DYNAMICS OF MANAGING A SPECIALIZED TALENT POOL OF EMPLOYEES.

Organizational policy that governs promotion, retention, and hiring practices is critical to a firm's human resource management strategy. The policies implemented by firms will vary based on the available supply of qualified employees. As organizations become increasingly reliant on technology and data, their need for specialized and skilled employees also increases. Further, the market for technologically skilled workers continues to become more competitive and in turn, hiring and retaining qualified, skilled, and experienced employees becomes increasingly difficult. Organizations will likely have to alter their human resources management strategy to maintain their required talent pool. Analyzing the hiring, retention, and promotion structures within an organization, this research investigates the effects of limiting the population of low-density, skilled employees available for an organization to hire. Representing a more competitive talent marketplace and talent pool, the goal of this research is to understand how employee retention strategies, incentives, and internal promotion policy can be altered to achieve desired manning levels within these highly skilled disciplines. Leveraging a system dynamics model, this study builds an interactive simulation tool allowing policy makers to view the potential outcomes of their policy decisions. System dynamics models the underlying system structure providing insight into variable interaction, causal relationships, and system behavior. The outcomes of this simulation will allow policy makers to identify differences in policy outcomes, reveal potential policy leverage points, and make more informed policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]