If workforce planning is something you action only when you need to make hires, you’re already behind in the recruitment planning game. The reality is that many organisations end up finding themselves on the back foot when it comes to the workforce planning process.
Can that be said about your startup or scaleup?
TLDR: Don’t wait to start your workforce planning. Make it a priority. Get practical and actionable steps to put your workforce planning into practice. Download a free, easy-to-follow, workforce planning ‘project planner’ and get insights from Scede’s expert talent leaders (ex-Amazon, Asos, Skype & Revolut) on exactly how to tackle workforce planning – whatever stage your startup or scaleup is at.
Book a free 30-minute workforce planning chat with our Scede team
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Easy-to-use contents:
- What is workforce planning? (Why do we do it, why is the process important, the benefits & goals of workforce planning)
- Why important workforce planning gets so regularly overlooked
- The pitfalls & consequences of poor workforce planning
- How to begin your workforce plan
- The workforce planning process: Understanding the 3 primary levels of workforce planning
- Operational Workforce Planning vs Strategic Workforce Planning – IN UNDER 2 MINS (video)
- Workforce planning: Easy-to-use project planner (download)
- Who’s usually involved or responsible for workforce planning?
- Workforce planning guidance (podcast)
- How to improve the diversity of your workforce through workforce planning
- The workforce planning process for startups – keep it simple
- 3-step workforce planning activity for early-stage startups
- How to use your workforce plan to understand recruitment demand
Whether you already have a workforce plan in place or you don’t have a hiring plan but you’re ready to build one – we’ve got you covered.
Workforce planning is something all startups and scaleups should do, whatever their stage of business. It doesn’t have to be an intimidating behemoth that’s impossible to tackle.
But it is something that will enhance your workforce management and help you to achieve your business’ scaling goals.
The number one thing to remember is – proper workforce planning needs to be done well in advance of actually needing to make those hires.
Read on to find out why.
What is workforce planning?
Workforce planning is an analytic process with the purpose of examining your historic and current workforce, assessing your future demand for people and skills, and using that information to set hiring targets to help your company succeed in its mission and overall objectives.
In simple terms, the workforce planning process aligns a company’s people and its organisation to strategic business goals. It enables you to hire the right people with the right skill sets into the right roles at the right time – using a data-informed approach.
Today’s talent market is still fiercely competitive, and you’ll know as a startup or scaleup that you’re likely competing against larger organisations for top candidates. On top of that, you’re likely being asked to do more with less – driving efficiency and efficacy in your recruitment.
A good starting point to optimising your recruitment resources and combat hiring and employee retention challenges is through a solid workforce plan.
It’s about being proactive in your talent management and less reactive.
You can’t build a skyscraper in central London unless you’ve got a plan. Can certain things run in parallel, what skills do you need to build the building at that phase in time, what teams do you need to bring externally? Do you need permanent sub-contractor teams or temporary teams? – Charlotte Lafferty, Founder of Think Talent.
Why does important workforce planning get so regularly overlooked?
Here at Scede, we often speak with startups that wish they could master the art of time travel – because a solid workforce plan often falls by the wayside due to competing priorities at times of critical growth.
As a result, they’re feeling the pain of people debt.
When we dig into their data and workforce scaling goals, the realisation is that talent planning for their desired business growth and timelines needed to be done months prior.
According to CIPD’s Resourcing & Talent Planning Survey 2022, 30% of organisations don’t look beyond six months, and only 17% are planning for over three years into the future.
Here’s an example
You need to increase your engineering headcount by 10% by April next year. If it’s already December, then you’ve missed your window to prepare effectively.
You can’t expect to see hires coming in in January with only weeks (and a holiday period) to make them happen. Especially if we take notice periods in Europe into account.
Companies, no matter what size they are, can become entirely reactive to the internal and external factors in the market, or the domain they’re operating in. And that has a knock-on effect on the successful execution of the hiring plan and the timeline ambitions related to this.
Before we go on, if this rings true for you and you’re feeling behind on your recruitment goals – get in touch to see how we can solve your hiring headaches in weeks.
The pitfalls & consequences of poor workforce planning
If workforce planning hasn’t been prioritised correctly, you run the risk of needing your talent teams and roles filled yesterday.
This is a dire situation for any growing startup or scaleup that needs the right talent in place to deliver business objectives. It’s a surefire way to derail your growth plans.
In fact, 23% of failed startups cite not having the right team as the reason.
