Human Resource Planning

Human Resource Planning is a continuous process. It helps organizations to estimate its current and future workforce needs to achieve its goals. It is mainly comprised of six stages:

1) Identify the Goal

Each management process is unique and is carried out to sort out a particular issue or achieve a particular organizational goal. In a similar way, in human resource planning, first the company identifies the particular goal to be achieved in future. It can be to increase the production, to increase sales promotion and to increase market share.

2) Accessing Current Humans Resources

In this stage, keeping in mind the goal to be achieved, the company analyzes the present inventory of human resources. The company collects relevant information about the employees like current number of employee and their skills and potential to accomplish the task.

3) Forecasting Demand and Supply

After analyzing the available workforce, the employees needed to accomplish the different tasks are estimated. Once workforce demand is clear the supply is forecasted by analyzing the internal and external sources of recruitment. The internal sources of recruitment are transfer, promotion, job enrichment. The external sources of recruitment are job portals, job consultancies and advertisement in newspaper.

4) Identify the Gap

The manpower gap is identified by comparing the future demand and supply of manpower. Accordingly, the company plans to hire employees in case of shortage of employees and to terminate employees in case of excess manpower.

5) Action Plan

The action plan is based on the gap identified in the previous stage. The gap tells the company whether it needs to hire or terminate the employees to achieve its goals. Accordingly, the action plan may focus on HR activities to hire or terminate the employees. The common HR practices for hiring are transfer, promotion and recruitment through placement agencies. The common HR practices for termination are voluntary retirement schemes, issuing termination letter or letter requesting resignation.

6) Monitoring and Control

This stage involves implementation of human resource planning action plan and its monitoring at regular intervals. If any deviation is found the plan is improved accordingly.