The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) recently released a report on Talent Management. We like it when our customer and the most significant HR association with its over 200,000 members takes a look at what we see as the most critical factor of HR today.

With only 11% of respondents having an HR department of 25 or more individuals and 22% more than 10, the results represent mostly the collected voices of small companies.
The top four areas of improvement the respondents looked for in their talent management programs were:

(1) Building a deeper reservoir of successors at every level (28%),
(2) Creating a culture that made employees want to stay with the organization (17%),
(3) Identifying gaps in current employee and candidate competency levels (17%), and
(4) Creating policies that encouraged career growth and development opportunities (16%).

However, one interesting trend to note was that about 60% of respondents said that their budget for recruiting and development initiatives will increase over the next three years, while only 45% said the same for the retention initiative.