Bakgrund: Vikten av att attrahera rätt personal är stor då företag söker långsiktiga konkurrensfördelar och stora resurser läggs idag på arbetet med denna viktiga uppgift. För att attrahera potentiella arbetstagare använder sig företag idag framförallt av direkt och riktad information till de individer och formella grupper av individer som bedöms som intressanta. Denna typ av kommunikation kan ses utelämna stora delar av den omgivning som inom socialpsykologin anses ha stor påverkan på individens val och agerande. Syfte: Att söka förståelse för och vidareutveckla teorin kring hur talent attraction kan ske genom att tilltala individen emotionellt, via den sociala omgivningen och genom att se till individens identitetsskapande. Metod: Genom ett expert- och snöbollsurval har 8 experter inom det valda ämnesområdet identifierats och intervjuats. Formen för intervjuerna har varit av diskussionskaraktär. Resultat: Vi har i uppsatsen presenterat stöd för att omgivningen påverkar individens val av arbetsgivare, att val av arbetsgivare har en påverkan på individens identitet och att även emotionella faktorer har inverkan vid individens val av arbetsgivare. Dessa resultat menar vi innebär att potentiella arbetstagare bör ingå som en intressent till varumärket. Detta medför en förändrad syn på hur arbetsgivare kan arbeta med talent attraction då emotionella och symboliska faktorer utgör ett komplement till de rationella och kompensatoriska faktorer som vi sett dominera dagens teoribildning.

Taking into account the rapidly changing of the environment nowadays and the necessity of being different between organizations, this paper tries to show how to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in companies, through talented people using talent management strategies. Here is included all theoretical framework where we will explain our understanding of talent management, talented people and the creativity as a talent. This framework gives us the tools needed to be able to analyse a real talent management strategy. During the analysis we will discover that a talent management strategy has to be fitted with the corporate strategy and with the corporate culture and also, that there are infinite ways to develop the talent management activities, it depends on the organization which develops it. For instance we are going to study two companies, Zerogrey and Google, which are very different between them but both of them have a talent management strategy.

Globalisation has brought on dynamic markets and competition, and with that obliged companies to focus on long-term strategies and a greater focus on attracting, developing and retaining its employees. The present hunt for talent can be entitled as talent management, a concept that nowadays cannot be avoided. Talent management evidently not only affects companies, but also the newly graduates that are about to be employed. Students within business and economics are one affected group, since there is an increased competition for the most talented students within that field. Hence, it also concern different universities and Business Schools that offer education within the field as they are expected to provide students with certain skills before entering the working life. This leads us to an investigation of the following problem statement: How could a business student become more employable and how does a Business School respond to the requirements of the companies in the view of the war for talent? The main purpose with this study is therefore to obtain a comprehension of how newly graduates from Umeå School of Business (USBE) can become increasingly attractive among large organisations within the business world. In this qualitative study we wish to gain a deeper understanding of abovementioned issues and organisations’ talent management, and therefore we have used a hermeneutic perspective. Consequently, we have performed telephone interviews with people that are well acquainted with recruitment and human resource related issues at large companies in Sweden. The eight interviewed companies include; Öhrlings PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Sony Ericsson, Volvo Group, Nobia and Nordea, as well as three companies who requested to be held anonymous and are thereby ficticiously named: HRCompetence, CapitalBank and Consultancy AB. In addition, we arranged group interviews with personell at USBE to get an insight of whether the Business School is focusing on facets that are valued by the organisations. The scientific approach has been deductive, and the results from the empiricism has therefore been analysed together with recognised theories. The main theories used in this study regards Human Resource Management, Talent Management, Employment and Higher Education Institutions which leads us into Branding. The results of the research show that students can become more employable by developing certain characteristics and competences. The most important ones are: driving force, education, work experience, activities in parallel to studies, international experience and good grades. When it comes to the Business School and in this case USBE, it can respond to companies’ requirements by most importantly increasing its corporate and community relations and increase its marketing in order to strengthen its brand. This could be done through providing internships, develop the alumni network, find alternative channels to corporate and community relations and marketing and engaging in internal marketing.

Because of the potential power and rapid economic development, China currently not only has been one of the world’s top exporters, but also endeavors to attract a lot of foreign investments and talents. Beside, currently more and more Taiwanese have jobs in China. Under these circumstances, what I want to research is to explore how China government attracts foreign talents for assisting its economic development. Compared with other seven countries, the issue of attracting foreign talents for China would be new so that I decided to choose several represent countries from North America, Europe, and Asia regions for having further exploration on how different countries attract foreign talents to assist their countries’ economic development. The study found the contribution of most foreign talents in China would focus on the main five industries—electronic information, biomedicine, advanced manufacturing, new materials’ field, resource and environment, and emerging saving and new energies. Rapid economic development has caused the urgent talents’ need in China. In this regard, both of China central and local governments have been triggered on developing and coordinating more comprehensive policies of attracting foreign talents than before. Due to national economic development goals, especially in high-skilled and high-end industries, to attract international student and to relax immigration regulation have been the important tools of attracting and retaining foreign talents. However, what suggestion the study would like to give is that the government should notice the unbalanced incentives provided between foreign and domestic talents. Otherwise, the government may play as a role of forcing domestic talents creating their careers overseas.