In CIPD’s latest Resourcing & Talent Planning Report they document an ‘increased competition for talent’, meaning it’s harder, and takes much longer to recruit the right talent into your business. This is exactly where effective recruitment planning comes into play.
Competition for well-qualified talent has increased over the last year (70% of organisations report this). Overall, 81% of organisations attempted to fill some vacancies. 77% experienced difficulties attracting candidates – up from 49% in our 2021 survey – CIPD, Resourcing & Talent Planning Report 2022.
Consequences of poor workforce planning include:
- Hires not being made for the right teams at the right time
- Delays in product launch and commercial success
- Impact on your bottom line
- Costly mis-hires being made
- Drop in employee engagement and a dissatisfied workforce
- Higher attrition rates
- No way of scaling your recruitment process
(Feel free to nab this graphic to share as a talking point on Linkedin!)
Could there be a skills gap in your business for workforce planning activities?
Something to consider before you approach your workforce planning strategy is the resource, capability and capacity your teams have to collate and deliver the data you need to form your plan.
(This is strongly linked to the topic of ‘Who’s usually involved or responsible for workforce planning?‘)
Scede’s Director of People, Tom Heath, shares more on this…
“I think if you look at the root cause of some of the challenges with workforce planning, a lot of the time, it’s a lack of capability within the business. Whether you’re a startup with 10 people, 20 people, a scaleup, or even if you’re an enterprise. It’s not necessarily just capability from a technical standpoint, it’s a question of having the capacity and resources available to do the work.”
Tom suggests asking the following questions:
- Do you have the right skill set within your HR team to be able to provide the analysis and data for recruitment planning? And is there the skill set to be able to provide a workable workforce plan?
- Do your teams have the time and resources available to them to do this well?
- Are the right leaders in place that can dedicate time and apportion workload correctly?
- Have you got the right people within your team to drive and monitor those workforce planning initiatives?
“More often than not, I would say there are gaps there.
It’s no one’s fault. But it’s a reality. It creates a lack of cohesion, or relationships and communication internally with leadership teams, Founders/Co-Founders and HR, with no one really taking ownership to work cross-functionally on the wider workforce planning project.
And that’s where the impact of those gaps comes trickling down into hiring teams because your workforce planning becomes a reactive process.
It’s a situation where you’re told what the plans are, and then go and deliver it, rather than actually being a core part of the operational planning. That’s where I see a big disconnect which then has a detrimental impact on everything else.”
How should you begin your workforce plan?
When it comes to planning your workforce, there’s no ‘one size fits all’.
Of course, that would be the dream, but in reality, the success of the actions you take and the processes you put in place depends heavily on how relevant they are to your specific business.
The term ‘workforce planning’ umbrellas the wider process but there are different layers to it.
Where to begin really depends on what level of workforce planning you’re currently doing – and if that’s zero, don’t worry, you’re in exactly the right place by reading this.
Any level of workforce planning activity is useful, but getting each level right before you move onto the next is essential – Lauren Vint-McGee, Director of Talent Acquisition at Scede
A key question to ask before you start:
What level of workforce planning is my organisation ready for?
The workforce planning process: Understanding the 3 primary levels of workforce planning
Workforce planning isn’t a single action. People often jump straight to ‘I need to do strategic workforce planning!’, unaware that there are some foundational steps that need to happen first.
Lauren Vint-McGee, Director of Talent Acquisition here at Scede, explains that a successful and effective workforce planning process comprises three main elements:
- Level 1: Talent resource planning
- Level 2: Operational workforce planning
- Level 3: Strategic workforce planning
“The absolute base level (or level 0) is that you don’t do workforce planning – you’ve literally not done or aren’t currently doing any recruitment planning at all. At this stage, you’ll be doing ‘reactive recruiting’ in terms of hiring and potentially repeating the same processes over and over.
For example – if you’re solely reacting to open vacancies when someone leaves an organisation, they’ll be replaced with the same sort of person with the same skill set.
There’s no pipeline, there’s no talent community – everything starts from scratch. And that doesn’t change until the hiring manager starts to implement some sort of talent planning process or future-looking recruitment strategy.
In my experience, most organisations who say they do ‘workforce planning’, are only really doing the very basics – level one of talent resource planning.”- Lauren Vint-McGee
Talent resource planning
Let’s call this level – ‘What do I need right now based on historical data?’
Essentially, this is the first level of workforce planning for a startup or small business planning its initial growth phase, or a business with no previous workforce planning in place.
