Workforce Planning: The Key to True Strategic Staffing and Recruiting

by Jeremy Eskenazi
Jeskenazi@RivieraAdvisors.com

If professionals in the recruiting and staffing profession could predict what positions, roles, functions, and skills would be needed by organizations in the future, could they be more successful? The answer is absolutely. Why then do many recruiting and staffing professionals feel as if they are always operating in a reactive mode? The reason is often that true "workforce planning" is not being accomplished inside the organization. What is workforce planning? Workforce Planning is a process to assess workforce content and composition to respond to future business needs. Simplified, workforce planning is a systematic process to analyze the gap between what a business has in the way of organizational talent and what it needs in the future. Often workforce planning adds an additional important component, an assessment and plan for addressing the gaps that were identified.

Instead of starting over each time we get a requisition or a request to fill a job, a recruiting and staffing professional who uses workforce planning will have already developed plans and sourcing for the needs previously identified. To most recruiting and staffing professionals, this whole idea sounds great, but the reality is that many will question why spend time and energy on developing plans when the view of recruiting itself is reactive - change is constant in our world. So why bother?

Benefits of workforce planning:

The "why" of workforce planning is grounded in the benefits to managers. Workforce planning provides managers with a strategic basis for making human resource decisions. It allows managers to anticipate change rather than being surprised by events, as well as providing strategic methods for addressing present and anticipated workforce issues.

Some components of workforce planning, such as workforce demographics, retirement projections, and succession planning, are familiar to managers. Workforce planning provides focus to these components, providing more refined information on changes to be anticipated, the competencies that retirements and other uncontrollable actions will take from the workforce, and key positions that may need to be filled. This in turn allows managers to plan replacements and changes in workforce competencies.

Organizational success depends on having the right employees with the right competencies at the right time. Workforce planning provides managers the means of identifying the competencies needed in the workforce not only in the present but also in the future and then selecting and developing that workforce.

Here are a few other real reasons to do workforce planning:

• Due to shifts in the labor market, planning for workforce needs is a critical concern for businesses across all industries.
• The labor pool does not dynamically expand in direct correlation to most company's talent needs (for example: yes, there may be a large number of workers that have been affected by layoffs but organizations may be seeking workers with specific skills that are not readily available)
• Companies in a growth mode are increasingly challenged to acquire critical talent required to achieve business objectives over the long term, but with specific milestones in the short term.
• Workforce planning enables RELATIONSHIP rather than INCIDENT recruitment. That is-you can understand what specific types of people, competencies, and skills you will need in the future and develop relationships with sources of that talent well before you have a need to fill a role.

As a recruiting and staffing professional, if you lead or participate in a workforce planning initiative, you will be placed squarely into the strategic business planning process for your organization. You can align your daily recruiting tasks to the outcomes you learned by doing workforce planning. For recruiting and staffing professionals, as well as generalist Human Resource professionals who have responsibilities for recruiting, here are a few other great reasons to do workforce planning:

• HR and Recruiting professionals are viewed more as "strategic" business partners by the businesses they support.
• Provides HR and Recruiting professionals a blueprint to "stay the course"
• Shifts from a transactional mode.
• New business developments and changes are easily incorporated, priorities shift on the basis of collaboration with the business.

How to "do" workforce planning.

Many recruiting and staffing professionals like the "idea" of workforce planning, but often it gets pushed aside in favor of more "reactive work" (like filling requisitions). But few really understand how to get a grasp on how to "do" workforce planning. In reality, the workforce planning process is really a "coordination" process. Getting the data necessary to analyze the workforce is often the most daunting task. To gather the data, you simply need to interview managers of individual workgroups inside your organization and then you will consolidate and analyze that data. You'll create a set of standard questions to ask each manager Overall, here are a few steps in how to "do" workforce planning:

• Review the current workforce supply. Take a look at the competencies or the employees presently available inside the organization to achieve business objectives.
• Future workforce supply. Review your current supply and add in any known variables (prior demand, known openings, attrition, performance review data), add in unknown variables (transfers, terminations, competitive factors).
• Develop a demand forecast. Assess what competencies or employees will be required to achieve business objectives for a specified time in the future.
• Review the gaps. The gap is the sum of comparing current and future supply to demand forecasts. Gaps can be filled by transfers, acquiring talent externally, outsourcing, contracting, etc.

If you are going to lead a workforce planning effort, here are some specific actions you can take:

1. Planning. Take a look at your organization, and break it into "chunks"...take a look at your organizational structure and go down to the most basic workgroup level (such as Division, Department, Team, etc.), and determine who are the workgroup leaders. You'll then need to create a list of standard questions you'll want to ask them about their business and their workgroup. Here are some examples of questions to ask:

• What are the key business goals and objectives for the next year? 2 years?
• What is our competitive environment like, how will it impact your ability to meet these goals and objectives?
• What are the critical processes that are needed to meet those goals? What are the key success factors for achieving future outcomes?
• What are the key work activities associated with these success factors?
• What are the barriers to optimally performing the work activities?
• What talent pools can affect those barriers?
• What does your current talent pool look like today that may impact your ability to achieve success in the future?
• What people capabilities are needed to deliver on those critical processes?
• What are the most critical people issues you currently face?
• What do you think the most critical people issues will be in 1-2 years?
• Which positions, capabilities are most critical to your business?

2. Prepare Workgroup Leaders. Make sure you prepare the managers you'll be interviewing. You may want to call, visit, or send an email and let them know the purpose of the interview you'll be having with them. Perhaps you can even send them some of the sample questions you'll be asking them about in your interview. You will also want to gather a list of all the employees in each workgroup, and bring that with you to your interview with each workgroup manager.

3. Conduct Workgroup Leader Interviews. During your interview, you'll want to clearly identify the future business state for the workgroup...what will need to be done in the workgroup in the next 1-2 years (or longer)? What are the goals and objectives of the workgroup, and more importantly, what skills and competencies will be required of the team? You will then review each of the current employees and assess them based on the skills and competencies needed in the future. This should be a quick and fast assessment, not a lengthy review of each employee. You should then discuss the perceived gaps in the business needs and the competencies of the current workgroup.

4. Analyze Outcomes and develop the Demand Analysis. After you gather all of the information from the interviews you'll want to track what you learned on a simple spreadsheet that will identify what your workgroup's told you about what they have, what they will need in the future, and their what their future demand requirements will be for talent.

5. Gap Analysis. You can then review the information you have learned from the exercise and create your assumptions. You can make a good "guesstimate" of what types of positions, people and competencies will be needed in the future.

6. Building Plans. Now you will be able to plan on how gaps will be addressed (Will you "build or buy": will your develop talent internally, or go out and attract new talent with the right skills and competencies you need?) You'll want to now plan your execution of the staffing plans and align the resources you will need.

Conclusion

With the information that you have gathered, not only will you have developed a sense of the people needs of the organization today and in the future, you have now built a relationship with the business that makes you much more of a strategic business partner rather than a recruiting and staffing "executor". The information in a workforce plan can then lead you to build broad sourcing programs that focus on the future needs of the organization while at the same time you can focus on the execution of individual searches. Overall, you cannot build a building without a blueprint- so why build a company without one as well?

Jeremy M. Eskenazi, SPHR is Managing Principal of Riviera Advisors, Inc. (www.RivieraAdvisors.com) , based in Long Beach, California, a leading HR consulting firm focused on helping companies improve the way they attract, deploy, and retain talent. Jeremy brings more than 17 years of experience running global staffing functions for companies like Universal Studios, idealab!, and Amazon.com to the consulting practice, and regularly speaks and writes about recruiting and staffing issues.