Page 31 - Retaining Top Employees

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“Employee What?!” 19

tion of hiring independent contractors—free agents—rather than,
or alongside, “core employees.”
The War for Talent
After the concept of core competencies and the rise of the free
agent, the third key factor in current thinking on employee
retention is a theory encompassing employee acquisition (hir-
ing), employee retention, and performance management some-
times called “the war for talent.”
When this phrase was first used is lost in the dusty web
pages of time, but it gained most exposure when the consulting
firm of McKinsey & Company in 1997 issued a report (and later
a book) titled The War for Talent, based on a study involving 77
companies and almost 6,000 managers and executives.
The “war for talent” mindset proposes that:
• The number of high-caliber individuals out there who
can perform your organization’s “mission-critical” (core
competency) tasks is limited.
• Those individuals are basically mercenaries for hire.
• You’re in a war with your competitors to attract and keep
such individuals.
Later espoused by many prominent “HR thinkers,” such as
John Sullivan of San Francisco State University, the “war for tal-
ent” approach stresses that employers must present a com-
pelling “employee value proposition”—essentially a set of rea-
sons why a potential employee should come and work for you
rather than go elsewhere.
Where Does Retention Start?
Whatever the validity of the underlying approach, the “war for
talent” methodology made an undeniably positive impact on
employee retention thinking, through the realization that it’s
much easier and considerably less expensive to retain a current
good employee than to find a new one.
That’s something that sales and marketing executives have