Andrew Mayo, president of the HR Society, told HR and resourcing professionals at a Hays event in London that the first task was defining talent. “Is it those with customer service skills, or is it those with leadership skills,” he asked.

The next issue was deciding what proportion of the workforce was talented. “That is the big question,” he said. Mayo said this varied enormously from virtually everyone, in the view of some managers in parts of the Civil Service, to as low as 1% in other organisations.

Mayo suggested that one solution was for resourcers to ask “who are the people who are critical to our success?”.

Mayo suggested that the job of recruiters was then “to try to maintain the critical skill set” within their organisations.