We introduce talent hoarding as part of a firm’s optimal personnel policy, i.e., firms use instruments that aim at reducing a worker’s visibility to alternative employers to prevent employee poaching. Our theoretical results show that employers hoard workers of intermediate talent to save labor costs. As reducing a worker’s visibility impedes the firm from optimally exploiting his talent, talent hoarding is surplus-decreasing.  Furthermore, talent hoarding leads to a non-trivial redistribution of income between different talent types. Our experimental results generally support the theoretical results with the exception that a winner’s curse like phenomenon prevents talent hoarding from decreasing surplus.