Talent - finding it, getting it and keeping it - is shaping up as one of the decade's biggest challenges for marketers and ad agencies. And the biggest hurdle to meeting that challenge may well be that most employers still haven't grasped that employees really are in the position to call the shots in the relationship these days. 

That was the consensus of four of the country's top marketing industry recruiters during a round table, dubbed "Talent Wars," hosted by the Toronto chapter of the American Marketing Association earlier this month. Another consensus was that it's going to be a very long time-we're talking 10 to 15 years here-before the current talent supply and demand imbalance lets up. 

The tech sector, of course, is white hot compared to the rest of the economy, and this is having a massive ripple effect. Traditional packaged-goods companies are being effectively plundered by tech and dot-com start-ups looking for people with grounding in marketing. And marketing and advertising isn't making it onto graduating students' radar. 

So what can be done? 

The good news is that it's not all about the money. Money does matter. A lot. But other intangibles are just as important. 

The bad news, however, is that changing a company's culture on intangibles is likely far harder than throwing cash at people. As Stéfan Danis, president of Toronto's Mandrake Management Consultants, put it, companies have to move from an "acquisition of talent" mode to a "management of talent" posture. 

Employers can start by offering a more supportive work environment, suggested Roger Clarkson, vice-president of Toronto's SpencerStuart & Associates, by including things like on-site day care and fitness facilities, as well as being more open to flex hours and telecommuting. Danis noted that sabbaticals of a year or six months after five years on the job are becoming "a huge issue." 

Training and "face time" are also huge. Recruiter Timothy Snelgrove pointed out that the cohort of people 25 to 34 rightly feels neglected by upper management. That, added Sylvia MacArthur, president of Toronto's Madison MacArthur, even though this group is actually looking for their workplaces to provide a sense of "community" and even "family." 

Training, mentoring and coaching may seem costly and time-consuming, especially if the odds are a good many employees will leave before you can reap the full benefit of the investment in it. But if it's not done, you can bet staff are even more likely to move on. 

The best thing marketing companies can probably do? Give people something stimulating and challenging to do. With so many multinationals asking their Canadian operations to simply execute made-elsewhere strategies, noted MacArthur, it shouldn't be surprising that the best and the brightest are leaping at opportunities to actually do and create new things. 

Interestingly, the much-heralded brain drain of talent to the U.S. didn't even come up during the two-hour round table. In fact, MacArthur noted that her company is finding that U.S. organizations are setting up infrastructures here to service the U.S. market because they know there's a good talent pool in Canada and they can't lure as many people south as they'd like to. 

Sounds like an opportunity for multinational marketers to me.

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