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Lacey Halpern joins Brandon Laws on the HR for Small Business podcast to discuss workforce planning. During the episode, Lacey discusses the process of workforce planning such as doing a gap analysis and implementing a talent acquisition strategy in an organization.
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Brandon: Welcome everybody! My name is Brandon Laws and this is the HR for Small Business podcast. I am with Lacey Halpern, a returning guest. Welcome, Lacey!
Lacey: Thanks for having me! I’m excited to be here.
Brandon: Today we’re going to talk about workforce planning. Give us some insight, what is workforce planning? Why do employers need to do it?
Lacey: I think, especially right now, what we’re hearing from our clients and out in the community is that businesses are hiring and I have seen lots of businesses go through the process of posting jobs and getting people in the door. It’s not meeting the needs of the business. I think what’s missing is doing some type of gap analysis where you’re really looking at your current workforce, what the needs are, and then creating a talent acquisition strategy. That’s how I would define what workforce planning is.
Brandon: When you talk about workforce planning, it sounds like a process. What areas do employers need to explore, in a step-by-step?
Lacey: The first step is in looking at the business’ supply—what are the current assets in terms of talent? Then, we’re going to be moving after into evaluating the supply and demand—what are the needs of the business? And then figuring out what the difference is, what that delta is. That’s the gap analysis. After we’ve identified the gap we move into the talent acquisition strategy.
Brandon: For the supply, what sort of things are you looking at? Are you looking at people, are you looking positions or maybe just assets or resources that you have in the company? What sort of things would fall under “supply”?
Lacey: I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is your people. So, the number of employees you have is something to look at, the types of skills those employees have, what’s their tenure, how many employees do you have that are looking at retiring soon, how many employees do you have that may be in this sort of temporary space moving on to do other careers, leaving for school. The demographics, especially if you’re an employer that has to comply with affirmative action requirements based on the type of business and your customers. If you’re one of those employers, really paying attention to the demographics is important.
And then also looking at succession planning, too. Do we have folks who are high performing employees that could potentially grow into other roles? So really, what’s the state of
the company, how many people do we have, what resources are available, and how are they currently being utilized?
Brandon: On the supply side, what are some of the biggest issues employers are seeing right now?
Lacey: I think some of the most challenging issues are that one of the largest portions of the workforce right now are Millennial employees. I’m part of that group.
Brandon: As am I.
Lacey: Yes, so I think employers really paying attention to the differences in generations in the workforce and understanding that each of those generations need different things. So retaining talent, because there are jobs out there in the market available, that’s a really hot topic right now in terms of the current supply—how do we keep our people here?
Brandon: Yeah, so with the supply, it’s not only the supply that you have within your company, it’s the supply of the entire market. And if you’re trying to compete with other employers for the same talent, that actually impacts your supply issue.
Lacey: Absolutely. So, paying attention to those positions that would be the most critical if you lost and had to back-fill them, and how challenging would it be to get someone into that position, those are all the questions you should be doing in an exercise. And I’d say that this exercise is something that you could do even on a quarterly basis. Especially if you’re a company in a growth mode, we have a lot of clients that are doing it.
Brandon: Things change so fast.
Lacey: Absolutely! So what you need today may not be what you need six months from now. So paying attention to the current talent that you have is important. And then succession planning, because that’s an important piece of retention is that ensuring that if there are folks that want to move up and change their trajectory within the company, paying attention to those people is important.
Brandon: Now what about demand? Are you looking at the demand for the people or skills or a mixture? How does that all work?
Lacey: So if you think about demand, there’s sort of two buckets of what are the current needs that our customers have and does my current team have the skills and bandwidth to deliver on the current projects and business objectives? And then, also, future thinking. So we know that our sales goal is X, and that large number or small number or whatever it is is going to impact needing to bring on new people. Adding that into the planning, that’s why having HR at the table in the leadership meetings is so important. It’s critical, so that the staffing and hiring and training retention can all be aligned with the business objectives.
Brandon: With demand, some of it’s sort of like looking into the future and making anticipated assessments as to what you’re going to need. That can be scary sometimes. So as an employer, what sort of predictions are you supposed to make?
