Talent management is a continuous strategy employed by institutions to attract and retain high quality employees, develop their skills, and work on continuously motivating them to improve their performance. The focus is on creating motivated human resources to enable an institution to meet its long-term goals. Staff retention is influenced by, amongst other things, the human resource planning, recruitment and selections, optimal human resource utilisation, human resource development, compensation and benefits, and employee labour relations, safety and health. This study sought to investigate the talent management strategy employed by the Zululand District Municipality to attract and retain high quality employees at local government. The literature argues that rural-based municipalities have the highest levels of service delivery back-log and are in dire need of skilled human resources in their quest to expedite service del