Recruitment planning and forecasting hiring needs
Introduction
Imagine you’re a recruiter and a manager walks up to you saying: “I need a new employee yesterday.” You answer: “No problem,” open your ATS and show them a list of strong candidates who applied in the past couple of weeks — some of them probably still open to talking about the job. Sounds good? Is it even possible these days? With proper planning, it mostly is.
Workforce planning
Research by CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) found that 61% of organizations do some form of workforce planning. Is that a lot or a little?
It seems like too many organizations still take a reactive approach to recruitment. According to the CIPD report, fewer than half of companies have a workforce planning strategy built on a solid understanding of current and future needs, and only about a third collect data to identify skills gaps within their organization.
Why plan recruitment?
On one hand, the need for planning seems obvious — especially in business. On the other, there’s not always time to prepare analyses, strategies, and schedules, and day-to-day priorities push future hiring plans to the margins. This section is for those who still haven’t found the time to build a hiring plan.
Even the best-built team makes mistakes. Good planning helps minimize how often mistakes happen and how much they cost.
What is workforce planning? It lets you determine who you’ll need, when, and with what skills. It also helps you estimate the budget required for recruitment processes and for onboarding the candidates you select.
When planning recruitment, you figure out how many people and what types of employees you need to meet current and future business demands. You factor in not just planned business growth, but also historical turnover rates extrapolated to future quarters. Naturally, not every hire can be planned in advance. Unplanned hiring tends to involve senior positions where turnover is too low to predict the next opening. But knowing that even top executives change jobs means you won’t be caught off guard — you’ll have knowledge transfer processes in place.
Ad hoc recruitment processes — ones that start only after an urgent need appears — are usually more expensive and often less effective. Unplanned hiring is typically less well-prepared, runs faster, and covers a shorter period. These conditions make it harder to attract enough candidates, verify them properly, and make good hiring decisions. A rushed process can lead to costly hiring mistakes.
Reasons to plan hiring and recruitment:
- Determine what human resources the company needs to achieve its goals.
- Calculate the budget required for recruitment and new positions.
- Start recruitment early enough to avoid hiring mistakes and the costs that come with them.
How to plan hiring: analyzing staffing needs
Start by identifying future staffing needs. Determine how many employees and with what qualifications the company will need to reach its business goals. If the goals will be carried out by a specific team, consult the plan with that team’s manager. This way you’ll be sure the strategy is accepted by the people who’ll be responsible for executing it.
Once you’ve established what you need, check what you currently have. Answer the question: what skills are already available in your organization and what will you need in the future? This reveals the competency gaps that need filling.
Consider what portion of your staffing needs you can meet through internal recruitment — finding candidates for new roles among existing employees (promotions, role changes, internal training) — and what portion needs to come from the external job market. Use internal recruitment whenever possible.
Advantages of internal recruitment:
- Gives employees room to grow within the organization.
- Reduces turnover, since employees are less likely to look for development opportunities elsewhere.
- It’s cheaper — you avoid the cost of sourcing candidates externally and vetting them from scratch.
The downside of internal recruitment is that it slows down the inflow of people with outside know-how or simply a fresh perspective on the company’s challenges.
Calculate the budget you’ll need for recruitment processes and new hires. Recruitment costs typically include:
- The cost of in-house recruiters or hiring a professional recruitment agency (or outsourcing recruiters via RPO).
- The cost of a recruitment system (ATS) that makes processes more efficient and automates building a candidate database for future openings.
- The cost of job ads posted on job boards.
- The cost of candidate verification tools — tests, assessment centers, etc.
- The cost of maintaining new positions.
Staffing needs analysis — summary:
- Identify the staffing needs for achieving organizational goals.
- Check whether current resources are sufficient.
- Determine whether you can source internally or need to go to the job market.
- Calculate the budget for recruitment and new positions.
