Growing In-House Talent a More Common Trend

Mercer said the shift in personnel policy is most pronounced among companies whose current strategy is to buy talent; more than half (56%) said they expect to build more in the future.

Some 51% said they are now equally divided between promoting from within and hiring from the outside. Some 15% of respondents said they expect to step up their efforts to hire more employees from outside, the survey of more than 300 large employers showed.

The employers surveyed cite attracting/retaining the right employees as their top reward program challenge over the next 12 months (83% cite this issue as “very important” and 16% cite it as “somewhat important”).

Differentiating high performers ranks second on the list of current manager issues (78% and 21%, respectively), and cost control is third (75% and 23%, respectively).

Other findings

Mercer also asked survey participants about their corporate reward programs.

Just 17% of the respondents said their current reward programs support the organization’s talent requirements to a great extent.

The majority (69%) said their reward programs support their talent needs to a moderate extent while 14% felt there was a minimal connection between their organization’s reward programs and talent needs.

External benchmarking is the technique most commonly used to make decisions about how to allocate reward investments (used by 75% of the employers surveyed), followed by best practices among other organizations (65%), and employee surveys or other employee feedback (48%). 

Few companies (29%) assess workforce trends based on internal statistical modeling of workforce patterns to guide their reward investment decisions.

The complete Mercer survey is available this Mercer Web site .