Metrics for talented employees

What is the most important task of any HR department? I think the one thing they can do is to find and keep talented people within company. The problem is that these people are usually not like others (that's why you want to hire they!), they do not pay much attention to salary you suggest, they don't want to have stock options and don't think in terms of profit and loose. You goal is to find these people, hire them and keep them in company as long as you can. That is the main goal of any HR department.
Let's discuss how to manage talents in your company. The first task is to find gifted people, I'm sure you know how to find people to hire, but the task here is to find talented? How to do it? Well, I cannot advise much here, you will need to talk with hundreds to find the one, more over you will probably need to provide some people with test job to find the right person. But there is an indicator that you are performing well: if you will find something that is not usual and is extraordinary, pay attention to this person.
In terms of finance talented people are easy to hire. Typically, you will no need to pay huge salaries or pay someone to abandon their job. The turnover rate within this kind of people is below average, as the only reason why they change their job is they cannot find something new and interesting. When hiring talented person you will need to hire some ordinal persons and probably fire them later, so you should carefully consider what the impart of bad hire might be.
The most important thing about talented people is to provide them with adequate learning and growth opportunities. Keep them interested in your company, not just because you pay money for the job, but let them work with some interesting projects. If you have an education courses, suggest them to visit courses they like. Also, consider some "don't"-s. Don't make a usual rotation you might willing to do for others. If you find talent, then I'm sure you don't need him or her to fill like brick in your company building. These people are more sensitive to that kind of changes.
The best option for talented people is learning-on-the-job, suggest them to learn some technology, or pay attention to some market tendency, suggest them to learn a foreign language.
Actually, training opportunities are the one metric which should be considered as a "talents" indicator. Ask people you why they are interested in position you suggested, the good answers are, "because of I can work here with X technology and help you to develop Y product", I'm sure you are talking to gifted person or "I like your training opportunities", again, you are talking to the person, who will learn faster than you can imagine. This is a great business investment.
The good idea is to combine some talented oriented metrics into the set of metrics, key performance indicators or scorecards, so that you can always compare your current HR strategy against "searching talented" strategy and answer the question - if you are performing well.

If you are interested in hr scorecard, check Sam Miller HR performance web-site.