The challenge of aligning the workforce with the organization’s goals is clearly not confined to large, complex, global businesses. In fact, it’s the focus of a study aptly titled, 2007 SMB Owner Trends: Aligning People with Business Goals.

What’s not surprising is that the Achilles Group study found that Finding and retaining talent is by far the biggest SMB challenge. We know eRecruiting is no longer limited to large organizations.

Recruiting talent was identified as the biggest HR challenge–although HR respondents didn’t equally emphasize the challenges of talent management initiatives such as performance management or retaining talent.

Although this is a study specific to small and medium businesses, remarks in the study’s introduction easily apply to businesses of all sizes:

People matter — success is linked to people, because labor costs represent the largest ongoing cash disbursement and because financial performance is typically tied to the people capacity of an organization.