It’s Fourth of July time again and America is 233 years old—a prime number. Many of the Baby Boomers in the prime of their careers looking towards retirement are singing a different tune about when they’re 64. A number of factors including deflated 401(k)s, healthcare costs, non-traditional work schedules, and the economy are stalling their departures amidst changing workforce demographics.

It seems Baby Boomers are not retiring like lemmings and creating talent shortages. Here’s some important research around workforce age issues:

Watson Wyatt says that older workers are delaying retirement by at least three years.

The Center for State & Local Government Excellence reports similar findings for the millions of public sector workers they represent with 85% saying that employees are delaying retirement.

The Difference a Downturn can Make: Assessing the Early Effects of the Economic Crisis on the Employment Experiences of Workers from Boston College's Sloan Center on Aging & Work offers insights into engagement and the economic crisis across age groups.

Change in Employee Engagement by Age Group after Onset of Economic Crisis

The report Age & Generations: Understanding Experiences at the Work Place explores the question Think Age is Enough to Predict Worker Needs? And Engaging The 21st Century Multi-Generational Workforce features a definition of engagement and identifies key drivers across age groups.

Engaging talent is shown to be different things to different people. However, the business benefits are well worth the effort, as demonstrated by increased productivity and organizational performance.

There’s clearly a talent and brand connection that drives business performance. Strong employment brands are essential in any economic environment if you want to attract top talent.

Employer Brand Institute's Employer Branding Global Research study with 2000+ respondents found that 46% of companies will increase investment in their employment branding this year. Nearly two-thirds of those will focus on career websites and recruitment marketing.

In Europe, Potentialpark Communications issued their list of top career websites with study findings that illustrate why career sites drive employment brand success: 96% of students do their job shopping online.

How do you get there? Start with a clear employment brand strategy that also reduces costs and reaps business results. From our research, the investment could pay for itself many times over.

Responding to cost control measures and smaller budgets, Watson Wyatt’s 2009 HR Technology Trends Survey found 61% of companies are looking to optimize their current HR processes and technologies.

For those who practice the principles and execute the initiatives, strategic talent management is the key to business management. Internet connectivity and Web 2.0 technologies now support software as a service deployment of these processes.

Additional findings from Seeking Cost Advantages in HR Technology and Service Delivery - 2009 HR Technology Trends Survey concur:

Talent management has become a higher priority for one-third of companies due to the economic crisis.

Social networking, while extremely new, is already being used more than most other Web 2.0 tools.

Further evolution of social networking habits and technology has created a great new opportunity: the ability to participate in and benefit from a talent community. Here is the definition as outlined in the Taleo Research white paper The Talent Community:

The talent community is defined as a distributed group of talent management practitioners who interact virtually rather than face-to-face, for the purpose of sharing talent management knowledge, talent management solutions, and talent profiles. Members are linked not by their place of employment, but by their common use—across organizations—of talent management technology applications.

Powered by user contributions on a common platform or Talent Grid, members benefit from conversation enabled by online discussion in an ecosystem of knowledge, solutions, and subject matter experts. This enhancement to talent practice adds new value to our customers and the growing talent community.

According to the Washington Post’s story Federal Antitrust Probe Targets Tech Giants, Sources Say, several large technology companies—Google, Apple, Genentech, Yahoo—are being investigated for antitrust behavior. The focus of the investigation doesn’t have to do with their products, intellectual property, or marketing practices—it’s their recruiting.

It’s alleged that they have agreements to not hire away top talent from each other, which could be perceived as a restraint of trade. Could this have big implications on non-compete agreements? If it’s not legal for companies to have agreements that other companies won’t try to take their best talent away, is it a huge leap to say that it shouldn’t be legal for companies to prevent their employees from actively pursuing employment on the other side of the street?

Interestingly, on the flipside, there’s the theory that you don’t want to hire talent away from your competitors. An MIT Sloan Management Review article, How to Minimize the Risks of Hiring Outside Stars, cautions: The more star workers’ performance depends on the people around them and on their familiarity with their company’s processes and culture, the less likely they are to perform at the same level on a new stage, at least at first.

Hiring salespeople from the competition always seems like a no-brainer, but there are many pitfalls with this hiring strategy, is outlined in Beware of Hiring Your Competitor’s Salespeople.

Corporate culture issues can also negate the benefits of poaching top performers, according to Are You Hiring a Rock Star or a Turnover Statistic? and Knowledge @ Wharton's article Hiring from Outside the Company: How New People Can Bring Unexpected Problems.

Perhaps, instead of holding your employees under litigious lock and key, allow your employees to thrive at what they do best, and provide career expansion opportunities to retain the top talent you have.

Whether your organization is hiring and retaining many or few, the importance of quality of hire and the difference in output from top performers is real. Although this is not news, new research and reiteration of the best methodologies is always welcome – especially when articulated in top-tier business media.

Harvard Business Review provides an outstanding set of information resources in its article, The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad, the accompanying podcast interview with author Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, and a Recruiting Practices Self-Assessment Quiz.

Although focused on the senior level (the lead author is a partner with executive search firm Egon Zehnder International), the emphasis on the significance of hiring and the issues around selection of the best candidate resonate across all levels. And, equally significant—instead of virtually preaching to the HR choir—the audience for this publication is executive leadership themselves.