We hear everywhere that people are in short supply. Yet strangely, this does not mean that good jobs have become plentiful for young people. As aging and low growth arrive at the same time, corporate workforce strategy is shifting from a competition for hiring toward the design of retention and redeployment.

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One of the most common complaints heard in business today is, “It is hard to find people.” Manufacturing sites are losing skilled workers, hospitals and care facilities lack enough people to handle shift work, and small and medium-sized companies in regional areas say they receive few applicants even after posting job openings. In sectors that depend heavily on physical labor, such as logistics, construction, shipbuilding, root industries, and face-to-face services, labor shortages have already become not a temporary difficulty but a constant operational risk. It is no longer unusual for companies to turn down orders because they lack workers, for hospitals to reduce beds because they lack staff, or for factories to adjust operating hours because they cannot find enough people.

Yet on the other side of the same society, a completely different voice is heard. Young people say there are no good jobs. Entry gates are narrow, requirements are high, and even when they manage to get hired, they often see no clear path for long-term growth. One side says there are no people; the other says there are no jobs. At first glance, this looks like a contradiction. But this contradiction is close to the core of today’s labor market. The problem is not simply that people are scarce. It is that the gap has widened between the people companies want and the jobs people want.

Aging reduces the number of new entrants into the labor market. As birth rates fall, the working-age population shrinks, and existing skilled workers approach retirement age. But this does not automatically create more good jobs for young people. When economic growth slows and companies become uncertain about future profits, they tend to reduce risk rather than boldly expand new hiring. They look for experienced workers who can contribute immediately rather than young workers who must be trained over time. They prefer project-based personnel or outsourcing to regular hiring, and they want already verified people rather than cultivating talent internally for new businesses.

This produces a strange labor-market scene. Companies say, “There are no usable people,” while young people say, “There are no jobs worth entering.” Worksites lack labor, but many of those jobs are not attractive to young people because of low wages, irregular hours, regional locations, and weak career prospects. The doors to office and professional jobs grow narrower, while demand rises for field jobs and care work, but the education and mobility pathways connecting the two are not sufficiently dense. The crisis of the labor market now appears not as a shortage of numbers but as a failure of connection.

This change fundamentally alters corporate workforce strategy. In the past, when people were lacking, companies thought they could simply hire more. But in an era when the supply of labor itself is shrinking and the mismatch between good jobs and needed skills is widening, hiring alone cannot solve the problem. Companies must now build the capacity to retain the people they already have for longer, retrain them, and move them into the places where they are needed. This is why the center of workforce strategy is shifting from hiring to retention, retraining, redeployment, and work redesign.

There is an easy trap in talking about labor shortages in an aging era. It is the expectation that because the number of people is shrinking, young people will soon worry less about employment. But reality is not that simple. What matters in the labor market is not only the number of people but the quality of jobs. People’s choices vary depending on what kind of job it is, where it is located, how much it pays, whether it allows long-term growth, whether it can sustain a life, and whether it is socially respected.

When young people choose jobs, they do not look only at salary. They also ask whether the job will lead to the next stage of their career, whether they can learn from it, whether it will completely destroy the rhythm of their life, and whether the organization treats people like disposable parts. When a regional manufacturer says it cannot find young workers, the issue includes not only low wages but also housing, transportation, culture, education, and social networks. When the care industry cannot find people, the issue includes working conditions, emotional labor, and social recognition. When hospitals and logistics sites struggle to recruit, the issue includes night shifts, intense workloads, and anxiety about physical exhaustion.

This makes the labor-market contradiction even deeper. Jobs that suffer from labor shortages are not necessarily the jobs young people want. The jobs young people want are not necessarily being created in large numbers. During periods of rapid economic growth, companies had the room to hire young people and train them. Even if they were inexperienced at first, companies could see them as future core talent and invest in their education. But in a low-growth era, corporate patience declines. The cost of hiring and training new workers feels burdensome, there is less room to absorb failure, and pressure for short-term results grows stronger. As a result, the hiring market produces the strange condition of demanding experience-like abilities even from new entrants.

This is not only a problem for young people. If every company looks only for experienced workers, someone has to train those experienced workers in the first place. But if each company reduces young-talent development to lower immediate costs, the entire market runs short of the seeds of experienced talent. What looks like a rational choice for an individual company produces a broader shortage of talent across the labor market. This is the trap of labor shortages in a low-growth period. Companies try to reduce costs, but in the process they weaken their own future talent base.

