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Attending a Jeff Grout event is a bit like eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant after weeks of fast food. The content is rich, varied and filling, yet easy to digest. And it's delivered with consummate precision. Grout doesn't say "um" or "er". He doesn't repeat himself, hesitate or deviate. He just imparts one piece of useful advice after another.

Some speakers limit their presentations to a handful of key points, in the belief that an audience won't retain anything more, but Grout prefers to cram in several decades of insight and experience. If you closed your eyes, you'd think you were listening to a painstakingly crafted radio programme. He's one of the best reasons to download events as MP3s (free to members) from the London Business Forum website.

Grout's central thesis for this event was that the rules of recruiting have changed profoundly in the 10 years since McKinsey coined the term, "War for Talent". And he should know. Previously he was managing director of Robert Half International, the world's largest specialist recruitment agency, and he's co-authored books such as Recruiting Excellence and Kickstart Your Career: the Complete Insider's Guide to Landing Your Ideal Job.

By way of introduction, he cited the latest recruitment survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development, which showed that UK employers are finding it harder than ever to attract and retain the best people. Eight-four per cent of organisations are "experiencing difficulties" in these areas, up from 70 per cent just two years ago. "And the survey indicates that what you're doing to rectify [these difficulties] is just the same as you've always done," Grout said, adding: "If you do what you've always done, you will get what you've always got... This is now a time to change."

UK employers have some bad habits, he argued, and one of the worst is a preoccupation with younger candidates. The members of "Generation Y" are "career mercenaries... an impatient generation that doesn't expect to stay with you." Indeed, during the research for Recruiting Excellence, he discovered they expect "to spend no more than two and a quarter years with you before they move on to do something else."

This new breed of young professional regards each job as a means to improve skills and "marketability". So they will only stay at your organisation if you keep them challenged and interested. "And they're interested in the soft stuff," Grout argued. "They're interested in the vision and values of your organisation. They're interested in what it feels like to work within your business, and they're particularly interested in learning from their bosses and learning from their colleagues. So their team-mates are very important."

Attracting a career mercenary boils down to three things, he suggested: their immediate boss, the pace of opportunity and the working environment. "And when they talk about the working environment, they seldom ever refer to the physical environment... What they're talking about is the management environment and the communications environment. Because, invariably, staff turnover is down to three major causes: bad bosses, poor communications and slow routes to opportunity."

Ultimately, Grout said, "Generation Y is not only looking for a career, Generation Y is looking for a life. And consequently, we need to understand their expectations and aspirations in order to attract them. We have to speak their language."

With this in mind, it's crucial to develop a compelling "employer brand". When Grout asked the audience how many of them had consciously developed such a thing for their organisations, only about 10 per cent raised their hands. "Pathetic," he said, shaking his head. "If your [overall] brand is about attracting and retaining customers or clients, your employer brand is about attracting and retaining people for your organisation. It should provide the answer to the question, 'Why should I work for your organisation?' And the reality is, organisations with strong employer brands have very little difficulty in recruiting."

Virgin often tops lists of most appealing employers, because it is regarded as more dynamic, democratic and flexible than other organisations. This judgement is, for the most part, based "purely on external perceptions," Grout pointed out. And these perceptions are largely driven by the group's charismatic CEO, Richard Branson.

Fortunately, he added, there are ways to establish quickly how your organisation is perceived by potential candidates, and what needs to be done to strengthen your employer brand going forward. For example, you can:

• ask those who have joined your organisation in the last six months why they joined, and how the reality of working for you differs from or meets their expectations;
• interview those who have stayed with you for more than two and a quarter years, asking them, "What is it about the culture and/or management style of the organisation that has persuaded you to stay?";
• get an independent third party to conduct exit interviews ("If you want reliable exit interview information, you must outsource it," Grout insisted. "A study by Steven Taylor of Manchester Metropolitan University found a reliability rate of [in-house] exit interviews of just 36 per cent."); and
• get your marketing department thinking about how the employer brand can be improved, and how it might be supported or otherwise by the overall brand of the organisation (only 19 per cent of them are involved in communicating their employer brand, according to research by Working.com).

Yet no matter how good your employer brand is, you still need to observe some basic rules of recruitment, Grout said. For example, in recruitment advertising, you should always specify where a particular job will be located. One of his former clients, he recalled, wanted to recruit a £100k-a-year finance director, but didn't want to reveal their company name, or the fact they were based in Weymouth. As a result, he said, "we had a £100,000 job in the Sunday Times, and we received three replies, because no one knew where the bloody job was based."

Similarly, "64 per cent of candidates will be deterred from applying to an ad that doesn't have a salary, unless it's a big brand," he said. "Those who will be deterred from applying to an anonymous ad is just 13 per cent. So, faced with the dilemma of 'Do we advertise who we are and no salary, or advertise a salary but anonymously,' there is no choice. Always go for salary unless you have a big brand." And don't give candidates false expectations, he added. Remember that one of the best ever responses to a recruitment ad in The Sunday Times, for the chief executive's position at Lambeth Council, had the heading: "Probably the worst job in Britain."

Having said all this, today's talent market is so competitive that you need to draw upon as many different sources of potential candidates as possible - for example, the Internet, where "50 per cent of users have looked for a job on-line"; and employee referral schemes, where each bonus should have "at least three noughts on the end of it," because that will still save you money over an external process.

Grout added that, "Retention is no longer 20 years with one organisation. Retention is retaining access to people that used to work for you." As a managing director he used to make a point of keeping in touch with star workers after they left, and would send them letters periodically, to let them know what was going on in their old teams and to assure them that they could, if they wished, come back. "I would get back every year without fail somewhere between four and six people at no cost to the organisation," he said.

Ultimately, Grout concluded, you need an integrated approach to recruitment - a triangle in which the three apexes are "the line manager, the HR professional and the recruiter". In too many instances, these parties are not sufficiently intimate, and as a result the needs of the organisation are not being met. You need to form a partnership with an external recruitment consultancy (for impartial advice as much as extra capacity), but most importantly you need to create the right culture, because "successful recruitment is at the heart of business success."

Consultants Watson Wyatt complied a human capital index that shows excellence in recruiting increases shareholder value, Grout pointed out. Ross Mackenzie published a study that showed companies with the best talent management practices actually outperformed the sector average by 20 per cent in terms of delivering shareholder return. "So, consequently, as an activity, recruitment adds more value than any other HR activity." However, he added, "it shouldn't be viewed as the sole preserve of HR... It should be a business activity [that is] mission-critical to everybody in the organisation."