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When Flora Bryce walked into your office, you could tell immediately what she was going to say. “I’ve got another job,” Bryce told you. “I start two weeks from Monday.”

You met Flora Bryce when she was about to graduate from the Human Resources Program at the Zenith City branch of the University of West Dakota. During your annual guest appearance in Professor “Duchess” Dankette’s class, Bryce’s questions had been unusually insightful. When she asked you for a job, you checked with Dankette, who over the years had given you the real scoop on her students. Dankette told you a detailed story about this analytical, hard-working student, so you hired her.

In just a few years, Flora Bryce had become your very-hard-to-replace health insurance specialist. Zenith City wasn’t big enough to have both a senior and junior health insurance specialist; if the senior person quit, you could not simply promote the junior staffer. So where would you find someone to replace Bryce — someone who had her accumulated wisdom about the pluses and hidden minuses of the various health plans that the city offered its employees?

As the director of human resources for Zenith City, you have faced this problem before. Indeed, you have experienced constant turnover among your staff. You recruit them, you train them, and then they quit.

Last year, it was Pichardo Hippiloto, your director of temporary services. When he was a summer intern, you gave him the task of designing a system to provide temporary services in-house. Like most organizations, Zenith City had replaced support personnel with technology. City departments simply didn’t need as many full-time support people, and the city could not afford to staff its various offices for their peak-load needs. Thus, when an agency needed extra staff, it had hired a temp from a private agency.

Zenith City was big enough to create its own, internal temp service. By the end of the summer, Hippiloto had a fledgling temporary-services program up and running. So you offered him a part-time job managing his baby while he also finished his senior year. Indeed, you were so pleased with Hippiloto’s work as an intern that you also committed to hiring him as the city’s full-time manager of temporary services when he graduated the following June. Hippiloto recruited a talented pool of temps, marketed their services to departments and saved the city money.

Then Zenith City Robotics learned about Pichardo Hippiloto and started courting him. And the company had an easy time stealing Hippiloto away. After all, once the Zenith City program was running efficiently, Hippiloto lacked a major management challenge. And, in addition to the opportunity to fix ZCR’s broken temp service, the firm had offered him a 25 percent pay increase. Within a very quick month, Hippiloto was gone.

Originally, Kerriga Joseph, the city manager, had thought Hippiloto was a gamble. Most managers serve up the trendy management pitch about delegation, empowerment, discretion and responsibility. Joseph actually lived those principles. “It’s your call,” Kerriga told you, without hiding her skepticism. “If you think it makes sense to hire Pichardo to run a temp operation, do it.”

But then, Kerriga had said the same thing about Rich Guapo. You hired Guapo simply because Joanna Harrington, the provost of the Zenith City campus, told you to hire him. When you first went to work for the city, you began building contacts with university faculty. And several years ago, at lunch with Harrington, she advised you to hire Guapo, the student-government president.

Despite his age, Guapo created a functioning network of human-resource staffers in various city agencies. Most of these people didn’t just handle personnel matters; most had a much wider portfolio. Guapo sensed that they could use some real help from your department, and he transformed a monthly meeting — originally nothing more than a gripe session — into a set of working relationships. Agency staff relied on Guapo for help and advice. As a result, your department fixed many problems and prevented even more.

And then Guapo was gone. The pattern was repetitively aggravating: You recruit them, you train them, and then they quit.

Sure, you once hired that real loser, Roger Vaughan. But a dud as an intern is much less of a liability than a dud with civil-service protection. Your top recruits, however, don’t need such protection. Their protection is their talent. And once outsiders recognize their ability, they’re gone. You need to find some relief from this tormenting turnover in talent.

For Bob Behn’s approach to this month’s public management dilemma — or to post your own ideas — click here.