Still, simply increasing youth hiring does not solve everything. If the work offered to young people is repetitive labor with no growth potential, getting hired itself cannot be a solution. What kind of experience they gain in their first job, what kind of seniors they meet, what skills they learn, and what responsibilities they take on all shape the direction of their long-term careers. This is why youth employment policy must not remain focused only on hiring numbers. Good jobs for young people are not created by wages alone. Growth pathways, training structures, the quality of work, and organizational culture must be designed together.

Aging and the shortage of good jobs for young people are not opposite problems. They are two faces of the same structure. The more the number of people declines, the more society must create good entry points for young workers and sustainable roles for middle-aged and older workers. Companies that do not hire young people and seek only experienced workers lose their future. Companies that simply push out middle-aged and older workers lose their accumulated skill. The two generations must not be forced to compete for the same positions. They must be connected through different but complementary roles. This is why workforce strategy in an aging era is not merely about expanding hiring but about redesigning the organization.

For a long time, companies solved workforce problems through hiring. When people were lacking, they posted job openings, offered higher salaries, recruited from competitors, and hired headhunters. During a period of growth, this method worked to some extent. Markets expanded, populations grew, and university graduates continued to enter the labor market. Companies believed that they could find the people they needed from the external labor market at the right moment. But as demographics change and technology advances more quickly, that belief is increasingly being shaken.

Competition for hiring is becoming more expensive. People with specific technical skills, field experience, customer understanding, data capabilities, or the ability to handle complex equipment are wanted by every company. If there are enough of such people in the market, hiring can solve the problem. But when supply is limited, companies end up competing for the same people. Wages rise, hiring periods lengthen, pay equity with existing employees becomes unstable, and even newly hired workers may leave when better conditions appear elsewhere.

Moreover, hiring is not the end but the beginning. Hiring someone does not mean that person immediately becomes a source of organizational performance. Time is needed to learn the work, adapt to the team’s methods, understand customers and the field, and grasp the organization’s informal rules. If expectations and reality diverge during this process, turnover occurs. The company complains that someone it struggled to hire has quickly left, while the employee feels that the company was different from what had been promised. The moment hiring succeeds but retention fails, the labor shortage returns to the starting point.

That is why, in an era of labor shortages, companies must ask a question before hiring: Who do we already have inside our organization? What capabilities do they possess? What can they do beyond their current roles? Who could play a larger role in another department with a little training? Which departments are seeing work decline, and which departments are seeing work explode? Companies that cannot answer these questions become overly dependent on external hiring.

Surprisingly many companies examine the résumés of outside applicants carefully while knowing little about the capabilities of their own employees. Employees are classified only by their current department, rank, and job title. But a person’s actual abilities are broader than a job title. A sales employee may be strong in customer data analysis, a production worker may know best how to improve equipment, and an accounting employee may be interested in automating internal processes. The problem is that these capabilities remain invisible inside the organization. People are there, but the organization cannot read them.

In the future, strong companies are likely to be those that look carefully not only at the external labor market but also at their internal labor market. Hiring will still be necessary, but hiring alone will not be enough. The ability to rediscover, connect, and move people already inside the company will become as important as the ability to recruit. Labor shortages cannot be solved merely by having the HR department post more job openings. They require the entire organization to redesign how it uses people.

In an era of labor shortages, employee retention is not simply a welfare policy. It is a survival strategy. When one employee leaves, it does not mean only that a seat has become vacant. It means that the employee’s knowledge of customer preferences, equipment characteristics, subtle field problems, partner relationships, and tacit team knowledge leaves as well. Especially in workplaces where skill matters, experience not written in manuals often determines performance. The problem is that the value of such knowledge becomes clear only after it has disappeared.

Retention is not completed simply by raising wages. Compensation is, of course, fundamental. But organizations where people stay for a long time are not made by pay alone. Work must be manageable, managers must be reasonable, and people must feel that they can grow inside the organization. Above all, they must not feel that their time is being consumed meaninglessly. People do not avoid difficult work unconditionally. But it is hard to endure work whose purpose is unclear, work that changes nothing, work that teaches nothing, or work that brings no respect.

