Human Resource Planning Process

Human Resource Planning Process

Human Resource Planning is a set of activities undertaken to forecast an organization’s labor demand or requirements and internal labor supply, to compare these projections to determine employment gaps and to develop action plans for addressing these gaps.

Human resource planning is a process through which the company anticipates future business and environmental forces. Human resources planning assess the manpower requirement for a future period of time. It is a task that identifies present and future human resources need for a company to achieve their goals. It attempts to provide sufficient manpower required to perform organizational activities. HR planning is a continuous process which starts with the identification of HR objectives, move through analysis of manpower resources and ends at appraisal of HR planning.

Following are the major steps involved in human resource planning:

• Assessing Human Resources

The assessment of HR begins with environmental analysis, under which the external (PEST) and internal (objectives, resources, and structure) are analyzed to assess the currently available HR inventory level. After the analysis of external and internal forces of the organization, it will be easier for HR manager to find out the internal strengths as well as the weakness of the organization in one hand and opportunities and threats on the other.

• Demand Forecasting

HR forecasting is the process of estimating the demand for and supply of HR in an organization. Demand forecasting is a process of determining future needs for HR in terms of quantity and quality. It is done to meet the future personnel requirements of the organization to achieve the desired level of output.

• Supply Forecasting

Supply is another side of human resource assessment. It is concerned with the estimation of supply of manpower given the analysis of current resource and future availability of the human resource in the organization. It estimates the future sources of HR that are likely to be available from within an outside the organization. Internal source includes promotion, transfer, job enlargement and enrichment, whereas external source includes recruitment of fresh candidates who are capable of performing well in the organization.

• Matching Demand And Supply

It is another step of human resource planning. It is concerned with bringing the forecast of future demand and supply of HR. The matching process refers to bring demand and supply in an equilibrium position so that shortages and over staffing position will be solved. In case of shortages, an organization has to hire a more required number of employees. Conversely, in the case of over staffing, it has to reduce the level of existing employment.

• Action Plan

It is the last phase of human resource planning which is concerned with surplus and shortages of human resource. Under it, the HR plan is executed through the designation of different HR activities. The major activities which are required to execute the HR plan are recruitment, selection, placement, training and development, socialization etc. Finally, this step is followed by the control and evaluation of the performance of HR to check whether the HR planning matches the HR objectives and policies.