Adopt strategic workforce planning

- Recruiting isn't an expense. It's an investment. It's money that you need to spend to hire the people who will make your company more money. And like any investment the key is to figure out how to create the most value for your business with every dollar that you spend. In this video we'll look at a process called strategic workforce planning that can help you align your recruiting investments with your business needs. To begin strategic workforce planning you create a census that shows how many people you employ today. In this example, the census is segmented based on job types and office locations. Next, you review your business plans and decide how much you expect the size of your workforce to change. The offices in this example are all growing but at different rates. So to keep it simple, each office assumed the same annual growth rate for all of their positions. Now you can multiply the current census counts by your growth rates and that gives you a workforce target. This is the number of people you expect to have in the future. Check your business plan to make sure that your budgets match up with this workforce target. Now, your workforce target minus your current census gives you your growth hires. This is the number of people that you'll need to hire to support the growth of your business. But you're not done. Next you need to factor in turnover, or attrition. It's natural to lose some people because they take promotions, move to other companies, or retire. In this example, the company has an annual attrition rate of 3%. The attrition rate times your workforce target gives you your replacement hires. This is the number of additional people that you need to hire to backfill folks that leave your company. Your growth hires plus your replacement hires equals your annual recruiting target. In supply chain terms, this is your demand forecast. It's an estimate of the number of candidates that you expect to hire in the next year. Now that you have a demand forecast you need to identify your sources of supply. In other words, where will you recruit new employees? This company plans to recruit almost 350 associates from local high schools. The strategic workforce plan gives them data to justify investments that will make it easier to fill those roles. For example, they may decide to sponsor recruiting events that will get students excited about joining their team. At a high level, managing your recruiting process is really about having the right supply to satisfy your talent demands. When a business can't hire the people they need quickly, everyone suffers. It causes burnout among employees, which leads to high attrition and low customer satisfaction. Using a strategic workforce plan to manage your talent supply chain can help you make smart recruiting investments so that you can fill openings quickly and keep your operations running smoothly.