Aging makes retention strategy more complicated. Employees are not merely workers inside a company. Outside the company, they also carry the burdens of caregiving, health, and family. More employees must care for parents, manage their own chronic illnesses, balance work and child-rearing, or worry about income after retirement. HR systems that assume work and life can be completely separated no longer match reality. To make people work longer, companies must create conditions under which they can endure longer.

Retention of middle-aged and older workers is especially important. They carry the organization’s memory. They know which clients are difficult, where problems repeatedly arise in a process, where customer complaints actually begin, and which reports do not match field reality. Such knowledge is difficult to reproduce through short-term training. Yet many companies view middle-aged and older workers only as costs. They see them as highly paid, slow to change, and soon to leave. But if the perspective changes, they are not costs but knowledge infrastructure. The issue is how to move that knowledge into new roles.

A well-known experiment with older workers in a German automobile plant illustrates this point. As the average age of workers on a production line rose, the plant did not try to push older workers to work like younger ones. Instead, it changed the work environment itself. It adjusted flooring, workbench height, seating, magnifying tools, assistive equipment, and rest patterns. The changes were not grand, but the results were clear. The core insight was to see older workers not as the problem, but to see the workplace as something that could be adjusted to human change.

Retention strategies must be this concrete. It is not enough to say, “Please stay longer.” Work intensity, working hours, equipment, managerial attitudes, health support, and late-career roles must change together. If companies demand that people work at the same speed and in the same way as they age, they consume people. If they adjust roles, use experience, and reduce burdens, people can continue contributing for longer. Retention is not the skill of holding people in place. It is the skill of changing the conditions of work so that people can continue to contribute.

The word redeployment often carries an uncomfortable feeling. It evokes images of reorganization, restructuring, removal to a marginal post, or being pushed aside. In many organizations, redeployment has indeed happened without sufficient explanation, and people have received it as a signal of anxiety rather than as an opportunity for growth. But in an era of labor shortages, redeployment must take on an entirely different meaning. It must no longer be a buffer before pushing people out. It must become a core strategy for reconnecting capabilities inside the organization.

Some tasks decline with technological progress. Repetitive data entry, simple checks, standardized reporting, basic consultations, and some administrative tasks are affected by automation. Other tasks, however, grow in importance. Customer experience management, data interpretation, safety management, quality improvement, care, field problem-solving, and work that connects technology and people become more important. If companies leave employees in shrinking tasks untouched or simply push them out, accumulated skill disappears. If they move those employees’ experience into new work, organizations can respond to change without relying only on external hiring.

For redeployment to be possible, people cannot be seen only through a single job title. If an accounting employee can only do accounting, a sales employee can only do sales, and a production worker can only be used on a production line, the path of movement is blocked. Real capabilities are far more complex. Someone who has met customers for a long time can read patterns of dissatisfaction. Someone who has spent years on the production floor can intuit the causes of quality problems. Someone who has handled office processes for years knows where time is wasted. Redeployment is the work of translating these hidden capabilities into another language.

Good redeployment also shows employees a plausible future. If a company suddenly says, “You will move to that department next month,” without preparation, people become anxious. They feel that they have been pushed aside and that the meaning of their career has collapsed. By contrast, if the organization explains what work will shrink, what work will grow, and what roles employees can move into after receiving certain training, redeployment can become an opportunity. People are more shaken by change without reason than by change itself. When the direction and standards of change are visible, redeployment becomes not a language of anxiety but a language of transition.

Redeployment is also connected to generational issues. If middle-aged and older workers hold on to all existing positions and leave no room for young people to enter, generational conflict grows. But if middle-aged and older workers move into roles involving field knowledge, quality control, safety, training, mentoring, and customer trust management, while young workers take on new technologies and execution-oriented tasks, the structure changes. Young workers learn quickly, older workers reduce their physical burden, and companies prevent the loss of accumulated skill. Redeployment must be a way to redistribute roles, not a way to take seats away.

In this sense, redeployment is close to the opposite of dismissal. If dismissal cuts a relationship, redeployment reconnects it. If dismissal sends accumulated skill outside the organization, redeployment uses that skill again in another place. Of course, not everyone can move into every role. But many organizations have not yet even tried enough. The gap will widen between companies that ask where a person’s experience can be used again before pushing them out and companies that never ask that question.

In an aging era, the first thing that must change is our imagination about age. Many organizations still see youth as a symbol of change and innovation, and age as a signal of cost and slowdown. Of course, every generation has strengths and weaknesses. Young workers adapt quickly to new technologies and sensitively capture new cultures and consumer instincts. Middle-aged and older workers possess longer-accumulated experience and judgment. The issue is not which side is superior. The important question is how to combine different strengths.

