Strategic Workforce planning: Why is it needed?

In simplest terms, Strategic workforce planning is integrating workforce supply and demand analysis into the strategic planning of an organization.

Everything that pertains to business is increasingly becoming quantitative these days. The subjective decisions based on opinions, perceptions and experiences are getting antiquated and the world is moving to more objective decisions. Every decision whether It is an increase in revenue, or cutting down of the costs or future benefit calculation, is now relied upon by the numbers it carries along with it.

• In hiring decisions, with overall recruiting budgets going down, every hire is a critical business decision and must be guided by business strategy. The Strategic Workforce Plan is a map which guides that strategy and recruiters that can understand and shape it play a vital role in talent strategy.
• Lack of right skilled people- Unemployment may be rife globally, but still a major problem faced by recruiters is finding the right talent, especially in those areas where experts are scarce. Lack of rightly skilled people inside an organization is another problem which is caused by lack of foresight and unwillingness on the part of the organization to learn and grow.
• Rapid technology change -Once an organization deduces the next technology or process that will help it to strengthen its foothold, having the right people in place will give it fillip to move ahead of competitors. The speed with which an organization responds to external environment will have a far reaching consequence.
• Mitigate risk- Whether it is an upturn in the economy or rapid technology change or frequent attrition or change in strategy, aligning the workforce planning to the strategy of the organization will alleviate the risk factors.

A recruiting example :Advanced workforce analytics helps recruiters to identify the needs of the market and even before they set it and identifying the right people. A simple example of analytics in recruitment is companies using social media like linkedin,twitter and facebook  to target potential candidates. By knowing what tomorrow’s needs will be ,the softwares used in recruitment analytics,with the help of keyword search and user behavior and big data analysis predict the interest and future potential of candidates. In the near future, this data coupled with the previous work  records and the industry scenario can predict even up to the extent of the potential candidate’s tenure.

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