Explaining HRForecast products as musical genres

Your people, or your workforce, are the core of your company. Investing in your employees is investing in the future of your business. HRForecast’s innovative approach to HR management allows business and HR leaders to improve their workforce planning with the help of smart tools and labor market data. In this article, we unusually explain our products. We asked our team members what musical genres and songs they would associate with our main solutions: Market Intelligence, smartPlan, and smartPeople. Let’s dive in.

Market Intelligence is a people analytics platform that helps business leaders and HR managers identify the jobs and skills required in the future, detect labor market trends, and create future operating models.

If we compare Market Intelligence to a music genre, it’s definitely heavy metal, as data is for true believers. Heavy metal includes related styles that are intense, virtuosic, and powerful. Influenced by the active sounds of the electric guitar, heavy metal is perhaps the most commercially successful genre of rock music, as evidenced by the Metallica S&M performance in 1999.

The same applies to Market Intelligence; it encompasses the work of several analytical tools and selects the most commercially successful labor market data among all analyzed data. Like Spotify, it connects massive amounts of data worldwide to provide insights on labor markets, jobs, and skills into your business intelligence landscape.

Entering the data-driven Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a long-term play. Stakeholders can benefit from the Market Intelligence platform by selecting and analyzing HRForecast’s external data sources to identify relevant trends for HR and business. It’s like trying a new sound, such as the symphonic metal of Apocalyptica and Nightwish.

As Jay-Z sings, “I got 99 problems, but strategic workforce planning ain’t one.” We would compare the smartPlan strategic workforce planning platform to a classical symphony since you need to orchestrate a wide range of musicians (business stakeholders). But once it’s assembled, you have an entire orchestra (company workforce) working in harmony.

Imagine one of the most famous classical music compositions, “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel. The composer builds a composition from a single theme that grows simply through harmonic and instrumental ingenuity. “Bolero” is a highly original piece of music, performed in the key of C major and carefully introduced into the minor key. It creates a beautiful atmosphere; this piece repeats itself over and over again; it has no elements of ornamentation and a steady, constant hum of the side drum.

smartPlan is just like “Bolero;” it’s simple but provides many features to those who’d like to strengthen their workforce. It combines all different aspects of workforce planning in one tool, step by step, one instrument after another. smartPlan allows clients to forecast future workforce demand and supply, analyze skills gaps, and propose solutions to close them. The platform enables business managers to design and plan their future workforce 5+ years ahead and hence be ready for future challenges.

Just as the conductor uses the musicians in the orchestra to play a piece of beautiful music, you can build, buy, or borrow employees for your business project.

• Build by upskilling or reskilling your existing employees. This means you don’t lay off specialists but help them retrain to your requirements.
• Buy means recruiting specialists you need externally to fulfill your business needs.
• Borrow means hiring a temporary workforce for task work.

Once you know which job roles your organization will need in the future, you can translate your business strategy into workforce demands, which is the key use case of smartPlan; that’s the harmony of sound.

Imagine “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen’s classic rock opera released in 1975. The song focuses on several changes in music and tempo. You don’t have time to get bored because it offers new playback possibilities.

The same is true with smartPeople. This talent marketplace platform enables you to identify skills gaps, transform your skills landscape through tailored upskilling and automated learning journeys, and create the best fit between your employees’ skills and your business requirements.

By the way, smartPeople has developed a new feature for recruiting professionals that reveals many useful insights. Such approaches help your managers to build your workforce “harder, better, faster, stronger.”