ABSTRACT
If you ask top executives across the globe what are the greatest challenges to competitive success they face, they will invariably bring up the so-called “War for Talent.” Across a wide range of industries it is not just the ability to get business or the state of the economy that keeps executives up at night, but finding employees who have the leadership capacity and talent to implement new and more complex global strategies. Indeed, in the 2007 Conference Board Survey 79 percent of CEOs of successful U.S. firms rated availability of talent as their chief business problem (Corporate Authorship TCB, 2007). Talent shortage has also become a critical issue in fast-growing emerging economies, such China and India, where large low-skill labor pools mask severe shortages of truly high-quality candidates (see Part 3 of the current volume). For example, India’s NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) has warned that the Indian IT sector faces a shortfall of 500,000 professionals by 2010 that will threaten the competitiveness of the country’s offshore IT services (Johnson, 2007). This looming talent shortage is so critical that the Indian IT provider HCL Technologies, with over 50,000 employees and revenues over $2 billion, has adopted the radical philosophy of putting “the employee first and the customer second,” based on the belief that great employees have become scarcer than customers (Birkinshaw, Crainer and Mol, 2007).
