Culture Is the Key to Winning the Talent Wars

The number one issue troubling business leaders today is the increasing difficulty of recruiting, motivating, and retaining the best talent. There is a talent shortage at every level, in every industry. The talent wars are back on and more heated than ever.

Bruce Tulgan and his firm, RainmakerThinking, have been tracking this trend since the mid-1990s, basing their work on hundreds of thousands of interviews, survey responses, and consulting sessions with business leaders, managers, and rank-and-file employees from hundreds of companies. Hiring managers report – at every level, in every industry, in organizations small, mid-sized, and large-scale alike – that hiring, managing, and retaining top talent is more difficult today than at any time in recent memory.

Bruce Tulgan has been listening to these concerns. Based on the latest RainmakerThinking research, he has released a new white paper for employers who want to improve attraction, hiring, and retention: Winning the Talent Wars: Build a Winning Culture of Attraction, High-Performance & Retention.

Make no mistake, the talent wars are affecting organizations of every shape and size:

• Average durations of employment are decreasing
• Voluntary unplanned turnover rates are increasing
• Departure demand (those employed but seeking other employment) is increasing
• Open-position rates and time-to-hire rates are increasing
• Early voluntary departure of new hires is increasing

The challenges of the talent wars are clear. The question this white paper seeks to answer is, “What can employers and managers do about it?” There are two options: enter a bidding war for talent or build a winning culture. RainmakerThinking’s research shows that bidding wars don’t work. At the highest level, the goal must be to build a winning culture.

About Bruce Tulgan: An adviser to business leaders all over the world and a sought-after keynote speaker and seminar leader, he is the founder and CEO of RainmakerThinking, Inc., a management research and training firm, as well as RainmakerThinking.Training, an on-line training company. 

About RainmakerThinking, Inc.: A management research, training and consulting firm and the leading authority on generational issues in the workplace, founded and run by best-selling author and internationally recognized management expert Bruce Tulgan. Since 1993, their research has included hundreds of thousands of participants from hundreds of organizations in a wide range of industries. RainmakerThinking continues to pursue three ongoing longitudinal studies: The Generational Shift in the Workforce (since 1993), Leadership/Management/and Supervision (since 1995), and Human Capital Management (since 1997). Based on this ongoing research, RainmakerThinking has provided assessment, training, and consulting services for more than 400 different organizations ranging from the United States Armed Forces to Wal-Mart.