EFFECT OF TALENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES ON EMPLOYEE RETENTION IN THE INSURANCE INDUSTY
Success of any organization depends on the strategies put in place to ensure they retain talented employees. Today's manager's challenge is to keep the staff engaged and ensure attraction and retention of talented employees. The manager has to know the current acquisition and retention strategies employed by other organisations. The goal of most companies is to benefit from talented employee behavior and contribution in the workplace by promoting a win win situation for both the company and workers. The purpose of this study was to evaluate effect of talent management strategies on employee retention in the insurance industry. This study was conducted within the insurance industry of which 5 Companies were sampled. The study was descriptive as the respondents only described the phenomena, but was not involved in any manipulation of the variables. The target population constituted 200 Assistant and Managers. Samples of 70 staff were selected based on simple random sampling method. Primary data was collected using a structured questionnaire. Data was analyzed using the SPSS package Version 21.0. Simple descriptive statistics was used to illustrate the various qualitative and quantitative factors that were conceptualized to influence the employee retention. The results were tabulated in form of frequency tables, pie charts and bar graphs to capture the number of responses to a particular variable in each determination. Further, the study adopted correlation and regression analysis at 5% level of significance to determine strength and direction of the relationship of the variables under study. The analysis showed that talent acquisition had the strongest positive (Pearson correlation coefficient .877) influence on employee retention. In addition, talent development, compensation strategies, succession planning are positively correlated to employee retention .588, .705, .0424 respectively).The study established that the management of the organization did not properly plan and manage career path. The succession plan strategy employed by the organisation has not improved their willingness to be retained in the organization. The study also recommends that on boarding programmes should help to ensure employees retention. The study can be conducted with emphasis to Kenyan owned companies with a more diverse group of employee. Also, different variables could be chosen that are different from the ones used in this study for the generalization of the findings of this study. Key Words: Talent Acquisition, Talent Development, Talent Compensation Strategies, Succession Planning, Employee Retention, Insurance Industry