Strategic workforce planning

Continuous performance through data analytics

Faced challenges

HRForecast supported EY in the development of HR instruments for the recruiting and development of highly qualified employees. In the light of the financial crisis around the year 2008, most professional service firms postponed or abandoned new employees’ hiring. As a result, qualified university graduates were forced to pursue their careers in other branches. Paired with high growth rates in recent years, this has led to a bottleneck in the talent supply in the consultancy business. Considering the cautious historical hiring schemes during and after the financial crisis, competency gaps in the “middle management” are now developing and the labor market is not able to supply suitable profiles.

To close these competency gaps and prevent them in the future, EY has decided to utilize modern instruments for data analysis. At the same time, the strategic workforce planning process needs to be adapted to changing conditions, especially with arising diversity discussions.

Questions to be clarified:

What are the reasons leading to unwanted employee turnover?

How can attrition be prevented?

What are the optimized recruiting measures?

How to close the skill gaps and to prevent them in the future?

How to adapt strategic workforce planning to the changing conditions?

Project approach

1. Data infrastructure setup

Together with EY, we scrutinized the attrition behavior within the company on all hierarchy levels. In this way, we were able to detect the driving forces and reasons leading to unwanted employee turnover.

2. Statistical methods

Criteria, such as individual workload, gender, level of education, development time per career level and performance evaluations were analyzed with advanced statistical methods, whereby diversity-related facts were also taken into consideration.

3. Labor market analysis

“Middle management” profiles were identified as the profiles with especial attrition risk. Suitable profiles on the external labor market that could possibly fill the “Senior Manager” rank gap were considered.

4. Results

HRForecast applied various instruments designed explicitly for HR analytics so that the recruiting process of EY continuously satisfied the requirements of today and tomorrow.

Key insights & value-adds for the client

The results in a nutshell…

Graduates from Universities of Applied Sciences stand out in terms of performance and loyalty in their career’s early stages – compared to graduates from University.
Females leave or withdraw from leadership position more frequently than males.
The high attrition of Senior Consultants can’t be compensated by the Junior Consultant level.
A high number of soon-to-be graduates with relevant specializations will soon become available; however, a considerable decrease is already foreseeable in the upcoming future.