The talent resource planning phase is always backwards-looking, meaning it provides insights into how things have been previously. It gives talent managers or leaders direction on what they might need based on historical data.
In this phase, you’ll use data to review past talent trends in your business – such as what the team currently looks like, attrition rates overall, and by function and seniority.
This will allow you to provide a quantitative look into the nature of talent in your business right now.
With this, you can review current demographics and identify specific areas that may have talent gaps or risks.
(If you’re an early-stage startup and your enterprise is too new to have sufficient historical data to draw on, go to ‘The workforce planning process for startups‘ section).
Key questions at this stage:
- What are our attrition rates per role/level/location?
- When have we seen spikes in hiring needs or resignations in the past?
- How long does it take us to hire people per role/level/location?
- Which positions do we find hard to fill?
- What is the current distribution of employee tenure?
Your projections from this talent resource planning stage will take past movement trends, hiring activity, talent movement within the organisation and attrition data, and then apply those trends as assumptions against the current workforce as it moves into the future.
This will provide you with a baseline to understand where future gaps will be that you may need to address, so you can focus on building out your plan with a focus on the top priorities or pain points identified.
Operational workforce planning
We can call this level – ‘What do I need to get to where I want to be in the next 12 months?’
This next stage of the workforce planning process could be reflective of a startup that’s already performed some workforce planning activity. It’s completed its talent resource planning stage and is now building on that to look further into the future.
Operational workforce planning is essentially identifying the fundamental things that you know about the workforce you have today, plus your historical data from the first talent resource planning stage.
You’ll be building on the above foundations, but taking a more operational and future-planning view by utilising available knowledge like:
- What projects/partnerships do we have coming up and how many people do we need for them?
- Who’s going on parental leave? Is anyone returning from leave?
- Who’s coming up for retirement?
- Has anyone handed in their notice?
- Are there any “at-risk” team members?
Layered onto the insights from your initial talent resource planning, this data creates pipelines that help the talent acquisition team understand what their workload is going to look like.
For example, if they know the person retiring in September does a critical or hard-to-fill role, they know in advance that they need to start hiring in plenty of time to mitigate any business risk.
The same goes for the importance of workforce planning for hiring the best cultural fit:
“Impact hires share a defining trait regardless of their seniority level or experience: a great cultural fit for the company, whose contributions are going to yield compounding results and resonate deeper within the organisation than a standard hire-to-fill-a-role.” – Nazy Kerr, Head of Talent at Harver
Key questions at this stage:
- How well does your current workforce support your future business strategy? What are the skills gaps?
- How many employees do we have at each level?
- Have you analysed the gaps between your workforce supply and your projected workforce demand?
- What diversity gaps exist within my workforce? What changes do we need to make to address this?
The operational workforce planning piece looks directly at the talent you’ll need to successfully execute the overall business strategy.
This information is gained from understanding the business strategy and filtering it down through more specific goals – determining the talent implications and eventually getting to a granular understanding of the skills and headcount needs of the organisation to be able to execute that immediate business strategy.
The final piece of this operational component is taking the current and future talent needs and comparing them to the status quo projections to determine an initial gap.
If everything keeps progressing as normal – and there are no market or unforeseen anomalies that could impact the plan – and considering the talent that’s needed to succeed, what do those numbers look like?
Strategic workforce planning
And finally, we’ll call this level – ‘How do I make my business grow?’
At this stage, your workforce planning process becomes more strategic. You’ll be looking further into the future.
But to do a strategic workforce plan, first, you need a goal. You’ll be looking three to five years into the future and asking questions like:
- Where do we want to be as a business?
- Are we building an internal TA team or outsourcing our hiring to a talent partner?
- What does my talent retention look like?
- Are our competitors hiring vigorously?
- What can we improve to compete for the best talent?
- Performance management-wise, where do our high performers fit into the plan?
- What do our Learning & Development opportunities look like?
- Can we optimise employee engagement?
- Do we need to improve our company culture?
- Can we refine our interview and onboarding processes?
Strategic workforce planning is essentially the stage that brings the two previous phases together.
Gaps have been identified, and analysis and data collection has been done, so this phase specifically answers the question:
“So what do we do about it? What’s the plan?”
Within this strategic component of workforce planning, you’ll examine gaps further, evaluate different talent programs and model various scenarios needed to achieve this.
Additionally, you’ll look at the resource and financial implications of the measures needed in order to get there in the desired timeframe.