This thesis consists of three chapters on financial structure, managerial compensation, and product markets. The unifying theme of these chapters is to examine how the financial decisions of firms are affected by market imperfections. Chapter 1 places emphasis on the impact of internal imperfections arising from asymmetric beliefs (or behavioral biases) and agency conflicts by examining how these internal imperfections affect managerial compensation and corporate financial structure. On the other hand, Chapters 2 and 3 incorporate external market imperfections especially arising from imperfect product market competition. More specifically, these two chapters develop market equilibrium frameworks to examine how the matching market for CEOs and firms interacts with the product market to affect the distributions of CEO compensation and firm size. In Chapter 1, we develop a dynamic model to examine the effects of asymmetric beliefs of a firm's manager and blockholders regarding the profitability of the firm's projects, and differing attitudes towards their risk, on its capital structure. The firm's capital structure reflects the tradeoff between the positive incentive effects of managerial optimism that increases the manager's output and blockholders' private benefits against the negative effects of risk-sharing costs. We provide several testable implications for the effects of the degree of managerial optimism as well as permanent and transitory components of the firm's risk on different components of capital structure. In our calibration of the model, performed separately for different industries, we show that while optimism and risk have qualitatively similar effects on capital structure in different industries, their quantitative effects are significantly different. The interactive effects of asymmetric beliefs and agency conflicts could potentially explain a significant portion of the substantial inter-industry variation in capital structure. Chapter 2 studies how the distributions of CEO talent and compensation vary across industries, and how product market characteristics affect these distributions. We develop a market equilibrium model that incorporates the competitive assignment of CEOs to firms in a framework in which firms engage in imperfect product market---specifically, monopolistic---competition. Using the distributions of CEO pay and firm value in each of twelve Fama-French industries, we calibrate the parameters of our structural model, and indirectly infer the unobserved distributions of CEO talent and firm quality that together determine firm output. We then conduct several counterfactual experiments using the calibrated models corresponding to each of the industries. We find that the distribution of CEO talent does, indeed, vary dramatically across industries. More importantly, contrary to the conclusions of earlier studies that abstract away from the effects of the product market (Tervio, 2008 and Gabaix and Landier, 2008), the impact of CEO talent on firm value appears to be quite significant. Our estimates of the effect of CEO talent on firm value for the industries in our sample are two orders of magnitude higher than those obtained by the aforementioned studies. Further, our estimates suggest that the compensation of CEOs is quantitatively in line with their contributions to firms. Broadly, our study shows that it is important to incorporate the product market environment in which firms operate when assessing the contributions of CEOs to firms. Chapter 3 builds a market equilibrium framework in which the CEO-firm matching process is affected by the product market. We show that under reasonable assumptions there is a unique equilibrium in which only managers with ability above a unique cutoff level are matched to firms. This very simple screening process endogenizes the distribution of active managers who match with firms. Our calibration of the model using a parametric approach, which is in contrast with the empirical analysis performed in Chapter 2, strongly supports the principle arguments on the importance of CEO talent and appropriate CEO talent levels (on average) in Chapter 2. In addition, due to the law of demand and supply, which is a key feature of the extended model, we obtain somewhat different influence of some of product market characteristics on CEO pay. Furthermore, our parametric approach allows us to draw some implications for the effects of CEO talent distribution on the market equilibrium.

“The War for talent” – the fight for talented people, that can improve an organisation’s performance – is getting tougher every day. This study focuses on the topic of employer branding, which is becoming a popular “weapon” in this battle. Private organisations, being used to applying marketing principles, have already discovered this tool. However, the public sector, with a lack of marketing experience, is perceived to have a weaker employer brand. This is why this study has been conducted with regards to public administrations. The aim of this paper has been to uncover potentials within a public organisation, that could be used to highlight the advantages of a public employer.In order to build a framework for the problem, a literature review, considering theoretical concepts about the “War for talent”, the employee value proposition and employer branding has been carried out. To gain a deeper understanding of the matter, qualitative research in the form of semi-structural interviews has been executed using the case of a Swedish municipality. Further empirical ascertainment has been achieved by reviewing recently used job advertisements.The analysis of the data has shown that the municipality’s employer brand image is perceived as rather weak, however, there are strong indicators for potential within the organisation. It is possible to say that the conveyed employer brand image is not congruent with the brand identity.Moreover the analysis of the employee value proposition has shown factors that can help to narrow the target group of applicants. One significant result considering this issue is the highlighting of social responsibility as one of the more prominent potentials.Keywords: The war for talent, employer branding, employee value proposition, public administration, recruitment

