How Talent Analytics Kickstarts Your Workforce Planning Strategy
The modern talent market is primarily defined by scarcity, uncertainty, and constant change. While Human Resources teams may be faced with such challenges, their counterparts within the business are still relying upon them to develop and deliver the talent necessary to execute business-critical objectives.
Additionally, business leaders also rely on talent intelligence data to inform their organizational design strategies. Human Resources practitioners looking to gain a competitive advantage and support their business partners cannot rely solely upon reactive talent practices when a requisition opens, but need to instead develop data-informed and comprehensive practices to strategically deliver the right talent exactly when it is needed. Horsefly Analytics’s Global Labor Market Intelligence platform provides a myriad of location-based talent data to help inform an organization’s workforce planning strategy and talent planning strategy overall.
Defining Workforce Planning
Workforce Planning is a term used to describe an organization’s efforts to analyze its existing employee population, assess organizational gaps, and predict and plan for future organization-wide talent needs. A successful workforce planning program will align talent strategy with business strategy to support the organization’s critical business objectives.
How Horsefly Can Help
Companies setting out to develop or enhance existing workforce planning strategies should leverage the Horsefly platform to equip themselves with the labor market intelligence necessary to build a comprehensive and data-backed strategy. By utilizing Horsefly Analytics’s Global Labor Market Intelligence platform, organizations can gain valuable insights to determine the optimal locations to source critical talent, where to most effectively source diverse talent, as well as ground their compensation practices in data to gain a competitive advantage.
Relevance to the Organization
A comprehensive and effective workforce planning strategy supports organizational growth in numerous ways. Firstly, workforce planning activities can ensure that the organization’s human capital strategy aligns with the critical needs of the business.
Workforce planning done properly allows organizations to mitigate risk by anticipating and planning for potential workforce disruptions before they come to fruition - whether it be a lack of overall headcount, a lack of a specific skill set, a lack of diversity, or a shortage of another critical human capital component - thus supporting the broader business in its pursuit of fulfilling critical objectives and focusing on growing the bottom line.
Workforce planning also supports the development of realistic and efficient hiring goals. A comprehensive workforce planning process should not only surface insights regarding what type of talent to hire and in what quantity, but should also allow practitioners and stakeholders to understand where they should geographically recruit talent to ensure that hiring activity supports the organization’s diversity goals and promotes cost efficiency and competitive advantage within the talent market.
Businesses can also leverage workforce planning to assess whether specific talent needs are better suited to hiring full-time personnel, hiring contract labor or a third party, or acquiring entire external teams or organizations. For example, when there are significant gaps in business-critical skill sets or competencies that no internal talent is readily available to fill, practitioners can arm themselves with labor market intelligence to enable data-driven conversations. In doing so, organizations can address whether a “build” - building out a team or developing the skill sets among the existing employee population - or “buy” - acquiring and integrating an entire team or company - strategy is most appropriate to meet their needs.
Finally, though responsibility for owning the workforce planning process often resides within the Human Resources department, assessing and aligning talent needs is only one part of a comprehensive workforce strategy. This process should also involve partnerships from colleagues within Finance, Taxation, Legal, Facilities/Real Estate, as well as those in other functional areas and across the Executive Leadership team. The workforce planning process is ultimately about ensuring that there is organizational alignment across all relevant functions to ensure that the business strategy can be executed in full.
How to Utilize Horsefly
When looking to establish or enhance a world-class workforce planning strategy, Horsefly customers can:
- Leverage the platform’s talent supply and demand data to understand the ideal location(s) for sourcing critical talent.
- Utilize the platform’s salary information to inform compensation practices and build a competitive advantage within specific talent markets.
- Assess the demographic composition of specific talent pools to support organizational diversity and inclusion goals.
Workforce Planning is an essential element of talent planning and organizational design. Balancing the needs of the business with the appropriate talent strategy is a collaborative effort. Horsefly Analytics Global Labor Market Intelligence platform provides a multitude of global data points to help those involved in workforce planning strategies - from HR, to Talent Intelligence, to business leaders - make data-driven decisions quarter over quarter and year over year.
We look forward to partnering with you to help you best leverage Horsefly’s talent analytics and labor market data to make smarter hiring and strategic decisions within your organization.
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