Are You Losing Great People and Not Finding the Talent You Need?

Are You Losing Great People… and Not Finding the Talent You Need?

Your best employees know they have options. The candidates you need may not live where you’ve always recruited. Competitors may be paying more, recruiting in different markets, targeting different skills, or reaching talent pools your organization isn’t seeing.

For HR leaders, that creates two problems at once: How do we keep the people we can’t afford to lose—and how do we find more of the talent we need?

Those concerns aren’t new. In its What’s Keeping HR Up at Night? survey, HR Executive found that 28% of HR executives identified retaining key talent in a recovered economy as one of their top concerns. Close behind, 27% cited attracting and retaining diverse talent. Only employee engagement ranked higher. Years later, the pressure hasn’t disappeared. HR Executive subsequently found hiring and retention dominating HR concerns, while the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reported in 2025 that nearly seven in 10 organizations were still having difficulty filling full-time positions.

The problem for many organizations isn’t a lack of HR data. It’s a lack of external market intelligence. You know who works for you. You know who applied. You know what you pay. But do you know what is happening in the labor market around you?

That’s the gap JobsEQ by Chmura is designed to help fill.

Pain Point #1: Keeping the Talent You Already Have

Retention problems are rarely solved by compensation alone. Culture, managers, career opportunities, flexibility and employee experience all matter. But compensation and external opportunity still matter—a lot. If an employee can earn significantly more for the same occupation elsewhere, that matters. If competitors suddenly increase hiring for the same roles you employ, that matters. If demand for a specific skill is accelerating faster than supply, that matters. And if your organization discovers those changes only after employees start leaving, you’re already reacting.

JobsEQ gives HR leaders a view of the market outside their organization so they can better understand the competitive environment around critical talent.

You can examine:

• Market compensation by role and geography
• Current employer hiring activity
• Advertised pay
• Talent supply and demand
• Skills employers are seeking
• Employment and wage trends
• Hiring competition across markets

That changes the conversation from “Are we paying our employees enough?” to “Are we paying competitively given the actual market for this talent?” Those are very different questions.

Compensation Benchmarks Need Context

Suppose you’re losing experienced cybersecurity professionals. A salary benchmark is useful. But by itself, it may not explain the problem. You also need to understand whether the local talent pool is expanding or shrinking, which employers are recruiting similar workers, whether hiring activity is increasing, which skills are commanding premiums, and whether another geography presents a different competitive environment.

JobsEQ allows HR teams to look at those signals together. That helps organizations make better-informed decisions about compensation, recruiting, workforce planning, and where retention risks may be increasing. It doesn’t replace employee listening or good management. It gives HR something equally important: a clearer picture of the market your employees are operating in.

Pain Point #2: Reaching a Broader Talent Pool

There’s another simple reality; if you keep recruiting in the same places, using the same assumptions and searching for the same backgrounds, you shouldn’t be surprised when you keep finding the same talent pool.

Attracting a broader range of qualified talent often starts by understanding where talent exists in the first place. JobsEQ allows HR and talent teams to look beyond their traditional recruiting footprint and examine labor markets based on factors such as:

• Talent availability
• Occupations and skills
• Educational attainment
• Workforce demographics
• Commuting patterns
• Employment concentration
• Wages
• Current job postings
• Employer competition
• Transferable skills

This isn't about making employment decisions based on protected characteristics. It's about challenging assumptions about where qualified talent can be found and identifying markets and talent pools an organization may have overlooked. That distinction matters.

For example, instead of automatically recruiting a difficult-to-fill occupation in the same three metropolitan areas, an employer can ask:

• Where else does this talent exist?
• Which markets have deeper supply relative to demand?
• Where do workers with transferable skills live?
• Could we broaden the qualifications or skills profile without lowering the capabilities we need?
• Which markets give us access to a larger or different workforce?

That turns talent sourcing into a market-analysis problem—not simply a job-posting problem. And that can create more opportunities to reach qualified people who were never showing up in the existing recruiting funnel.

Current SHRM guidance similarly emphasizes widening pathways to work and reaching underutilized talent pools, including veterans, military spouses, older workers, people with disabilities, and other populations that have historically been overlooked.

There’s a Third Question HR Should Be Asking: Where Should We Hire?

Retention and talent attraction eventually lead to a bigger workforce strategy question, are we recruiting in the right markets at all? For organizations with remote work, distributed teams, multiple facilities or expansion plans, geography becomes a strategic lever.

JobsEQ can help HR compare markets based on talent depth, compensation, hiring demand, demographics, commuting patterns, and competitive pressure.

Imagine that your organization needs to hire 200 people across several critical occupations. Rather than automatically adding those positions to an existing office, HR can help leadership evaluate:

• Can our existing labor market support that growth?
• Would another metro provide a deeper talent pool?
• What would compensation look like there?
• How many other employers are competing for those workers?
• Where is the talent supply more sustainable over time?

That elevates HR from filling requisitions to helping determine where the organization should invest and grow.

And Then There’s the Reporting Problem

HR leaders often have the analysis. The next challenge is explaining it. A CHRO may need to present a compensation recommendation to the CEO. Talent acquisition may need to explain why recruiting should expand into another metro. Workforce planning may need to show why the organization should build certain skills internally rather than continue competing for scarce external talent. That’s where Canvas in JobsEQ adds another layer.

Canvas brings JobsEQ analysis together with charts, maps, narrative, calculations and an organization’s own information so HR teams can move from market analysis to a polished, shareable workforce story. Instead of exporting data from one system, building charts somewhere else and recreating everything in a presentation, the analysis and communication can live much closer together.

Stop Guessing About the Talent Market

Retention will always involve more than data. Building an inclusive organization will always involve more than recruiting analytics. JobsEQ doesn’t replace strong leadership, culture, career development, or employee experience. But HR leaders shouldn't have to make critical talent decisions without understanding the market around them.

• If your challenge is keeping critical employees, JobsEQ can help you understand what they are worth in the external market and how aggressively competitors are pursuing similar talent.
• If your challenge is reaching a broader talent pool, JobsEQ can help you understand where talent exists, which markets you may be overlooking, and what skills could expand your search.
• If your challenge is planning for growth, JobsEQ can help you answer where the talent is, what it will cost, and how difficult it will be to hire.

Those are the questions behind many of the problems keeping HR leaders up at night. And they’re questions Chmura can help answer.

Put your talent challenge to the test… Give us one difficult role, talent market or workforce challenge.

We’ll use JobsEQ to show you where the talent is, what the market is paying, who you’re competing against, and what other options you may be missing.

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