Tips for Effective Workforce Planning and What To Do Next

Written by pepelwerk | Sep 13, 2023 6:15:00 PM

Many companies spend time throughout the year thinking through who they are going to hire to meet the demands of the business. Depending on the size of your business depends on the degree of thought that is needed to complete a meaningful workforce plan. Some companies have maybe 1 or 2 hires that they need throughout the year and some need thousands. The number of people that you need to do the work is only one part of the equation. The other part is knowing how to action it. Before you continue reading, make sure that workforce planning and learning about how to action it through workforce planning applies to your business. These are a few questions to ask yourself: 1. Does my business have high turnover? 2. Is your business located in an area where a lot of similar business operate? 3. Do you demand for our product or services that you cannot deliver on because you don’t have the people? If you answer, yes to any of the above keep reading. Still unsure, complete this qualifying survey

What is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is a clear plan of what needs to be done, who needs to do it, when they need to do it and how much it will cost the company for them to do it. It is also known as resource planning. Workforce planning can only be done after the leaders of the business have decided the financial goals, the strategy and delivery model (how your customers will get what they bought). The five components of workforce plan

Clear business strategy to deliver your products or services in the next 1-2 years
Information about your service areas and where you conduct business
Competitive understanding of industry and geography
Clear inventory of your workforce and gap analysis

What do I do after I completed worforce planning?

A typical reaction is to ready your recruiting, talent acquisition team, third party staffing our recruiting process outsourcing provider to prepare to source, screen and qualify candidates as soon as you give them the green light. Maintaining a traditional resume-based post and pray CRM talent acquisition and recruiting approach.

Be cautious of sticking to these old methods. You may end up spending more money and more time on the gamification of the job market then is necessary. You might have also lost revenue or margin because you couldn’t get the people you needed on time or paid a higher compensation then was reasonable.

There is a better way.

Workforce Building

Did you know that most of the people that you need to do work for your company are already spoken for? Most companies forget that people have a supply and demand for our skills sets just like any other inventory. Yes, I just referred to people as inventory. That doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the value of the humanity (so, hug-a-bear people, calm down).

I am explaining that we all need to wake up and pay attention to trends in human interest and skills to plan our recruiting and hiring processes better.

This approach may lead to a few different ah ha’s: maybe you realize you need to invest in automation or robotics, maybe you need to adjust your growth and delivery plan or, maybe you need to spend more time building your workforce

Workforce Building is just what it sounds like. Building the people to do the work you need done.

To do this well you need to:

Clearly identify the attributes of the kind of person you want to work with your customers and work with you
Clearly scope the tasks and goals of the job and what is required to complete those tasks and accomplish those goals successfully.
Be prepared to close a technical skills gap of your candidate pool.

You will notice that I didn’t say anything about a job description that includes a thesis on your company’s mission, the need for a resume or a need for a over layered Talent Acquisition team.

If you are constantly, reacting to the job market and retroactively looking to hire people, then you might be leaving money on the table or burning cash on unnecessary recruiting efforts. Instead, a successful company looking to move into 21^st century of recruiting, sourcing and talent acquisition need to do a mixture of both to meet the hiring needs of their business.

See if adding workforce building to action workforce plan will increase your ability to get the people you need to reach your business goals is the right approach for your business.

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