Different firms are seen to pursue different human resourcing strategies; and the differences observed often have their origin in the different goals of the respective firms. For example, as Hyman[1] has observed: "changed circumstances do not lead to uniform responses by employers; indeed, we can note considerable variation in the actions of managers in response to circumstances facing organisations for which they are held accountable". Furthermore, that different firms do indeed have different human resourcing strategies has public policy consequences.Too often, however, public policy is fashioned on the assumption that the representative firm of neoclassical analysis exists in reality, rather than as a "mental construct"[2] designed to analyse theoretically the consequences of changed circumstances. As a result of the use of this "black box" type of analysis, public policy agencies, such as Training and Enterprise Councils, operate as if they are oblivious to the observed fact that firms pursue different objectives and, to meet these, of necessity, they must design and implement different human resourcing strategies.This paper seeks to illustrate the different human resource strategies and policies of firms. To do so, it makes use of data collected from employers for a local labour market survey of women returners, contextualized in the firms' more general human resource policies, to produce a taxonomy of firms with regard to both their organizational responses to external environmental change and their external and internal labour market strategies vis-à-vis recruitment, selection and training.Two discrete activites were associated with the production of this paper:(1) Empiricism, as quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from both a questionnaire survey and a set of subsequent case-study investigations, which involved structured interviews and the collection of additional company information.