Have you got a workforce plan to set you up for success in 2024?
Karan & Co
Sourcing the very best senior talent as a trusted advisor to the Construction, Infrastructure, and Transport markets
Smart businesses are hiring now or making approaches, having coffees and setting their workforce planning strategy for 2024.
While many businesses find the Christmas period can be a sprint to the end or a moment where they can look to scale back, we are finding the influx of senior roles and strategic hires suggests that businesses know "what got you here won't get you there" and are starting to put the motion in place for their hiring needs for 2024.
Spending time on your workforce planning and operating from a strategic space will make it much easier to consider your immediate and future strategic hiring gaps to ensure you aren't left scrambling for the "available talent" and have the time and diligence to survey the market and engage with the "best in market" talent.
Business Strategy= Recruitment Strategy
If you have a business strategy of future target markets and you know the roles where you consistently struggle to hire the right talent then you have all the data you need to build a basic workforce plan.
Looking and assessing your attrition, tender win ratio, growth trajectory and expanding markets is an initial way to start to plan initially for the next 12 months who you anticipate hiring and when.
This means you can also be proactively talent pooling on a regular basis with known gaps and also when you hire for graduates and junior staff you can have a better understanding of what you are hiring for in terms of future forecasting needs.
See below a simple formula for calculating your workforce planning needs at a basic level and this can form your initial ideas of the numbers you will hire and then use the formula listed below.
You can also break this into categories for position types if you can get granular with your HRS system and identify the attrition in each position category.
Looking at overall numbers you can start to plan your hiring budget and spend using the formula below:
Simple workforce planning formula
Projected?Workforce=
Current?Workforce × (1+Anticipated?Growth)?(Attrition?Rate × Current?Workforce) + (Tender?Win?Ratio × Open?Positions)
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Where:
You can then apply this formula through to different role categories in the businesses in areas such as Commercial, Project Management, Project Engineering, and Supervision to start to look at what the numbers look like for each category and then start to plan each month depending on tender win history.
This formula assumes a linear projection of growth, attrition, and hiring based on the starting workforce, anticipated growth rate, attrition rate, and the number of positions expected to be filled through tender wins over the 12-month period so adjustments may need to be made depending on the business structure.
Workforce planning may sometimes see like an additional headache but investing in the process and operating from a position of proactive hiring rather than reactive hiring will help you forge ahead of your competitors in hiring the best talent in the market.
If I can also leave you with one piece of advice here also- engage your resourcing team or a resourcing specialist in this strategy. Salaries change, rosters change, uplifts change and trends towards FIFO or local work change too depending on industry conditions.
Workforce planning doesn't have to be hard work and putting some work into the basics will mean you can be hiring for roles 8-12 weeks ahead of the person sitting in the hot seat.
Also, when you allow more time to hire you can be a lot more flexible with notice periods, project completions and overseas holidays for your new staff member too.
Trust me, they'll appreciate their new employers proactive approach.