Strategic Workforce planning focuses on having the right people in the right jobs throughout the employment cycle-from recruitment to separation. Systematic and strategic, workforce planning engages managers in defining effective short-term staffing actions in the context of longer-term strategies which enables immediate decisions about how to achieve near-term business goals and objectives. Workforce planning is the process of estimating staffing requirements, forecasting staff availability and calculating the difference between current supply and forecaster demand.
This meant that the HR unit was simply filling up positions without any strategic planning. Hence, many organizations realized that hiring people without the requisite skills just to fill up positions would do more harm than good to the companies and hence, a conscious decision was taken by the HR managers in conjunction with the line managers to have forecasts of how many employees they would need over a quarter. The point here is that the constant bickering between the HR managers and the line managers took a toll on organizational efficiency and hence, this compromise was arrived at wherein the demand for specific skill sets had to be forecasted by the line managers and the HR managers would then deal with hiring accordingly. The third aspect of the staffing and hiring activity is that many HR managers during the boom years advised the line managers to find employees from other divisions who wanted a change in their job profiles and roles. This internal filling up of positions by inter-division and intra company movement was effective in many companies like Fidelity. Further, overtime by key resources and hiring temporary workers were the norm in many companies.
