Lets talk about the power of a demand plan and what you as a TA leader can achieve when you have one, as this might help you formulate when the right time is for you to start the process. What money can be saved, what business productivity can be driven?. What we can take to our leadership to show why Demand planning is not a nice to have, not something we should think about at some stage but the very first step in transforming our recruitment function. Every single pain point in your function can be attributed to not having a demand plan. If we took some expertise from other functions and carried out some root cause analysis then all delivery issues would stem back to not having a clear sight of demand from the business. Everything we’re targeted on as a TA leader is linked to this. So if we want our function to be high performing which in turns improves our credibility then we need to translate that into business language. Investment in something new is hard to achieve, so if you want to stand a chance of gaining it, you need to be smart about it. Time, cost, quality, experience. These are the 4 main areas of focus for all TA teams, and we need to show the impact and ROI that demand planning will have on your business leaderships own set of objectives. So the first one Time. In TA we often talk about time to hire. This is an obvious metric for us but we need to shift our terminology slightly if we’re to have an impact. The business, hiring managers, CHRO do not care whether our average time to hire is 20 or 40 days - especially our hiring managers. Its meaningless to them. All they care about is not having an empty vacancy in their team because that is what causes them pain. This pain can be linked to project delays, customer loss etc. So we need to stop thinking about reducing time in terms of time to hire but more in terms reducing empty chair time. Because behind every empty chair day we remove we put money back on the bottom line of our business. Suddenly now we can directly link demand planning to greater business productivity, that’s something the business will care about. Its also something your CHRO will care about because you’ll now be responsible for driving better business productivity through better TA delivery. As you can see, a slight shift in our terminology can have a big impact. If you’re hiring over 1000 people a year and you reduce your empty chair time by 5 days. That’s 5000 extra productive days you’ll drive into your business. If each of those days is worth say £200, that would be an extra £1,000,000 you’ve put on the bottom line. And that’s for only 5 days. Some customers we work with have removed 30-40 day so far! If you’re interested in working out what your empty chair time is drop me a line and I can show you how to do it. So the thing to remember from this video is to start talking businesses language and not old recruitment metrics . If you go to your CHRO with a plan to put a million pounds on the bottom line I’m sure they’ll want to hear about it.