Some abilities weaken with age, but others grow stronger. The ability to identify what matters in unexpected situations, read intentions behind a customer’s words, detect danger signals in the field, mediate conflict inside an organization, and predict why a once-failed method may fail again is built over time. These abilities are not easily converted into data, but they often create decisive differences in real workplaces.

The problem is that many companies do not use these abilities properly. They continue to demand that middle-aged and older workers do the same work in the same way, and then at some point pressure them to leave because their costs are high. In doing so, companies may reduce wage costs, but they lose accumulated experience. A better approach is to redesign late-career roles. Not everyone has to become a manager or executive. Diverse late-career pathways are needed, such as specialist, field coach, quality monitor, safety mentor, customer relationship manager, new-employee trainer, and project advisor.

Using older workers well cannot be solved by extending the retirement age alone. Extending retirement is only a beginning. More important is creating a workplace where people can work longer. Is work intensity adjusted? Are there tools to reduce physical burden? Are opportunities provided to learn digital tools? Are roles designed for collaboration with younger employees? Does the pay system reflect role and contribution? Without these questions, merely extending retirement may become a burden for older workers, young workers, and companies alike.

In Korean society, this issue is especially sensitive. Many middle-aged and older workers are pushed out of their main jobs too early, and afterward often move into unstable, lower-income work. This does not end as individual insecurity in old age. It leads to a loss of skill, weaker consumption, greater social-security burdens, and heavier family-care responsibilities. If companies can use the experience of middle-aged and older workers for longer, individuals, businesses, and society can all benefit. The key is not simply to hold them longer, but to create places where they can contribute differently.

Retraining is no longer optional welfare. It is a survival device in an era of labor shortages. If it is hard to hire new people, existing people must be able to do new work. As technologies, customers, and work tools change, people must change with them. The problem is that this shift does not apply only to certain job groups. Artificial intelligence and automation are not concerns only for developers or engineers. Sales, production, accounting, customer service, logistics, education, healthcare, and administration are all affected.

But the term retraining easily becomes hollow. Having employees take a few hours of online lectures, receive certificates, and record them on evaluation forms does not create real change. Employees do not know why they must learn, managers think they have done their duty by sending them to training, and companies complain that they spent money on training but cannot see results. This kind of retraining remains a formal procedure rather than a survival tool.

Good retraining must be connected to actual work. Employees must be able to see how their current work will change, what role they can take on if they learn certain skills, and how training will lead to real assignments and project participation. People do not learn only because of an abstract future. Learning becomes alive when they feel that what they learn is connected to their work and career. When training and placement are separated, reskilling becomes a slogan. When training and movement are connected, reskilling becomes a strategy.

The retraining case of a large telecommunications company illustrates this point well. As the telecommunications industry moved from network equipment toward software and data, the company realized that it would be difficult to keep up with change by bringing in new talent only from outside. So it provided existing employees with online training, university-linked programs, technical education, and new career pathways. The key lesson of this case is not simply that the company spent a large amount on training. It is that the company saw the possibility of transforming internal talent strategically rather than buying all future capabilities from the outside.

National support is also important. Aging and technological change are difficult for individuals to handle alone. Middle-aged and older workers need time and money to learn new skills, and companies also struggle to bear the full burden of training. Governments must share the costs and risks of transition, forecast the capabilities needed by each industry, and design training that actually leads to employment and mobility. Small and medium-sized companies in particular often have weak internal training systems, making workforce transition difficult without external support.

What Korean companies need is not the volume of training but the connectivity of training. Rather than offering a large number of lectures without direction, they must first identify what work will decline and what work will grow inside the organization. Then they must design the learning needed to move people from declining tasks into expanding ones. Training must not end in a classroom. It must lead to real projects, mentoring, job mobility, evaluation, and compensation. Only organizations that learn again can use people again.

The biggest misconception in an era of labor shortages is the belief that more people are all that is needed. But in many organizations, the problem is that people are lacking while work is excessive, and much of that work is unnecessary. Organizations filled with too many meetings, reports, complex approval steps, repeated entries of the same information into multiple systems, and ever-growing documents created to avoid responsibility will always feel understaffed, no matter how many people they have. Such organizations collapse faster when labor shortages arrive.

