The Power of Workforce Planning Templates

But if your current workforce plan exists only as rough notes or lives entirely in your head, you’re missing out on significant opportunities.

Workforce planning templates align your talent acquisition (TA) efforts with your company vision. They ensure various stakeholders are prepared to hire, train, and develop talent where and when necessary for reduced costs and increased efficiency, innovation, and growth.

Read on to learn how workforce planning templates can transform your hiring strategy and boost your bottom line.

What is a workforce planning template?

A workforce planning template is your roadmap for understanding and preparing for current and future talent needs in line with your business objectives. Like a GPS, it helps you navigate from where you are now to where you want to be.

For instance, you can use a workforce planning template to quickly respond to unplanned leaves from critical employees, minimizing productivity losses before they impact your operations.

But, workforce planning templates are particularly powerful for:

• Labor law compliance: Fill positions quickly to meet minimum staffing or youth employment requirements in industries like healthcare, transportation, restaurants, and manufacturing.
• New hire planning: Understand hiring quotas to develop effective onboarding that gets new employees productive faster.
• Training and development: Pinpoint skills gaps by departments and roles to create targeted hiring and upskilling plans.
• Exits: Predict which roles and departments are more likely to experience turnover, then develop succession and backfill plans.
• Organization planning: Create structured action plans for business goals like restructuring and expansion by analyzing headcount, talent acquisition, resources, technology, and skills needs in one centralized view.

Strategic workforce planning templates require the alignment and collaboration of stakeholders from multiple departments to be successful, including the C-suite, human resources (HR), recruitment, finance, and learning and development (L&D).

Why do you need workforce planning?

McKinsey research reveals that companies excelling at maximizing the return on talent generate 300% more revenue per employee compared with median firms¹.

This is because effective workforce planning keeps your long-term business objectives at the center of every personnel decision, enabling you to stay agile, reduce costs, and drive innovation.

1. Business objectives and TA strategy alignment

Workforce planning allows you to fine-tune your TA strategy to match your business goals, making you more likely to achieve them within budget, faster, and with fewer hiccups.

Here’s how this works in practice: Let’s say you want to lower labor costs by reducing annual external hires by 30% over the next three years. Your workforce plan helps you identify costs per hire, required skills, available resources, and potential backfills for each position, then adjust your talent acquisition strategies accordingly.

In year one, you create succession plans for key positions while building an internal opportunities marketplace and developing upskilling courses for existing talent.

By year three, you have detailed workflows, clear career paths, and feedback systems that improve internal mobility and employee engagement. Congratulations, you’ve successfully reduced labor costs by 15% and cut external hiring by 30%!

Pro tip: Remember that workforce planning for major business outcomes is a long-term strategy. It often takes consistent, smaller actions over several years to achieve, whether you’re a midsize tech company or a multinational corporation.

Amazon, for example, started the succession plan for Jeff Bezos, its former CEO, back in 2014—seven years before he stepped down.

2. Current workforce snapshot

A workforce plan serves as a comprehensive inventory of many of the primary workforce metrics you monitor over time. For example, a simple headcount plan typically includes:

• Positions and departments
• Current and target headcounts
• Full-time equivalent (FTE) counts
• Role types (full-time, part-time, volunteer, contractor)
• Attrition rates
• Total reward package costs (salary and benefits)
• Expected recruitment costs
• Current and target competencies

With this data alone, you can take meaningful steps to control key HR metrics like reducing turnover and achieving pay equity by comparing salary ranges among employees. This information also proves invaluable during workforce audits, such as FTE calculations for the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Unfortunately, most organizations house this data across separate platforms, like human capital management (HCM), accounting, learning management, talent assessment, and applicant tracking systems (ATSs).

You can prevent data silos by investing in an integrated HR tech stack that centralizes this information and eliminates bottlenecks.

3. Future workforce needs

Workforce planning allows you to be proactive rather than reactive to your talent needs. By comparing your current staffing levels to target numbers based on market trends and growth plans, you can take action and innovate before your competition.

Two of the best tools in your workforce forecasting arsenal include:

• Scenario planning: Examines “what if” situations to develop different courses of action for potential future states.
• Skills gap analyses: Identifies the competencies of current staff compared to future needs, with the “gaps” representing opportunities for talent development.

These strategies help you plan for long-term needs and respond effectively to market trends and industry changes.

For example, a current workforce trend is leveraging generative AI and automation to increase workplace efficiency. Let’s say you use scenario planning to answer the question, “What if we automate 20% of our current tasks?”

You begin to chart potential courses of action in ideal, worst-case, or likely scenarios. Your plan leads you to invest in new technology, hire engineering and L&D staff, and upskill existing talent following a skills gap analysis.

The result? Your company successfully automates a majority of repetitive tasks ahead of your competitors, lowering labor costs and improving productivity by over 100%.

4. Budget and resource planning

Labor and overhead are two of the biggest costs of running a business.

Workforce planning enables you to anticipate these costs, so you can plan, budget, and allocate funds and resources effectively across your organization. It can also prevent common problems such as over- or understaffing.

Typical costs you can track and address through workforce planning include:

• Role compensation and benefits packages
• Recruitment and hiring (internal and external talent hiring)
• Employee onboarding
• Development and training

Pro tip: Create dashboards and charts in your workforce plan to segment data by different factors, such as manager, department, or location.

Besides ensuring fair budget allocations, you’ll uncover opportunities for optimization, such as whether it’s more cost-effective to build (upskill current talent), buy (recruit externally), or borrow (outsource talent or hire contract workers) for open roles.

Put your workforce plan into action

A good workforce plan needs the right tech to bring it to life. While HCM systems can help you model scenarios with existing talent, most can’t help you hire for the future. You need a platform that provides key data for strategic hiring, plus the features to achieve your staffing objectives.

Don’t wait until after you’ve hired to start workforce planning. Become a strategic powerhouse by planning and hiring for the future.

1. McKinsey, 2024. “Increasing your return on talent: The moves and metrics that matter.” McKinsey website, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/increasing-your-return-on-talent-the-moves-and-metrics-that-matter.

As a content creator at iCIMS, Alex Oliver is well-versed in content and digital marketing from B2B and B2C organizations big and small.