What's workforce planning?
Workforce planning is the process of working out what people a business will need, comparing that with the people it has, and deciding how to close the gap. It covers how many, with which skills, where, at what cost and by when, and the ways to close the gap: hire, develop, redeploy, contract, automate or let attrition run.
The inputs are mostly internal. Current headcount and its cost by role, level and location. Attrition, both the rate and who is leaving. A skills inventory, which most companies hold only roughly. The business plan that says what will be built, sold or supported next year, and the budget that caps it. Strategic workforce planning runs this over several years and asks which roles the business will and will not need; operational workforce planning runs it over the next quarter and produces requisitions, backfill decisions and the hiring plan a recruiting team works from.
External posting data fills the gaps the internal inputs cannot. Competitor postings show what rival companies are hiring for, at what level and where, which is the market's view of the roles a plan should contain. Advertised salary ranges show what a role costs to fill in each location before the plan commits to a number. Skill shares per function show which skills are common and which are scarce, which decides whether a gap is a hiring problem or a training problem. The occupation and industry shares on the Labour Market Pulse give a market-wide cross-section to check the plan against.
In practice this is a handful of queries against POST /v1/jobs/search: company_name_or for the competitor set, job_title_or and job_seniority_or for the roles in the plan, job_country_code_or for the locations under consideration, and min_annual_salary_usd on the rows that state pay. The aggregates under /v1/insights return occupation demand and salary percentiles with sample sizes without pulling rows. Workforce planning also appears as a named skill in a minority of Human Resources postings, so the function itself is being hired for.
The full treatment is on Talent intelligence.
Related questions
Why is workforce planning important?
Because hiring is slow and expensive, and a role that is needed next quarter has to be opened now. Without a plan, teams discover gaps when work is already late, backfills are approved one at a time, and the budget is spent on whoever asked first. A plan turns the headcount budget into a sequence of decisions that can be checked against the market and the business.
What is the difference between workforce planning and headcount planning?
Headcount planning sets the number of people each team may employ and when the additions are approved. Workforce planning is wider: it also covers skills, location, cost, the mix of employees and contractors, and the choice between hiring, developing and redeploying. Headcount planning is the numeric output of workforce planning, and the part that produces requisitions.
What is strategic workforce planning?
The multi-year version. It starts from where the business is going and asks which roles and skills it will need, which of the current ones it will not, and how the gap should be closed over time. It relies more on external data than operational planning does, because the question is what the market will supply and cost, not what is in the budget this quarter.
What are the steps in workforce planning?
Set the business direction. Inventory the current workforce by role, skill, location and cost. Forecast demand from the plan. Model supply, including attrition and internal moves. Identify the gaps. Choose the action for each gap: hire, develop, redeploy, contract or automate. Budget it, then review it as the plan and the market change.
What tools are used for workforce planning?
Talent intelligence platforms such as Draup, TalentNeuron and Lightcast for market supply, cost and skills; enterprise platforms such as Eightfold for planning tied to internal talent data; and spreadsheets and the HRIS for the internal side at most companies. JobsPipe sits underneath as the postings data layer that the market-side numbers are computed from.
More answers
Query live postings yourself, 1,000 jobs a month free.
Get a free API key