Lacey: Yeah, I think most sales teams, leadership teams, are looking at past trends to be able to identify whether businesses are going to be following that same trajectory, paying attention to the local economy, the market, being involved in networking groups or industry groups to make sure that you’re staying in front of what’s happening in your sort of niche. But really also spending time focusing on what your current customers are asking for too, because that can give you insight. Asking your current customers what are their future plans, their business growth plans, so that as they grow, or as they’re suffering, you can adjust your staffing accordingly.
Brandon: You know, listening to you talk, it’s funny because we often, probably in the past, HR is really compliance-oriented. And nowadays they really do have a seat at the table with leadership, and what you said really proves that point because you’re looking at trends, marketing, sales, overall business, and how your hiring processes really need to dovetail into meeting those demand needs.
Lacey: Yep, absolutely. I think HR is in a position in a company to just be compliance. To just be the person that comes in for the investigation or to help deliver corrective action or constructive feedback to employees. I think that there’s a gap in that skill-set, and they’re not necessarily being fully utilized. So a talent manager or a recruiter that’s maybe in-house with a company and even HR, if they’re involved in at least understanding the trajectory of the business, where we’re going, what our goals are, we can take that information which is super valuable for someone who’s doing hiring, to say, what gaps do we have? Because what often happens, especially in a company that’s growing, is that 
there are periods of time during growth where we’re understaffed, we can’t keep up. And if you’re a business, you know that there are certain positions that are more challenging to fill that are critical to the business. Being ahead of that, and also understanding what the training curve is too. So just because we get an employee in through the new hire orientation doesn’t mean that the work is done and we’ve filled the gap. It’s getting them up to speed. So that comes in to play when we’re talking about this analysis.
Brandon: Yeah, so talk about step 3, the gap analysis, which you mentioned. As part of this gap analysis, are you looking at both the supply and demand parts, or do those really become part of this gap analysis process?
Lacey: Yes, I would say that it’s sort of two-fold. So you’re looking at, based on current business demands, in which areas is my current supply of talent not meeting objectives. So, the current people we have working here, what are the gaps in terms of how we’re fulfilling our customers’ needs. Is it bandwidth—do we not have enough people to get the work out the door, people are working lots of over time, dealing with burnout. Technical skills, leadership, again, diversity, if that’s an issue your organization has. Really looking at the current people and the current needs, what’s the difference? What’s missing? And then the future-thinking is, based on the current needs that we have, what are we anticipating for the future, and what are those gaps in terms of people? And so some companies actually create a matrix where they identify employees and evaluate them based on the competencies they have, the needs of the business, and really figuring out what’s the difference. I mean, you think of human resources and staffing as being really people-focused, but there is some math here involved where we’re really evaluating what we’ve got, what we need, and what’s the delta.
Brandon: An analysis by itself is one thing, but without action it is a whole different ballgame. What do you do with something like this after you’ve analyzed it and assessed what your needs actually are, what your gaps are. What happens after that?
Lacey: Right, so the first three steps are usually steps that can be quickly breezed through, especially in a small-to-medium sized business. So maybe we don’t spend a lot of time evaluating the future. Maybe we spend some time looking at what’s going on right now, because we’ve got work to get out the door, and we hire people. So, focusing on having a strategic plan, a talent acquisition strategy where we’re actually looking at the strengths that we have in terms of getting folks in the door. Where are our best people coming from? And having a multi-layered approach is important. If we have all of our eggs in one basket, if we just assume that we’re going to get all of our referrals, let’s say, from a local community college. If for some reason something happens with that market or that pool of candidates, then we’re sort of stuck with lots of working piling up, employees getting burned out, stressed out. It affects performance, morale, customers may decide to leave—there can be a huge snowball effect if we don’t act strategically. Some of the things I usually advise my clients to look at are internal recruiting, and that’s succession planning and looking at what talent we have, how can we move those people around, cross-training, and then external recruiting, where we’re actually going out, posting ads, identifying where we’re getting our best talent is important. So we’ve seen a lot of success using LinkedIn, Indeed, any of the industry sites, so being really well connected in the industry, posting in those areas. Identifying if there are opportunities to use contingent workers, so working with an agency, a staffing agency, a head hunter even if it’s a high-level position that’s really difficult to find—that can be really helpful, especially to just fill the gap for now. Maybe you move a few people around, so you can have some of the more challenging things to train on the people who have been with you for a while, and some of the more basic skills on a temporary worker so you can be thoughtful and take your time in the recruiting process.
