Students Forum for The Open and Closed Styles of Talent Acquisition and Management Free/Open Source Software 20 th December, 2008 Spreading knowledge… unrestrained http://sf-foss.iiitm.ac.in/ SF-FOSS, IIITM Gwalior Page 1 of 14 sf-foss@iiitm.ac.in The Open and Closed Styles of Talent Acquisition and Management: Which takes an edge where Rahul Kala rahulkalaiiitm@yahoo.co.in Students‟ Forum for Free/Open Source Software, Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior, MP, INDIA Abstract The phenomenal success of Free/Open Source Software during the recent years has led researchers in all related fields to re-think and re-evaluate the studies and concepts, especially those which the open source violates. Talent management and talent acquisition is no exception to this. The sudden rise in open source projects and their success is a cause of motivation for all of us to evaluate their philosophy and implement the same. Proper talent management and acquisition of talent can play a key role in strengthening the industry. Traditional closed management with their classic way of functioning may still look at the open source model as a big mystery. Open source has violated many of the theories of Software Engineering like limited team size, decentralized project management, etc. The concepts of self-motivated individuals, adaptive division of labor, informal or indirect leadership, etc. are the contributions of the open source to the world. In this paper we discuss these concepts and state their differences with the way of working of closed talent management. Even though open source has various benefits in working, but requirement of a good coordination process, redundancy of development, versioning problems, etc. pose a limitation. We present an analogy of the talent management in the two concepts with that of the natural ecosystem. Talent in open source works in a manner similar to the ant colonies. Here the process is more community oriented and there is no single dictator power. The proprietary, on the other hand, works on talent as the lions ruling the den. There is a hierarchy and that needs to be respected. Only the leader has the right to make final decision, and that is binding. We also take a look into the present conditions of meltdown and show how the open source way is better suited for this scenario. Even though the present firms may be seeing a setback at this time of recession, the impact on firms with an open source way of working is much lighter or none at all. We also discuss the interactions between the two styles of talent management and present a model that can be adopted by the proprietary companies to benefit from open model. Our arguments of the paper not only deal with software, but also on content that comes under the domain of Creative Commons. We have taken the examples of Wikipedia, Sourceforge.net, Linux etc. for the various issues we discuss. Keywords: Human Resource, Talent Management, Recruiting, FLOSS, FOSS, Open Source, knowledge 1 Introduction With the increase in competition and rising growths of companies, talent acquisition and management of talent has become one of the prime concerns of any company. Companies are spending huge amounts of money to ensure that they get the best people to work for them. The growth, development and proper management of talent is another factor for which the firms are spending heavily. The world had been dominated by proprietary software for a long time. The IT revolution and the explosion of knowledge in the late 1990s made the IT jargons the center of attraction for the whole world. This phase even saw the coming up of new companies. The proper talent acquisition and talent management techniques were inevitable to be built up. It was this period where we find a lot of emphasis being given on the humans or employee base. Training sessions, Knowledge sharing practices, continuous performance evaluation etc. are all credited to the period. It was then in the late 1990s that the revolution of open source began to propagate. Despite quality software like Linux, Apache, Firefox, etc [5, 55, 58] that were built, the business model of this movement shook the foundations of the software industry. Talent management and talent acquisition under this movement was also very different. The techniques of talent management and talent acquisition of this style