If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll have bought into why demand planning is a no-brainer and you’ll have an appreciation of how to go about getting started, what a demand plan should be, and possibly the most importantly of all, let’s look into the ‘so what’: the outputs and the improvements that will be born from you investing time and resource into this area. With a robust demand plan, you’ll get 2 things: high level strategic insights, and granular based data. Your leadership will lap up the insights, and your delivery teams will transform with the detail.
So, here’s an example version of what the granular data looks like for our customers. Here we can tell the business a very interesting story, as told by our line managers. What demand is coming down the line, and when? Where are the spikes? What reasons are driving that demand? And is that expected? What level of recruiting is going to be the focus over the next 12 months? The location of our demand, the type of hire it is, is it internal, external, perm, contingent etc. The top profiles we’ll be recruiting.
But here is the juicy detail: a list of every role your organisation is going the recruit for the next 3, 6, 9, 12, 36 months. Imagine your performance, armed with this data. All captured without you lifting a finger. Imagine your recruiter’s delivery with an extra 100+ days recruitment lead time. No more manager escalations.
In addition to the reporting and granular data, our customers also receive the strategic insights – the results. We often do exceptional work in TA, but we struggle to articulate it back to the business in their language. What have we achieved? What money have we saved? What potential money can be saved? What productivity can be driven? In the insights, you can see the opportunities on offer. How much empty chair time we’ve saved. What impact we’ve had on attrition. What impact we’ve had on our D&I targets.
And what feeds this type of insight? Well, it’s the granular data of course. We couldn’t create what we’ve just shared without knowing the detail for our customers, line by line, manager by manager, business unit by business unit. Sometimes even cost centre by cost centre. It’s in the detail that your TA operations can live, planning regional attraction and selection strategies perhaps. Maybe creating attraction budgets, based on real data. The opportunities are many.
The other great thing, if you opted for technology enablement and didn’t change a single thing to your recruitment operations, once you’ve extracted this info you will still be driving huge improvements into your business, because at the very least your managers will be engaging with the TA teams much earlier, meaning that empty chair time will tumble, manager satisfaction will soar, and the working lives of your recruiters will be a lot more meaningful and value driven.