The result of this strategic stage is a workforce plan along with a roadmap – inclusive of the constraints and contingencies – to help the organisation get from where it is right now, to where it needs to be.
Strategy-focused questions at this stage:
- Where do we want to be as a business in three to five years?
- How do I align workforce planning with my company’s overarching business strategy & mission?
- Do outside challenges exist in the market, political & economic environments? Have I identified them?
- What are our organisation’s strengths and challenges?
- How well positioned are we to survive change (eg: increase or loss of funding, market changes etc)
- How constant do we expect funding to be?
- What are our key strategic relationships (internally & externally) which will impact success?
Something to keep in mind is that measurement and reporting are key outputs of the strategic workforce planning stage – as monitoring progress toward your goals is absolutely key.
Key expert insight
Tom Heath, People Director at Scede (Ex Amazon, Revolut & Mollie) reiterates the point of understanding that workforce planning is made up of multiple phases.
I think it’s really important to distinguish the difference between operational talent planning and strategic workforce planning. In my view, they’re very different things.
Operational Workforce Planning vs Strategic Workforce Planning – IN UNDER 2 MINS ⏲️
Workforce planning tools recommendation
If you’re at the strategic workforce planning level and looking to hire significantly, you need to use historical data. If you don’t have that data, that’s when you need to look at some other options.
There’s a great tool called Talent Neuron that’s been acquired by Gartner – it’s a global analytics resource, essentially, for talent.
Using a powerful tool like that you’ve basically got labour market analysts working as an extension of your team with real-time, global talent data. It gives you extensive data for forecasting and dashboards so that you can make smarter, data-backed decisions when it comes to larger-scale workforce planning.
An alternative tool to this is Horsefly.
Workforce planning: Easy-to-use project planner
When you‘ve decided on which level of workforce planning is relevant for your business, you’ll have a solid idea of how to start the workforce planning process.
To help you, we’ve divided the process into easy-to-follow, actionable steps and a more granular breakdown of what each of the phases requires.
Below is a high-level ‘project planner’ to guide you in kicking off and launching your workforce planning process successfully.
You can download this and use it as a checklist to monitor your progress.
Could you benefit from a more in-depth look at tactical workforce planning?
Book a free 30-minute workforce planning chat with our Scede team
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Who’s usually involved or responsible for workforce planning?
The short answer to this is… it’s a team game. A combination of people, skills and teams will make up your workforce planning activity so it’s important to establish who’s involved from the off. This’ll allow you to create ownership and collaboration making sure you’ve got the right people with the appropriate skill sets and resources working together on the task.
People Director at Scede, Tom Heath makes an important point on the topic of ownership:
There does need to be ownership around the workforce planning process. But at the early stages is it the Founder? Is it the Head of TA? Is it the CTO who’s building the product? Do we need to get finance involved in terms of budgets? In truth, it’s a team game at that point. And if it’s not, you’re not going to score.
“Everybody has to input their needs in order to achieve company goals and ambitions. And as a Head of Talent Acquisition or owner of recruitment, you need to be the composer, pull a plan together off the back of that demand from your business, feedback to your internal stakeholders on whether that’s achievable and if not, communicate what you need in order to achieve it.
Collaboration is absolutely critical – and where I’ve seen this done well, TA have the right skill set, dedication, and investment in time into the planning process”.
Consider, do you have the technical knowledge and practical skills to build a successful workforce plan and recruitment strategy?
Are you comfortable analysing and communicating around the data?
And importantly, do you have buy-in from the rest of the business that this is a crucial activity and the influence to guide that conversation?
It’s crucial for people leaders to be at the heart of talent planning
Charlotte Lafferty, Founder of Think Talent, makes a prominent point on this topic that talent leaders need to “go out and have those tough conversations,” because it’s “so important to be an integral part of the operational planning process”.
Rather than being informed of what the hiring plans are and delivering them, Charlotte says it’s crucial for people leaders to be at the heart of talent planning conversations as that’s where their greatest impact will be.
“It’s never just delivering a list if that makes sense. So that’s half the job. Because you’ll just fall over – you see it time and time again. You get delivered a headcount plan for the year and it’s November and half the roles are in Q1.