How to plan hiring: building effective recruitment plans
Prepare a recruitment plan. A recruitment plan is first and foremost a calendar with the planned start dates for recruitment processes and the target hire dates. It also defines what stages each process will have and the timeline between stages. Keep in mind that different positions often have different stages and different timelines. You’d recruit a warehouse worker differently than a logistics manager, and differently still for a CEO.
When planning stages, also determine who participates in each one. Who posts job ads or works with staffing agencies, who sources candidates, who does the initial screening, who conducts first interviews, who conducts follow-ups, and who ultimately makes the hiring decision.
That’s not all. It’s also important to establish what each person is supposed to evaluate at their stage, within what timeframe (e.g. no more than 3 days after completing a stage), in what form (e.g. a note in the ATS), and to whom (e.g. the person responsible for the next stage) feedback should be delivered. Without clearly assigned responsibilities for each stage, the recruitment process doesn’t really work.
Of course, not every recruitment process needs to be complex, multi-stage, and multi-person. In many — perhaps most — cases, the process will be simple in terms of stages and participants. For the warehouse position example above, it could be a one or two-stage process run by a single person, taking two or three days per candidate.
Recruitment success depends largely — if not primarily — on successfully attracting the right candidates. How do you make sure you’re doing everything possible within budget to find the best people? You plan that process too. Let’s split candidate sourcing planning into two scenarios that often run in parallel.
Sourcing on your own
The first scenario is sourcing candidates with your own team. In this case, discuss the plan with the people who’ll actually be responsible for sourcing. Usually that’s an in-house recruiter or, if there are no dedicated recruiters, someone from administration or the team manager.
When planning, pay special attention to whether the person responsible for recruitment has sufficient knowledge about candidates for the positions in your hiring plan. If the recruiter hasn’t sourced for similar positions recently, I recommend preparing by gathering current market data on candidate availability and their financial and non-financial expectations. Salary expectations are particularly important for budgeting new positions and estimating how long recruitment will take. The lower the salary budget relative to market average, the more time and effort it’ll take to find and hire a good candidate.
Beyond candidate availability and expectations, also establish:
- What sourcing methods will be used.
- How long it will take to find suitable (not just any!) candidates.
- What the cost of sourcing will be. Remember that different methods (job ads, agencies, direct search) come with different price tags. There are many job boards — some niche, some specialized by industry or role. Some are free, some paid. There are also Facebook groups where you can search for candidates at no cost. You can also do your own direct search, usually on LinkedIn but not only there. Choosing the right sourcing method matters — a mistake can cost you several valuable weeks and quite a bit of money.
Working with a recruitment agency
The second scenario, which can run in parallel with the first, is outsourcing candidate sourcing to a staffing or recruitment agency.
Before placing an order, run a proper vendor selection process. There are hundreds of recruitment firms out there, and choosing the right partner is a key decision for your hiring success.
What to do when choosing an agency:
- Check references — not just for the firm, but for the specific people who’ll handle your recruitment processes.
- Check whether the people serving you have LinkedIn profiles (they should), what experience those profiles show, and whether client and candidate references are available.
- Establish how candidate sourcing and verification will work — not in general terms, but specifically for your positions.
- Secure a service guarantee: the right to receive another matching candidate if the first one doesn’t work out.
- Check if the agency is registered in the national employment agency registry.
- When selecting an agency, ask for proposed candidate numbers and delivery timelines.
Executing the recruitment plan effectively
Making the plan is one thing; executing it is another. We write about how to run recruitment processes in separate articles, most of which you’ll find in our Recruitment Academy. There you’ll also find links to external resources, training, and labor market reports.
But if I had to name the most important factors for successfully executing any recruitment plan, I’d list these:
- A competent person (or recruitment firm) responsible for executing the plan.
- A basic set of tools:
- A task management system (e.g. Trello, Monday)
- An ATS — a system for managing and automating recruitment processes and building a candidate database
- Google / Office tools, especially calendars, task managers, and video conferencing (Meet, Teams) for remote interviews
Good luck!
Read more about Element here.
DISCOVER ELEMENT!
Maciej Michalewski
CEO @ Element. Recruitment Automation Software
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