Top tips for agile workforce planning

Hiring and Engagement

You can’t have agile workforce planning without agility in your own strategy. We’ve summarised the top ways you can shift your thinking to develop a new workforce planning strategy.

Why build an agile workforce planning strategy?

As HR Professionals, forecasting can be hard, especially in un-precedented times like these. How often do we put budget aside for those “just in case” scenarios, only to still go over budget? Building an agile workforce planning strategy will allow better forecasting for your organisation and allow you to stay within budget and meet your targets more effectively. In addition, your development of an agile workforce plan will allow your organisation to improve the performance of your time-to-hire, cost-to-hire and candidate experience. The key is to create a business strategy that is flexible enough to have room for change, but is insights-focused and based on true case studies of your team to have enough practical knowledge for the strategy to be primarily accurate for your critical future hiring needs.

1. Let your recruiters do the agile workforce planning

No, we don’t mean ignore what the hiring managers forecast for the next 6-12 months. We mean, take their input and do your own research to find what role titles will be require in your business. This is a type of recruitment-led, bottom-up forecasting that is data-driven and analytics focused. Agile workforce planning involves looking at your previous hires (for example, how many sales people did you hire in January?) and then looking at the upcoming changes in the market and industry to learn how you need to forecast and development your plan.

Combining the needs of the hiring managers and the market trends experience of your recruiters will give you an agile workforce plan that reflects the needs of the business and the shifts of the job market to develop your organisation further.

2. Talent Pooling for your future roles

Everyone’s talking about it, but who is actually doing it right? Talent Pooling can be tackled in a number of different ways. The key thing to do is build Talent Pools that engage with the talent that are already interested in working for you. Engaging with talent means you find out: more about their skills, how interested they are in your company, and if they’re the right cultural fit. This fits into your agile workforce planning to allow you to create pools of canadidates with the pratical skills you need to allow your team to approach those pooled candidates when roles become available for a quicker and happier hire of your future staff. With your Talent Pool functionality, you need to be able to quickly build and fill your pools with high quality talent. LiveHire’s Talent Pooling has suggested candidates to enable your organisation to identify talent that you might not even been aware of in your Talent Community.

Start the conversation today with your candidates through Talent Pools, and you might just have your next hire ready for tomorrow.

Blog: The importance of Talent Pooling

3. Finding the skills gaps in your business

Agile workforce planning is all about thinking ahead to avoid reactive hiring. Think about the skills gaps in your business and you’ll be able to feed this information to your hiring managers to plan ahead for the future. This is a time where you can get input from different teams in the business and start to understand their pain points and what analytics you have to support the development of a solution for them. It’s also important to speak with the stakeholders and work out which direction they see your organisation moving towards in the long term and what critical needs they have for the future. Strategic workforce planning means creating a plan based on insights and data that will address the demance for your organisation for the future. This planning includes looking at the number of roles previously hired in your business, speaking to the business leaders to understand their future needs, and gaining knowledge about how the business is changing and where you could support them.

4. Make sure your agile team is aligned in everything you do

Having alignment among your team is one of the most important elements of guaranteeing your agile workforce planning is effective and efficient. This will ensure that you can work proactively to achieve this common goal. By using technology that allows you and your team to share notes on a candidate, to collaborate with the hiring manager, and to see where each candidates are within the process, will ensure increased productivity.