What is a demand plan? Very simply it is every role your organisation is looking to hire over the next 3-36 months, detailed out by job title, grade, salary, location, the reason and most importantly WHEN that demand is needed. Imagine if you had that data set what your performance would be like? Everything you’re targeted on is linked to this. It’s obvious.
Why have we never thought to try and obtain this data set before? Like I said in a previous video we’ve become so accustomed to working in a reactive way that we don’t think it’s possible? Well I’ll also tell you what’s stopping you in the next video. But before that let me tell you what a demand plan isn’t. It isn’t a huge number based on ‘what we hired last year’ Just because you hired 1000 people last year doesn’t mean you’re going to hire 1000 next year. And even if the number is approx. but somewhere close to the actual…remember it’s still just a number. It doesn’t help you create any form of strategy. Where will the demand be? What job titles? When? Is it all front loaded? Is it at the back end of the year? The number is meaningless if there is no granularity around it. How can you pipeline effectively if it’s a number? This is one of the main complaints we hear from our hiring managers ‘Recruitment are slow, they’re not in tune with my needs’. How can we be if we don’t know their needs? Well, they wont think to tell us if we don’t ask them. The other common misconception about having a demand plan is linked with our friends in finance. They will run a top-down approach. This is what they’ll try and tell us is good workforce planning practice. And it is a workforce planning exercise but it does not give us the data we need. They might tell us that we’re looking to increase headcount by X or this year we have budget for X number of hires. That is a budgeting exercise from finance and in no way helps us. If they say we’re going to hire 2000 people, this year. Great, ask them what, where and when?? They won’t be able to tell you. So this does not help us at all. Its an important task for them in finance but not for us. Don’t let them trick you into thinking they’ve given you what you need. They haven’t. So all we need to remember in this video is the definition of what a demand plan is. Every role that your organisation will hire for the next 3-36 months with the granular detail of job title, grade /salary, location, reason and WHEN.