A guide to choosing workforce planning software

Workforce planning and people management include lots of analytical work. To forecast workforce demand and supply, detect skill gaps, spot future knowledge opportunities, and more, HR teams wouldn’t manage without workforce planning software.

But how to choose software that’ll help you eliminate the routine work, fulfill your goals, and get your HR team up and running quickly? We wrote this blog post with four factors you should consider choosing workforce planning software wisely. Read on and enjoy!

Workforce planning software can solve several tasks at once. In order not to get lost in the sea of features, you need a list of goals and objectives you want to fulfill with workforce planning software.

For example, one of our clients, Lufthansa Systems Hungary, struggled with the harsh talent competition in the IT industry and uncertainty in future skills. Together with the HRForecast team, the company analyzed their existing workforce and detected current skill gaps that helped them determine future-readiness and develop steps to tackle skill gaps.

The bottom line: Your into tasks you need to solve and software features accordingly. Therefore, step one in your software selection process is to make up a list of objectives and tasks you’d want to achieve. For example, you can study the experience of other companies that operate in your niche.

The goal of workforce planning software is to connect business goals with workforce capacity. You don’t necessarily need to acquire a complicated toolset with the functionality you won’t use to achieve this goal.

In order not to get lost in the sea of options, go through this list of must-have features for workforce planning software:

Workforce gap analysis. This functionality allows HR teams to identify disbalance in workforce capacities; find workforce inconsistencies across different business units, departments, locations, etc.; track vital metrics like attrition and turnover; conduct headcount planning; and so on.

Skills gap analysis. A skills management module helps you detect current and future skill gaps. The module helps you build an internal talent marketplace based on actionable data and opens new learning and retention possibilities for your workforce.

Talent acquisition planning. An essential part of workforce planning is building a hypothesis and an action plan to tackle the identified issues. Talent acquisition planning helps you tweak your recruitment strategy to meet business challenges like the company’s growth, mergers, acquisitions, and so on.

Workforce forecasting. This module helps HR teams simulate workforce scenarios and unpredictable events to test out the action plans before committing to ones. With accumulated knowledge at hand, workforce planning software helps you save resources on implementing HR strategies, test their feasibility, and predict impact.

Analytics and reporting. Data-driven HR processes are impossible without tracking actionable metrics and timely reports. This functionality helps you gather vital metrics and indicators, benchmark the received data against your KPIs and OKRs, and maximize decision-making at your organization.