The quest for the best: human resource practices to attract and retain talent

The ability to attract and retain talent is rapidly becoming one of the key issues for human resource managers and their organisations across the globe. This article explores some of the strategies and techniques that organisations are using to cope with this issue and presents the findings of recent studies that have assessed the effectiveness of these approaches. Although the results do not provide conclusive evidence of the link between human resource practices and the ability to attract and retain talent, they strongly suggest that high performance organisations are consistently outperforming their competitors on a number of human resource factors, including the level of teamwork and openness between co-workers, the training and development opportunities they offer to employees, and the degree of pro-activity in HR planning. Developing this capability begins with the realisation that effective human resource management underpins the competitiveness of organisations.