified staff, or (2) to hire available workers and then “make” (i.e. develop) them in-house via employer-supported training. This study seeks to make two conceptual contributions. First, emerging from an interdisciplinary review of the selected literature spanning the sub-disciplines of (macro-micro) TM and workplace training, we develop and utilize a typological model of four mutually exclusive categories that classify employer rationales in recruiting talent and training talent within their organizations. Then, we explore the characteristics of employers within each of these four categories. This second part is quantitatively focused and explores the factors that influence employers' TD choices. Further we explore the relationship between those choices and finding “positions hard to fill”, while controlling for other HRM variables. Thus, our study is theoretically driven, and our findings are...