Making talent a strategic priority

Making talent a strategic priority

The War for Talent never ended. Executives must constantly rethink the way their companies plan to attract, motivate, and retain employees.

JANUARY 2008 • Matthew Guthridge, Asmus B. Komm, and Emily Lawson

Source: Organization Practice

In This Article

• Exhibit 1: Business and HR leaders identify many reasons for an inability to deliver value through talent-management practices, and seven obstacles stand out.
• Exhibit 2: The suitability of job candidates varies across countries as a result of language problems, educational systems, and cultural issues.
• Exhibit 3: Executives do not see the HR function as having the influence and capabilities to shape effective talent-management strategies.
• Exhibit 4: Organizations cannot afford to neglect the contributions of all but the highest-ranking employees.

Audio is available for this article.

• Comments (1)

Companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage. Yet the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating, and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.

Ten years after McKinsey conducted its War for Talent research,¹ the 1997 study drawing attention to an imminent shortage of executives, the problem remains acute—and if anything has become worse. Companies face a demographic landscape dominated by the looming retirement of baby boomers in the developed world and by a dearth of young people entering the workforce in Western Europe. Meanwhile, question marks remain over the appropriateness of the talent in many emerging markets.

Business leaders are deeply concerned, judging by two McKinsey Quarterly global surveys. The first, in 2006, indicated that the respondents regarded finding talented people as likely to be the single most important managerial preoccupation for the rest of this decade. The second, conducted in November 2007, revealed that nearly half of the respondents expect intensifying competition for talent—and the increasingly global nature of that competition—to have a major effect on their companies over the next five years. No other global trend was