4.2 Human Resource Planning
Human resource planning is developing a plan for satisfying an organization’s staffing needs. A strategic HR plan lays out the steps that your organization will take to ensure that it has the right number of employees with the right skills your organization needs to accomplish its goals.
A human resource plan answers the following questions:
- What work needs to be done?
- How many people do we need to employ?
- What skills and experience are necessary to do this work?
- What skills gaps need to be filled (and are there any areas of redundancies)?
HR plans can encompass the entire company or apply to smaller teams, departments, and individual projects (Lucidchart, n.d.)
A human resource plan comprises six main steps:
- Evaluate the goals of the organization. What is the organization’s plan for growth? Does it need personnel to staff a new office or retail location? Is it hoping to multiply the size of its sales force to support a significant sales push? Does it intend to offer additional customer service or internal support to boost customer satisfaction?
- Identify the factors that might affect the HR plan. Anything that might affect the plan, including those over the organization, has little control. Large and small companies should examine information from local business publications and industry associations to predict possible developments in the market. That can include new businesses or larger employers increasing their hiring or laying off employees.
- Establish the current talent landscape. Keeping the organization’s objectives in mind, there is a need for a complete picture of the current workforce. A detailed company organizational chart can illustrate each organization member’s jobs, skills, and competencies.
- Forecasting future staffing needs – Trend Analysis. Many factors need to be accounted for when looking ahead to future needs: turnover rate, investments in new technology, the economy, the unemployment rate, and the competition (poaching) can all influence the ability to achieve one’s staffing goals. Performing a trend analysis based on historical data is an effective way to forecast labour needs.
- Conduct a gap analysis. The difference between your future needs and the current landscape becomes the target to meet for your recruitment process.
- Develop a recruitment plan. Recruitment is the end product of human resource planning.
“Managing Human Resources” and “The Recruitment Process” from Human Resources Management – Canadian Edition by Stéphane Brutus and Nora Baronian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.—Modifications: Used second paragraph of section Human Resource planning, edited; Used section 1.1 Staffing plan, edited.
