Subjective bias in talent identification

This chapter explores talent identification during the early stages of the merger and acquisition process. Acquiring management teams need to balance the assessment of accurate talent information with decisions that will influence integration planning which may ultimately affect the acquisition outcome. Acquirers may rely on inside information from target executives and as transformational change events, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) creates political arenas that increase the risk of overshadowing talent by poor and biased talent decisions and political manoeuvring. Talent identification is an underexplored area within M&A contexts which run the risk of informal talent identification and subjective decisions. The chapter proposes a framework for future study and identifies the need to extend and re-engineer HR due diligence to include a deeper analysis of expanded talent pools.