The Challenges of Total Talent Management in the Gig Economy

The growing use of external project-based or task-based workers for a limited period of time raises many unsolved questions for modern organizations. Who is responsible for managing them? Should a formal HR strategy be designed for such gig workers? What kind of actions can be developed to avoid their job and income insecurity and to foster their engagement? This chapter is an attempt to respond to these questions through a critical exploration of the emerging concept of total talent management, including both external and internal talents. We first present the main results of a quantitative survey among Belgian employers focused on the way they manage external workers: our original data highlight the informal and largely decentralized nature of such management practices in most organizations. We then build on the existing literature to provide an integrated analytical framework around the concept of total talent management structured in three main dimensions: the work status, the work content and the working conditions of external talents. Drawing on the ecosystem perspective suggested by Meijerink and Keegan (2019) on HRM in the gig economy, our research proposals open up a promising
research agenda likely to endow this emerging concept with more robust theoretical foundations.