Here’s a little ditty at CLO magazine about the shift from recruiting to succession planning. As the talent pool decreases and boomers retire,  companies are finding they simply don’t have enough good people to fill senior roles. According to the Right Management Consultants survey mentioned in the article, the number of companies in this situation is around 80% and "more companies prefer to build their own future leaders from the ground up…they are assessing their high-potential employees to identify which ones have the qualities they desire in senior-level managers, and then providing them with the necessary training, coaching, and managerial experiences to fully grow them into upper management. Therefore, companies must have a good succession management system which tracks the executive qualities, skills, and abilities that have been the most instrumental in their managers’ and organization’s successes."

We’ve got a number of stories here about customers leveraging our product to reduce recruiting expenses through better succession planning and this survey seems to support the idea.