While two out of five employers in the HR sector are worried about losing staff, around the same number are doing nothing to keep them, according to a study.
Unsurprisingly then, Reed’s HR 2012 Salary and Market Insight report also revealed that nearly half of all junior HR managers were either actively searching or plan to start looking for a new job over the next 12 months. This figure compares with 39% across all pay grades.
More worryingly still, the survey of 1,500 HR employers and employees indicated that, although a third were experiencing a skills shortage in their organisation, a quarter did not know if they were facing one or not.
Jason Willis, divisional director at Reed HR, said that this lack of understanding suggested that firms weren’t doing enough to measure, manage and retain the talent that they currently had.
“The majority of businesses are now being run in a very lean way, with little surplus of skills to take up the slack when someone leaves for a new role,” he said. “This means that effective talent management is more important than ever and the first step to this is understanding the skills within the organisation.”
Nonetheless, research showed that “one person with the right mindset was worth seven without”, he added.
In a bid to try and stem a brain drain, some 46% of respondents said that they were investing in training, a third were focusing on providing internal promotion opportunities, while a quarter were looking to recruit new talent from outside.
