SPECIAL REPORT – RECRUITMENT
workforce planning develop a strategy to work with the depth of talent you have, which you’ve already invested time and energy into, rather than having to seek out new talent, particularly for leadership or specialist roles,” he says. Kerryn Fewster, the co-director of change management firm Change2020, agrees, and says simply that talent needs to be linked to strategy: appropriate advance planning should identify the talent needed to deliver on the strategy and plans. “Organisations get impatient and may take ‘who they get’ if the need to fill a role is urgent, but ideally urgency should be taken care of due to internal succession planning, and therefore if there is an unexpected departure an internal candidate can assume the role,” she says. Fewster suggests looking internally in the first instance, and growing and grooming that talent, as they are normally a good fit with the culture and know how the business works. She also suggests identifying businesses that have a similar culture or who invest heavily in their team members. “Be prepared to approach departing – or still employed – team members if required. Also, build a solid and genuine relationship with a limited number of recruitment agencies; ensure they are wedded to your business, know how it works, what the needs are, what is the ‘fit’ required, so only genuine candidates are submitted for consideration, which saves time and effort.”
LOOK AHEAD, NOT JUST BEHIND
It’s not unusual for a hiring plan to look retrospectively at what’s occurred in the past, ie to look at what was done last year and repeat it. Yet this too is changing, with a shift in focus towards measurement, data, analytics and insight. Nelson explains: “There’s a trend in recruiting to be much more metric driven. And those metrics can tell you historically what’s happened, but you can use those as predictive tools as well. However, it doesn’t necessarily say ‘Let’s put a stop here – we can see what’s going to happen in the next 12 months if we don’t change anything’. That’s where the strategic and structured intervention around the workforce strategy comes into play: ‘This is not working. We have to change things; we have to get the balance of our skill sets aligned to the business’.” The more successful organisations, Nelson adds, are those that have a mix of tactical recruiting data and business strategy; that involve the business stakeholders
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and the talent acquisition function, and then carry out a dedicated workforce planning exercise. Marsden-Huggins says investing in systems and software is essential. With integrated systems, he notes, you’re well positioned to plug into what your future business needs will be and then capture the relevant data for workforce planning. “By having intuitive systems in place it’s possible to mine your candidate potential from the second a candidate shows interest in your company. Invest in systems to tell you what you’ve got to work with, then use that data to plan your future workforce,” he says.
THE WORKFORCE IS CHANGING…
Any workforce plan should also acknowledge that the workforce and how it works is changing. According to research by Adecco, around 30% of Australian workers now work in part-time roles. Flexibility has become the name of the game, and that flexibility can take many forms. Are employers moving with the times? Have they been slow to drop the notion that 9–5 work is the only way? Nelson says progress has been slower than anticipated, but the more receptive employers realise that knowledge workers in particular can now conduct their work from different locations, working different hours. It’s all about the outputs rather than inputs. It’s evident that organisations have different philosophies about work. Some are tied to traditional notions (witness Yahoo’s surprising proclamation of an end to working from home), while others have radically gone the other way, embracing campus-style structures in which even managers don’t have set desks. Then there’s a big bucket in the middle where flexibility is being driven by the value of the employee to the employer, to the point where the employee dictates how and where they will work. Slezak adds that if an employer wants to find the best candidate to excel in the role (as opposed to just ‘get’ the job), they have to be open to the fact that the ideal candidate may not want to work a standard 9–5 Monday to Friday work week. “Employers need to seriously consider tapping into the part-time workforce, or perhaps be more open to the idea of two A-grade part-timers job sharing,” he says. Unfortunately, he adds, where too many employers fall down in relation to having part-timers on staff is that they expect the part-timers to deliver the same results as their full-time colleagues, or that they will at least be