South Africa is currently facing a significant problem in attracting and retaining quality professional employees. Some research has showed that employees leave organisations for a variety of reasons such as an inadequate salary, staff shortages, and insufficient personnel to handle the workload, frequent interruptions, fellow workers not doing their jobs and poorly motivated co-workers. From the results it is clear that the respondents perceived that talent management practices are applied poorly in organisations. From the mean scores it was evident that employees felt that they had an average level of psychological obligation towards their workplace. As regards work wellness of employees, the mean scores showed an average to high level of burnout, work engagement and levels of work engagement and ill-health. The exhaustion and mental distance components of burnout were significant positive predictors of the physical and psychological ill-health of employees. Work engagement wasa significant positive predictor of physical ill-health of employees. The final results showed that a structured model of talent management for employees can be developed further.