Towards total talent management practices: An exploration of management practices of external talents by Belgian companies

A growing external workforce and the rise of 'alternative work arrangements' (Cappelli & Keller, 2013) are radically transforming the structure of the workforce at the company level, leading to a ‘blended’ workforce collaborating side by side in the workplace (Camuffo & De Stefano, 2016; Dong & Ibrahim, 2017) and calling for an increasing consideration of external talents by user companies, beyond the legal risks of reclassification this could entail (Cross & Swart, 2022 ; Keegan & Meijerink, 2022 ; Retkowsky et al., 2022 ; van den Groenendaal et al., 2022). The concrete practices of Total Talent Management (TTM) developed by companies however remain poorly documented until now. We will here present the results of an in-depth survey among a hundred Belgian companies and suggest an original typology of TTM practices, in which the HR department is surprisingly not always playing a leading role.