And then, also—we’ve got this great plan for recruiting. Who’s going to manage it?
Brandon: Exactly.
Lacey: So having someone internal, and it doesn’t have to be a recruiter. You don’t have to have a talent manager to be able to do this. You need to have skilled hiring managers that are working through a clearly identified process that says timelines, that includes who’s responsible for what, and that they have a go-to person, maybe it’s an HR manager, maybe it’s a recruiter or talent manager. Whoever it is in your organization, depending on its size, that can keep the process moving along.
Brandon: It sounds like that last part is really, I don’t know if you call it a talent acquisition strategy, really one part of it is internal—moving people around, getting people in 
the right spots, procuring talent from within your organization, getting them the skills that they need. And then there’s that external side, recruiting, finding new talent. You just mentioned a lot of things, any guidance for people either looking for either one?
Lacey: Yeah, I would say that the first thing, if you’re looking at your internal talent, identifying if there’s a way to create a training curriculum for the employees that you have. It’s a great retention tool and can be a really cost effective way to develop your people for your own business, right? Because you’re going to be getting benefits out of that and training them to be better employees and more productive leaders. But also there’s something sort of intangible. It’s a giveback to the employees. If my employer provides an all-day training for me on, let’s say, leadership essentials or something like that. There’s something I’m taking away from that that’s even maybe personally applicable to my life, and those are things that are over and above the normal health insurance benefits and maybe a parking pass that a company’s providing. So, trying to get creative that way.
And then I also think that my advice to a company in terms of creating a proactive recruiting plan is to look at where your best talent is coming from. If it’s internal referrals, create a referral program where employees are incentivized to send in their friends and the people that they know. If it’s maybe one website that’s doing a great job of referring people in, spend your money on that website. It doesn’t necessarily support to just send out this huge blast and post it on fifteen or sixteen different sites can be very expensive. It can be difficult to manage and it’s time consuming to get all that posted.
Then also, consider using contingent workers also. Because there is a period of time, depending on the position, where we really have to fill the slot.
Brandon: Needed right now.
Lacey: Absolutely, there’s a stop gap. So this process, maybe to the people that are listening right now, sounds exhausting and super time consuming. And I think maybe in the beginning it might be. But if it’s an ongoing spreadsheet or if it’s an ongoing conversation that the leadership team is having or department managers are having, and evaluating the process becomes easier to go through. For me, as somebody who’s in HR, I want to be able to talk with a department manager and have a conversation about this. When they’re asking me to maybe post a job or if it looks like we maybe need this person, I might talk them through this process and kind of get them used to the types of questions we might ask. We have a really nice handout that maybe we could put out with the podcast here so that viewers can kind of see some of the questions that you want to be thinking about. But it doesn’t have to be exhausting and it can be really beneficial, because the worst thing that can happen is that you hire someone that isn’t the right fit for the company, for the job, and it doesn’t meet the business demands. So you’ve gone through that hiring process and it’s really not been beneficial.
Brandon: You mentioned the spreadsheet and a matrix, I assume you meant for the gap analysis and keeping that kind of long term. Is there any sort of template or method in which you would write out that gap analysis, or are there any resources that you know of that would work pretty well for doing one?
Lacey: Yeah, I think that, you know, just identifying, I would envision it being all kind of in one thing that you could print out and see, maybe by department depending on how big your organization is. It’s really identifying, listing out the skills and assets that you have, the talent, and then, where are we going, what do we need? And then maybe there’s an area that identifies briefly in a list, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, what the gaps are. So if we notice that we’re going to be getting in a bunch of orders and those orders are going to require that we have a particular skillset, maybe it’s a machinist, maybe we’re going to need to bring in welders or customer service reps, whatever it is, and we see that we’ve only got a few and one is planning on taking a huge vacation, maybe somebody is coming up on retirement, those would be red flags for me as an HR manager to say, We need to get in front of this so that we’re not stressing out the employees that we have and creating burnout internally.
Brandon: Lacey Halpern, as always, thank you so much for joining the podcast today.
Lacey: Sure, it’s been fun. Thanks!