So, what are the mechanics of the process? How do we obtain this demand info? Well, you have 2 main options: Excel or technology. There are pros and cons with both, and I’ll walk you through them. Excel: The pros. The big one, other than your time, it’s free. Its relatively simple to construct a workbook to send to your hiring communities to complete and send back. The cons, you need to send a different workbook to every manager. You need to keep track of who has sent it back, send reminders. You then need to collate all the workbooks into one data set. That’s a lot of time. What if managers override the formulas, then it won’t fit into the master doc. You then need to splice the data into insights and start actioning the data. All very time consuming. However, if you choose this route and you only get a 10% response rate from your managers, you’ll massively increase your team’s performance for all the reasons in previous videos. It’s really worth it, trust me. And that’s only 10%. It will truly change your working life. Flip you from reactive to proactive mode overnight and start becoming that professional, trusted advisor service that we so crave. Some of our customers use this manual process as a precursor to investing in technology. Using it as the business case to show the results and why it’s such an important but overlooked step in our TA delivery. However, if you keep repeating the excel process manually too many times, you’re in danger of becoming a very well-paid data collector. That’s not where you add value to your business.
So, what can technology do over and above excel? Well 1. We see higher adoption rates from day one with a simpler UI than excel. The UI can also act as a comms to the managers, guiding them through the thought process of demand planning. No more constructing individual email or distribution lists. Instead, you’ll get automatic tracking of who’s completed and who hasn’t, then automatic reminders to those that haven’t. Once the data has been collected from our managers, it will be automatically collated into various reports and insights and sent to the relevant recruiter informing them of their upcoming demand to achieve everything we’ve talked about in previous videos. Then, at the most opportune time, the manager will be automatically re-engaged to start the recruitment process and guided on how to get started. Potentially roles from the demand plan can even be automatically raised in the ATS on behalf of the manager, kick starting the approval process. The best bit of all of this is that the comms to the manager can be personalised to look like they’ve come from the recruiter, or TA leader, or even HRD that supports them. So the manager has been driven for their demand (apparently by the TA team), this demand has been collated, stored, shared with the relevant TA/HR colleagues internally, then prompts sent to the manager at the correct time to get started. The result? The manager thinks “wow these recruiters are being proactive in driving me for my demand, storing it, and guiding me on how to get started,” but you haven’t, your team haven’t done anything, it’s the technology in the background that’s driving all of this activity, all without you lifting a finger. So, if you want to see a demo of how Foresight does this then there is one later on.