Arts partnerships frequently offer companies effective and cost-efficient methods of achieving critical business goals. Americans for the Arts is producing a series of eight essays that will explore and illustrate the different types of benefits that arts partnerships can bring to your company. This particular essay makes the case that art partnerships can be a secret weapon in your arsenal to give your company and your community an edge in workforce recruitment and retention.

Many companies have trouble finding the talented employees they need. For example, in 2012, Microsoft announced that it simply could not find suitable candidates to fill thousands of open engineering, research, and development jobs. Microsoft General Counsel and Executive Vice President Brad Smith was quoted in Computerworld as saying, “Our nation faces the paradox of a crisis in unemployment at the same time that many companies cannot fill the jobs they have to offer.”

The talent shortage could dramatically worsen in years ahead as Baby Boomers retire. In 2014, The Conference Board predicted that we were about to enter a 15-year period of tight labor markets and talent shortages in which retention rates would drop and companies would have a harder time finding the talented workers they need.

If companies have trouble finding the workers they need, they will try to recruit some of your company’s top performers. So you need to be thinking about ways to retain high-performing employees who are in demand and potentially fielding offers from the competition.

Poor retention rates can derail your strategy and saddle your company with heavy costs. A 2012 meta-analysis from the Center for American Progress reviewed 30 case studies in 11 research papers and concluded that turnover typically costs a little more than 20 percent of an employee’s salary. For highly paid jobs and those at the senior and executive levels, the report found those turnover costs can skyrocket up to 213 percent of an employee’s annual salary.

Just how widespread an issue is turnover? In 2011, 23.6 million workers representing approximately 18 percent of the U.S. workforce voluntarily quit their jobs, according to the Center for American Progress. That’s a lot of turnover and a lot of costs for companies.

This essay shows how arts partnerships can boost the appeal of companies and communities in ways that can make it easier to attract and retain the talent you need to achieve success.