We’ve all been there. That’s why it’s important to be part of the process. Go out and push the door down slightly. Go out and have those tough conversations. Say look – I physically don’t have the capacity to deliver that. If that’s what you want and that’s right for us, then I need XYZ.” – Charlotte Lafferty
In a recent episode of the talent acquisition podcast, ‘Scaling So Far’, Matt Ellis, Founder and CEO of embedded talent partners, Scede, echoes this;
“I think the other super important piece on being active in early stage workforce planning conversations is – and I’ve made this mistake before – I’ve gone function to function, got my list, merged the whole list together and said, “Cool, here’s my big hiring plan”. That was a mistake.
It’s vital to be able to have conversations with those teams and challenge them. Ask questions. Challenge whether it makes sense to have all roles in the time-space specified. Do they have capacity from a hiring manager perspective to support this? If they’re ramping up commercial hiring, is the product at a place where it can be best sold?
That way, you’re driving a more solid approach to the recruitment planning as early on as possible.”
Workforce planning guidance – podcast
Here’s Matt and Charlotte’s full conversation on guidance around workforce planning and how to build the right team around you as a talent acquisition leader to achieve this.
Get the full episode transcript here
Who you’re listening to:
Charlotte Lafferty, former Head of Talent Acquisition at Mollie, now Founder of Think Talent is currently partnering with renowned tech companies sennder and WeTransfer. She’s previously scaled teams and led talent functions for the likes of Balfour Beatty, Multiplex, Sopra Steria, Exyte and others over the past 15 years.
Matt Ellis, Founder and CEO at Scede has built product and engineering teams for companies like Skype, Supercell and Space Ape Games and now heads up Team Scede, embedded talent partners who help scaling companies to achieve hiring success.
How to improve the diversity of your workforce through workforce planning
Workforce planning is an exercise that helps you to achieve your strategic objectives – now and in the future. By now, we should all be cognisant that building a diverse and inclusive team should fall within that. There are zero excuses to be reactive when it comes to DE&I – we should be tackling this topic strategically.
So, as you review your current workforce data, align this with your diversity promise or policy and identify where you’re currently falling short.
Laura Bibby, Head of Growth at Scede shares this advice:
“Is your workforce today reflective of your diversity goals? Or are there certain role types, functions, or seniority layers that lack diverse representation? If it’s the latter, now’s the time to act. You can shape a considered recruitment plan and approach to get you closer to your diversity objectives whilst ensuring you’re also hitting those hiring targets.”
Get further info on DE&I in recruitment in this related article:
Diversity Hiring Strategies – Embedding DE&I Into Your Recruitment Process
The workforce planning process for startups – keep it simple
“The workforce planning process for startups doesn’t need to be scary. Any level of workforce planning activity is useful!” – Lauren Vint-McGee, Director of Talent Acquisition at Scede
If you’ve been looking for workforce planning guidance online and landed on articles covering every deep dark corner of the topic, it can be quite daunting.
In a startup environment, Founders and Co-Founders are notoriously time-poor and are often still very much involved in recruitment and talent planning themselves. This is where you might find what we described earlier as ‘reactive’ recruiting where roles are being filled as they become available – almost in real-time.
The bandwidth for planning ahead for recruitment simply isn’t available.
If that sounds familiar, don’t panic.
You don’t need to look three or five years into the future right now if you’re not ready or able to do so – it’s absolutely okay to start at the very, very beginning and bake in some flex.
But I’m an early-stage startup with no data to look at!
If you’re an early-stage startup, you won’t have the historical data to use in the first level of workforce planning because the business is too young to have accumulated it. But even the most simple data sets can help you plan ahead more effectively.
Here’s where you need to start simple. Read on to find out how.
3-step workforce planning activity for early-stage startups
To begin workforce planning activity as an early-stage startup, make sure you’re using the data you’ve actually got like your current workforce demographic and skills and your financial data and budgets. Look at this alongside your 12-month plan.
Aim to produce a basic forecast or projection of what talent you think you might need to add to your business (and when) to achieve your ambitions in the desired timeline and cost.
Some things are easy to plug into your workforce plan.
There might be stand-out roles you already know you need to hire for, which are easy to bake into a workforce planning timeline.
For example, if you need to start marketing your business on social media in six months’ time, plan to start sourcing social media exec candidates in two months’ time.
Looking to build an e-commerce site? Work backwards from a launch date, pencil in the proposed work timeline (with contingencies), then get your web developer role live on your website in good time to kick off the recruitment process.
By using what you do know about your business married with your 12-month business plan and goals, you can get yourself onto level one of talent resource planning so you’ve got a solid base to build upon.
(Jump to level one of the workforce planning process: Talent Resource Planning)
Do I need fancy workforce planning software?
