The on-going demographic change increases the importance for firms to retain the most able and motivated employees. Firms will aim to influence employees’ propensity to stay with his or her current employer, by using specific Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. The aim of this project is, to analyse the relationship between the use of HRM practices on the one hand, and attitudes and perceptions of the employees as well as employee retention on the other hand. We will particularly focus on four key areas of human resource management: recruitment of employees, career and developmental support strategies, compensation policies, and flexible work models.Thereby, we will advance current research in three dimensions. First, we will focus in detail on a set of specific HR practices and assess their connection to the attitudes and perceptions of employees. This will allow us to develop a deeper understanding of economic and also psychological mechanisms linking the use of a practice to an outcome variable. Second, we will particularly study heterogeneous effects of HR practices for different employee groups according to characteristics such as gender, individual ability/performance and personality. Third, the project uses and further develops a novel and unique data set, the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP). This data set makes it possible to use detailed and longitudinal surveys both on the level of employees and their employers for a representative sample of establishments in Germany. The surveys can be linked to administrative data from social security records, which permit a more detailed description of the employment dynamics of the firms and employees and contains information before the survey starts and after it ends.