Tom Peters, the management guru, on his website takes a look at the question of getting the right staff by internal branding and building a work culture where people really want to work, Google, Apple and BMW being example of such companies.

What Tom Peters had to say:

“…It was a meeting of HR execs, and the topic was the, yes, the “war for talent.” Now I’ve used the term…The point is that the discussion at the meeting in question was warfare-ish to a significant degree - how to quickly nab the best people from the grasp of the competition, etc…
Well, I think that’s all (98%) wrong. I contend that the bedrock of finding and keeping and co-creating with great folks is not about clever tools to induce prospective “thems” to “shop [live] with us,” but a 99% internal effort to create such an exciting, spirited, entrepreneurial, diverse, humane “professional home” that people will be lining up by the gazillions (physically or electronically) to try and get a chance to come and live in our house and become what they’d never imagined they could become!

I.e., it’s not an externally directed “war to snatch talent from the other guy” by “being more aggressive than the competition”, but an internally directed competition against ourselves (and our outrageously strong beliefs about people) in which we aim to create an unimaginably attractive workplace. Think Apple, BMW, Cirque du Soleil, Wegmans. And back to the Royal Navy, the Brits built a model of Excellence that had no parallels in its sphere in human history - it was a model about what could be that had never been before, and it was “the other guys” who were forced into the externally aimed “competitive,” inferior, reactive, copyist mode.”

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