Post-industrial economic restructuring in developed countries has downgraded the role of blue-collar labour in regional growth, giving way, conversely, to occupations that demand high concentrations of human capital. Human capital has been documented to positively affect regional growth and income, signifying an urban planning shift towards amenities provision, as a human capital attraction tool. An emerging, highly-valued amenity in the post-industrial society is nightlife. Following Florida’s reasoning on the rising salience of the creative class, this paper investigates the hypothesis that nightlife attracts high human capital or skilled individuals. It focuses on the paradigm of Greece, using data acquired by the Greek statistics agency and, to a lesser extent, the Greek yellow pages. It employs two measures, the human capital one –calculated as the percentage of the population holding a bachelor degree and above- and an approximation of Florida’s creative class measure –occupational categorization according to job complexity. Bivariate correlations are applied to account for human capital attracting factors and structural equation modelling to assess nightlife’s impact on the two measures and respectively, on regional growth.

The current study assessed the efficacy of one TRIO program, Talent Search. This study compared the postsecondary enrollment of Talent Search participants and non participants. The comparison was conducted on a sample of 284 low-income college ready seniors from three south central Kentucky high schools. Results indicated that low-income students participating in the Talent Search program did enroll at a significantly higher rate than non-participants. This study also examined if the length of time students participated in the Talent Search program was significantly related to postsecondary enrollment. Results indicated no significant correlations. Additionally, this study examined if a relationship in postsecondary enrollment among Talent Search participants as related to their classification by Talent Search eligibility criteria of (a) low income only, (b) first generation only, and (c) both low-income and first generation exist. Results indicated no significant correlations. The findings in this study will help provide support of the effectiveness of TRIO, particularly Talent Search.

Connecting, living and working with people coming from different horizons across the globe has never been as intese as nowadays. This bordless world increases the amount of competitors that companies have to deal with in their business environment. The importance of establishing strategies and policies, that enable to blend diversity of cultures and brains, has been noticed by many. Moreover, the increasing necessity of creating a system which is able to struggle against the shortage of talents was and is still rendering even more complicated the task and the duties of leaders and managers of today. We see in the beauty of football not only a passion for the game but also and rather an effective way to face and to cope with the aformentioned two issues. The purpose of this thesis is to spell out and to stress some aspects that emerge from football and that could be suggested as new practices to compete in the 21st century for global companies.

Contemporary studies in international management field conceptualize subsidiaries as semi-autonomous entities. By involving in entrepreneurial undertakings and strategic activities, subsidiaries could contribute strategic value to parent multinational corporation (MNC). Distinguishing from previous researches derived from entrepreneurship theory and done by Birkinshaw and his colleagues, this study incorporated human capital theory and knowledge-based view (KBV) to fulfill the existing research gap and enlarged our understanding of subsidiary entrepreneurship. This research proposed two models to unlock and testify the underexplored phenomenon of subsidiary entrepreneurship. In the first model, this research incorporated human capital management in MNCs context and testified that not merely top management team (TMT) entrepreneurial leadership and subsidiary entrepreneurial culture were critical antecedents of subsidiary¡¦s strategic initiative, but the human resource management (HRM) practices of subsidiary talent management played an important mediator to generate the entrepreneurial system. In the second model, this study demonstrated the cross-field integration and synthesis of entrepreneurial literatures, human capital theory and knowledge-based view and expressed a more comprehensive illustration of strategic entrepreneurship. This study certified that absorptive capacity could facilitate subsidiary¡¦s entrepreneurial culture and further enhance subsidiary¡¦s strategic initiative. Moreover, subsidiary¡¦s practices of talent management could facilitate its absorptive capacity and further contribute to subsidiary¡¦s strategic outputs. By analyzing the empirical data collected from 202 MNCs¡¦ foreign subsidiaries in Asian area, this study testified that the subsidiaries which could contribute strategic value creation for parent MNCs should equip multilayer of initiative-takings: the local distinctive capability, market initiative and knowledge outflow. Furthermore, the HRM practices of talent management in subsidiary played critical mediating role on both the development of organizational capability, improvement of absorptive capacity and the enhancement of subsidiary strategic initiative. TMT entrepreneurial leadership was the core engine which could activate subsidiary¡¦s mechanisms to facilitate the activities of strategic value creations.