Talent management practices in tourism sector: A research in five star hotels in Antalya region

20th century has been an era that economic, social and political changes became quite quickly. During this period, opportunities brought by fast developing technologies transform local economies into global economies day by day. With the increase in competition among companies, human resources have gained significant importance for companies to maintain their operations. For this reason, companies have begun to effort to attract, develop and retain the high-skilled individuals with high potential. At this point, "Talent" has come out as the concept that companies need. Human capital, that is unique and unlikely to be imitated, has become the most important and indispensable factor in order for the companies to win over their competitors. Thus, the concept of "Talent Management" has emerged and talent management has been identified as a critical success factor in companies increasingly. In the tourism industry, that is labor-intensive, one of the major problems encountered by human resource managers are recruitment and retention. Low wages, long working hours, lack of personal career opportunities and high labor turnover are the conditions that negatively affect the employee engagement. In this situation, talent management offers interesting opportunities in order to overcome these difficulties that experienced in the tourism sector. The aim of this research is to determine that whether the human resources departments of five star hotels in Antalya are meeting the functions of talent management at their hotel or not, to demonstrate the importance of talent management perspective in five star hotels and to make suggestions about the subject. In this context, according to the results of this research, it is understood that the talent management approach have started to be adopted, but talent management practices in five star hotels have been insufficient yet.