Companies must now reduce work before increasing hiring. They must eliminate unnecessary meetings, reduce reports, integrate duplicate data entry, and prevent field workers from losing time to tasks unrelated to actual customers or production. The time of skilled workers is especially expensive. If experienced workers are tied up all day in meetings and reporting, the company is wasting its most important asset. In a labor-shortage era, managerial capability is revealed not only in the ability to hire more people but also in the ability to eliminate unnecessary work.

Work redesign is also connected to youth retention. Young people do not leave organizations simply because they dislike hard work. They leave when they repeat meaningless tasks, are trapped in work from which they learn nothing, merely receive orders from superiors, and feel that their time does not lead to growth. What young workers need is not necessarily easy work, but work through which they can grow. Organizations with less waste, real problem-solving experience, seniors to learn from, and visible contributions give young workers stronger reasons to stay.

Technology adoption must also be viewed from this perspective. Artificial intelligence and automation are often understood only as tools to reduce headcount, but in an era of labor shortages, they can also become tools that help people work longer. Systems that reduce nurses’ documentation burdens, chatbots that relieve customer service workers of repetitive inquiries, sensors that detect abnormal signs in production sites, assistive devices that reduce the physical burden on older workers, and automation tools that reduce repetitive office documentation all belong here. When technology is used only to push people out, it increases anxiety. When it is used to reduce people’s burden, it becomes a retention strategy.

What matters is design, not technology alone. Even the best tools can make people busier if work flows do not change. If a new system is added while the old system remains, if automated results must be manually checked again, and if reporting formats only increase, technology does not reduce burden; it adds another burden. Digital transformation in a labor-shortage era must ask not only “What new thing will we do?” but also “What will we stop doing?”

Ultimately, the ability to reduce work is connected to the ability to respect people. Companies that endure by squeezing people harder may survive for a while, but they will not last long. Companies that allow people to focus on important work, remove waste, use technology to reduce burdens, and protect the time of skilled workers can move more steadily even amid labor shortages. In an era when people are scarce, companies that design work well will gain people.

Korea is experiencing aging, low growth, youth employment difficulties, regional imbalance, and technological transition at the same time. This makes workforce problems appear in complicated forms. Large companies remain attractive to many young people, but their hiring scale is limited. Small and medium-sized companies need people, but often cannot offer career paths attractive enough to young workers. Regional companies have jobs but struggle to find people, while young people in the Seoul metropolitan area face fierce job competition but do not easily choose regional relocation. Care, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics suffer from labor shortages, but the working conditions and image of those jobs have not improved enough.

This problem cannot be solved by one policy or by the effort of a single company. Young people need good entry points, middle-aged and older workers need sustainable late-career roles, and companies need systems for internal mobility and retraining. Governments need policies that reduce transition costs and improve living conditions in regional areas. The failure of labor-market connection does not occur only inside companies. It is the result of education, housing, transportation, wages, industrial structure, and social recognition working together.

Korean companies’ seniority-based pay systems are an especially important issue. In a structure where wages automatically rise with age, companies feel burdened by retaining older workers for longer. But simply lowering wages can damage the economic stability and dignity of older workers. What is needed is a more sophisticated compensation system. Pay must reflect not only age but also role, responsibility, skill, and contribution, while jobs must be designed so that people can continue to do meaningful work in the later stages of their careers.

Youth employment must also not be viewed only through numbers. What matters to young people is the kind of experience they gain in their first jobs. If they are assigned only repetitive tasks, left without training, and after several years still have no marketable capabilities to explain, that job is unlikely to become a good job. Companies must design the first three years for young workers. They must show what skills they will learn, what projects they will join, which seniors they will learn from, and through what stages they can grow. Young people do not stay long because of vague loyalty. They stay when there is evidence of growth.

Middle-aged and older workers must not be neglected either. Many of them can still work and need to work, but they often cannot see a future inside their organizations. As digital transformation accelerates, reorganizations repeat, and youth-centered cultures are emphasized, middle-aged and older workers may feel that they are being pushed to the margins. Pushing them out may reduce short-term costs, but it also means losing skill and organizational memory. By contrast, if they are redeployed as trainers, quality managers, safety mentors, customer trust managers, or project advisors, companies can preserve experience.

