Unfairly Labeled

Chapter 8

Recruiting

As the United States comes closer to full employment, many business leaders are becoming more aware of how critical high-performing individuals are to an organization. Companies are struggling to understand how to attract and retain top talent. Robert Reich, an award-winning professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, described the importance of recruiting top talent for businesses. He said,

Nowadays, any competitor can get access to the same information technology, the same suppliers, the same distribution channels, and often the same proprietary technology. The only unique asset that a business has for gaining a sustained competitive advantage over rivals is its workforce—the skills and dedication of its employees. There is no other sustainable competitive advantage in the modern, high-tech, global economy.

According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 10,000 people will turn 65 years old every day for the next 19 years. This will be a tsunami of departing employees with deep institutional knowledge. As organizations struggle to cope with the vacuum left by retiring employees, they must also focus on recruiting heavily from the upcoming and incoming employee talent pool: millennials. This creates what is known as the talent gap, the void left by retiring baby boomers and not yet filled by millennials. In a quest to fill the talent gap, business leaders and human resource professionals ...