It’s crucial to document and track your workforce planning activities, and whilst all-singing-all-dancing software can be handy here, it’s not 100% necessary – especially if you’re working within budget constraints.
A free tool we’ve used in the past for simple workforce planning is Trello. Our article, ‘Using Trello For Workforce Planning’, maps out how we’ve gone about that – creating an online, visual and completely collaborative workforce plan that can be shared and edited in real-time.
If you’re further on in your workforce planning journey, a dynamic spreadsheet with formulas that gives you additional detail and outputs may be desired.
If this is the case, the CIPD has an extensive library of workbooks and factsheets that you can download or use as inspiration to build your own.
However, if you’re looking for a bit of guidance on building a more sophisticated workforce planning Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet that’s tailored to your specific company, needs and desired outputs – get in touch with us. We’d love to see how we can help.
Book a free 30-minute workforce planning chat with our Scede team
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Is it possible to do level three “strategic workforce planning” as a startup?
The honest answer is probably not. If you’re in the very early phase, you’re not really going to know what your business will look like in a year’s time – never mind three to five.
You’ll know the ‘plan’ you’ve showcased to investors, but you’ve yet to determine what that looks like in reality.
Here’s why.
Strategic workforce planning is based on historical AND forward-looking data. If you’re a startup, you don’t necessarily have that historical data to use in your recruitment planning.
If you’ve been in business for a couple of years and can see your trajectory based on past performance, then it might be possible. But if you’re brand new, you could predict a ‘forecast’, but it might feel ‘finger-in-the-air’ – making the strategic element of workforce planning very difficult.
“There are lots of startups that say, ‘I want to do strategic workforce planning and I want to see what the future looks like’. Most haven’t even gotten to level one of talent resource planning yet.
It’s impossible to succeed at sprinting before you’ve even looked at how to walk. That’s a thing that businesses (and not just startups) tend to get wrong and try to start way ahead of where they actually need to be.” – Lauren Vint-McGee
Learn more about workforce planning for startups in this related article:
How to use your workforce plan to understand recruitment demand
Once you have your workforce plan mapped out, the next step is to gauge what this means when it comes to immediate and longer-term recruitment demand, and determine whether you have the right capacity and capability to achieve this in your existing Talent Acquisition team.
That’s where Scede can help.
Europe’s fastest growing Fintech, Mollie, was on a mission to scale its world-class team globally – developing partnerships, evolving its incredible product and continuing to strive towards their mission to become the world’s most loved payment service provider (PSP).
Mollie had ambitious headcount targets to hit in order to achieve its goals. Their Head of Talent, Charlotte Lafferty knew that she needed to augment their Talent Acquisition team temporarily to manage upcoming spikes in hiring demand across their Tech, Commercial and Operations teams.
When you’re scaling, you often need to hire top talent at pace and in volume, without compromising on quality. So the decision was made to partner with us here at Scede to enhance recruitment efforts.
We worked closely with Charlotte to retrofit their headcount plan into our capacity and performance calculator, to determine the size of the team they needed in order to fulfil their recruitment needs.
Based on this data, Charlotte knew that with Scede temporarily becoming their dedicated embedded talent partner, they had the right recruitment resource in place through the upcoming phase of scaling – without overstaffing her permanent internal team.
Without a data-backed workforce plan to inform what the upcoming recruitment demand might be, you risk being reactive when it comes to hiring, making poor decisions due to stretched cost, resource, and time, and ultimately getting left behind in your recruitment.
Here’s the full case study on Mollie’s recruitment demand planning for high-growth hiring.
(Find out more about what it’s like to partner with an embedded talent partner and the benefits it could offer to support your hiring needs)
Key takeaway
Your workforce plan doesn’t have to be 100% ‘there’ before you take action, remember, any sort of talent planning activity is useful.
Start the workforce planning process at the level that’s appropriate for your business and build out your workforce plan from there.
“Don’t focus on 100% percent. If you get 80% and you can run with it, keep running.” – Charlotte Lafferty, Founder at Think Talent
A workforce planning strategy can evolve and adapt over time as long as it’s directly aligned with the needs of your organisation. No two workforce plans look the same, yours just has to work effectively for your needs as a business and its long-term goals.
Once you have one in place, the next step is communication to the wider business of what you are looking to achieve – and of course clarity on how you hope to achieve it.
Being transparent about your workforce plan will help your teams feel aligned with your company goals and how they contribute – which in turn has a longer-term positive impact on employee engagement and retention.
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