Korea’s workforce problem ultimately goes beyond dividing positions among generations. If young and older workers see each other only as competitors, no answer will emerge. Entry points must be created for young workers, different ways of contributing must be created for older workers, and a structure must be built in which the two generations work together and exchange knowledge and technology. What matters is not generational replacement but generational connection.

The HR department of the future can no longer remain a department that manages hiring and evaluation. In a labor-shortage era, HR must become a strategic department that designs the flow of people inside the organization. It must read which jobs will decline, which capabilities will become important, which people can move where after receiving what training, which departments carry excessive workloads, and which managers are causing turnover. HR is no longer administration. It becomes the survival map of the organization.

For this, an internal talent map is necessary. Companies must look not only at employees’ ranks and departments but also at their actual capabilities, project experience, learning history, mobility hopes, collaboration styles, and growth potential. Of course, this must be a device for creating opportunities, not for surveillance. Employees need channels through which they can reveal their capabilities, participate in new projects, and move to other departments. If people cannot move inside a company, the company becomes dependent only on external hiring. Companies dependent only on external hiring become more vulnerable to labor shortages.

The role of managers is also changing. In the past, managers who kept good employees in their own teams for a long time often appeared competent. In the future, however, managers who can develop people and move them within the organization will matter more. From the perspective of one team, losing a core employee may look like a loss. But from the perspective of the entire organization, blocked internal mobility is a much greater loss. If people have no path for growth, they eventually leave the company. Internal mobility is not a team’s loss; it is a company-wide retention strategy.

The perspective of CEOs must change as well. If workforce strategy is seen only as cost control, retention and redeployment will always be pushed aside. If companies cut training, push out middle-aged and older workers, and minimize youth hiring to reduce immediate costs, the balance sheet may look lighter for a while. But a few years later, there will be too little skill, too few successors, and too few workers capable of transition inside the organization. Workforce strategy is not merely a matter of current labor costs. It is a matter of future productive capacity.

In the future, companies will no longer be able to say easily, “We can hire when we need people.” The people they need may not exist in the market, may be too expensive if they do exist, or may not stay long even if hired. People become not resources to be bought, but resources to be cultivated and circulated. The gap between companies that understand this change and those that do not will widen over time.

The era of aging and labor shortages demands that companies abandon old habits. The method of hiring people quickly, using them quickly, and replacing them when they do not fit was possible in a growth era. But in an era when people are fewer and growth is slower, that method increasingly fails. Especially in a society like Korea, where aging is fast and the quality of youth employment is a major issue, companies cannot endure the future through hiring competition alone. Companies will be evaluated less by how many people they secure and more by how long they keep the people already working with them alive in the organization, how well they move them, and how properly they develop them.

This change must not become a story of competition between generations. Young people need entry points, and middle-aged and older people need sustainable roles. Companies need the connection of accumulated skill, and society needs efforts to improve job quality. Young workers bring new technologies and sensibilities, while older workers offer experience and judgment. Organizations must create structures in which the two generations do not take each other’s places but complement each other’s weaknesses. The best way to reduce generational conflict is not to push someone out, but to redesign roles.

Strong companies in the future will not be only those that hire well. They will be companies that reduce unnecessary work, rediscover internal talent, do not discard the experience of middle-aged and older workers, do not neglect the growth of young workers, and connect training and mobility to real work. Workforce strategy in an aging era is a shift from consuming people to circulating people. Companies that make people work together longer will survive over companies that simply hire more. Companies that redeploy better will survive over companies that replace faster. Companies that help people focus on more important work will survive over companies that simply assign more work.

An era in which people are scarce but good jobs are also scarce may look contradictory at first. But within it lies a clear message. The decline in the number of people and the decline in the quality of jobs must be solved together. Increasing hiring alone is not enough, extending retirement alone is not enough, and providing training alone is not enough. Retention, retraining, redeployment, work redesign, and youth career-path design must be tied together as one strategy.

Aging is not a signal telling companies to reduce people. It is a signal telling them to understand people more deeply. In an era of labor shortages, real competitiveness does not come only from the ability to find people. It comes from the ability to not lose people, to help them learn again, and to make them shine again in different places. This is why retention becomes more important than hiring, and redeployment more important than replacement. The competitiveness of companies in the future will ultimately depend on how long they can keep people alive within the organization.

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An Era of Labor Shortages and Scarce Good Jobs

- How Aging and Low Growth Are Changing Corporate Workforce Strategy