The capacity to connect an organization’s personnel strategy to its overarching goals will be the key to workforce planning in 2023.
Preparing for this year seems overwhelming for many HR and talent professionals. There has not been any reprieve recently, which has been difficult. Talent and HR directors are always on the front lines of trying to resolve how to quickly change and serve the demands of their organizations at any time, from pandemic hiring freezes and hiring booms to the most recent layoffs and a potential recession.
Here are three things organizational leaders can do to prepare for the year ahead and position themselves for long-term success.
Prioritize skills in your talent planning.
A focus on conventional job descriptions and application requests hinders innovation. Additionally, firms can no longer rely on stale conceptions of success when hiring and managing talent. Actually, hiring for positions without a thorough understanding of the abilities required for them disadvantages all parties involved.
Organizations must concentrate on acquiring personnel with the skills necessary to bridge the gaps today while also assisting in filling future business demands to satisfy workforce needs in the current economy, where the half-life of skills continues to diminish.
The significant departure from previous work practices will necessitate a substantial change in perspective and methodology.
Confining work to standardized tasks done in an active job and making decisions about workers based solely on their position in the organizational hierarchy, which has been the dominant structure for work for over a century, hampers some of the most important organizational goals today.
This is where recruiting decisions are based on skills. HR teams must divide positions according to skill levels and restructure the company to support skills-first practices as they reconsider talent acquisition procedures and move toward a skills-driven approach.
One essential component of your team is contingent talent.
Employing contractors is not a recent tactic. The relatively new notion that contingent talent is a crucial component of the workforce, not a short-term fix, that allows firms greater flexibility in talent planning.
Organizations can deliberately add skilled, specialized talent to their workforces as needed by using contingent labor.
Any firm is better positioned to address skill demands in a competitive labor market and unpredictable economic climate if it takes a flexible approach to talent.
How to deliberately create this all-encompassing talent network at scale for all organizational levels while integrating contingent workers where they are most needed is HR’s biggest problem.
Teams with talent must be capable of the following:
- Recognize any potential skill gaps
- Find the talent they require for their pipelines.
- Develop connections to fill talent pipelines and act quickly when a need for particular expertise materializes.
Increase the resiliency of your talent system.
More than ever, talent management systems must be resilient. The approaching economic downturn, a little weakening labor market, a rise in leadership position turnover, and changing employee expectations are some of the contributing factors.
As external factors impact firms, HR professionals must discover creative approaches to satisfy worker demands. HR directors should embrace a more comprehensive approach to workforce planning to accomplish this. Leaders from various HR areas are brought together to develop talent strategies supporting the organization’s overarching goals rather than taking a siloed approach.
Business and talent leaders must embrace data’s ability to address people-related issues.
Predictive analytics and AI will be used more frequently in forecasting to assist in identifying the appropriate jobs, talents, and geographic concentrations for the evolving business.
HR and personnel leaders will be more equipped and knowledgeable to handle the challenges 2023 throws if they concentrate on these three areas: skills, contingent workforce, and data.