2015-08-21
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THESE are heady days for most companies. Profits are up. Capital is footloose and fancy-free. Trade unions are getting weaker. India and China are adding billions of new cheap workers and consumers to the world economy. This week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit а new high.
But talk to bosses and you discover а gnawing worryabout the supply of talent. "Talent" is one of those irritating words that has been hijacked by management gurus. It used to mean innate ability, but in modern business it has become а synonym for brainpower (both natural and trained) and especially the ability to think creatively. That may sound waffly; but look around the business world and two things stand out: the modern economy places an enormous premium on brainpower; and there is not enough to go round.
The best evidence of a "talent shortage" can be seen in hightech firms. The likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft are battling for the world's best computer scientists. Google, founded by two brainboxes, uses billboards bearing а mathematical problem: solve it for the telephone number to call. And once you have been lured in, they fight like hell to keep you: hence the growing number of Silicon Valley lawsuits.
As our survey this week shows, such worries are common in just about every business nowadays. Companies of аll sorts are taking longer to fill jobs - and say they are having to make do with sub-standard employees. Ever more money is being thrown at the problem-last year 2,300 firms adopted some form of talent-management technology-and the status and size of human-resource departments have risen accordingly. These days Goldman Sachs has a "university", McKinsey has a "people committee" and Singapore's Ministry of Manpower has an international talent division.
