Workforce Planning During A Hiring Freeze

Workforce planning during a hiring freeze shifts from forecasting how many people to hire to deciding which work the existing people do.

The HR partner separates the work that must be done from the roles that used to do it and ranks vacancies by business consequence. A costed case then goes to finance for the exceptions it will accept.

Pages on strategic workforce planning usually assume growth and a horizon of three to five years.

Pages on hiring freezes tend to stop at internal mobility.

Neither describes the conversation with a business leader who has lost four people and cannot replace them.

This article gives a sequence for the first ninety days after a freeze is announced.

What A Freeze Removes

A freeze suspends the routines that normally tell the business what its workforce needs to look like.

Four effects follow, and each one shapes the first ninety days.

• Evidence. No hiring means no time to fill, no offer acceptance and no internal movement data, so the latest benchmarks predate the freeze

• Visibility. The work does not stop, and it moves to contractors and agencies that finance books outside headcount

• Capability. Development budgets are often cut first, and the loss appears in no attrition report

• Credibility. HR spent the period administering the freeze, and now asks for exceptions from people who remember the last forecast

David Edwards notes that workers supplied by third parties are rarely counted in headcount.

They are usually managed through supply chain as a non-headcount expense.

HR therefore starts the freeze without a view of a large part of the workforce.

The Work Before The Roles

A leader who has lost four people will ask to backfill four roles.

The HR partner's first move is to ask about the work.

Ross Sparkman defines internal workforce demand as the volume, skills and experience the organisation needs to operate and reach its objectives.

Work is the starting point in that definition, and the role is a later choice.

Five questions turn a backfill request into demand that can be modelled.

• "Which work stops on the first day this role is empty?"

• "What does that cost the customer, or the business, and by when?"

• "Which of your commitments for the next two years are held back by capability and not by budget?"

• "What did you stop doing during the freeze that you intend to restart?"

• "Where are you buying capacity from outside because you could not hire it?"

The answers produce a list of work items, each with a volume, a deadline and a consequence.

Some items belong to a role that still needs filling, some can be redistributed, and some can stop.

Jen Allen, a former Police Scotland practitioner quoted by Edwards, found a skills list for police officers that included baking and basketball.

Her conclusion was to start with demand and the task.

A skills inventory built before that step catalogues the population and answers no question the leader asked.

The better order is set out in building a skills inventory from the work.

Attrition Is Not A Plan

Many freezes are managed by attrition, and the organisation shrinks by whatever the labour market takes.

People leave where their skills are best paid elsewhere, which may be where the business can least spare them.

The result is a smaller organisation that is short in the roles it can least afford to lose and overstaffed in the rest.

Sparkman notes that workforce analytics can show whether particular groups are more prone to leave.

He adds that in a restructuring, high attrition may not be seen as a problem.

Two numbers per segment show whether the freeze is being managed or merely endured.

• Leavers since the freeze began, as a share of the segment

• Critical roles in the segment that are now vacant or covered by a contractor

A segment where both numbers are high needs an exception case before the next resignation arrives.

Which Vacancies Are Critical

Under a freeze, every leader describes every vacancy as critical.

Sparkman gives three characteristics that typically define a critical workforce segment.

• Skills in high demand or short supply. Inside and outside the organisation

• Impact on the value chain. Roles in core processes such as product development or supply chain

• Disproportionate contribution to outcomes. Innovation, customer satisfaction or operational efficiency

A fourth test suits a freeze, which is whether the work has changed enough that the old job description no longer describes it.

Refilling a role whose work has changed reinstates last year's gap and does not close this year's.

The HR partner runs each vacancy past the four tests with the leader present.

A vacancy that meets none of them is a candidate for redistribution, and one that meets several goes forward as an exception case.

For example, a service business has six open vacancies.

The dispatch planner meets three tests, because the skill is scarce, the role sits in the delivery process and customers notice a gap within days.

The second administrator meets none, and that work is redistributed across two colleagues with one weekly report retired.

Everything else is planned in aggregate, and that concession makes the first pass finishable.

The Options Before An Exception

Finance will ask what else was considered, so the exception case lists the alternatives with their costs.

Edwards sets out the choices an organisation faces when it has not planned its workforce, and each one carries a consequence.

• Pay more to attract people. The cost base rises, which reduces margin or raises prices

• Buy temporary capacity at higher rates. The work gets done, but employees lose the interesting work, and no skills stay in the business

• Train existing people. They are ready in about nine months, and competitors may already be delivering

• Hire whoever is available. New hires struggle, turnover rises and colleagues pick up the slack

• Use AI for the task. Unplanned, it takes too long to make a difference, and retrained staff feel threatened

Jane Datta, a former chief human resources officer at NASA, told Edwards that these are not always unpalatable.

She said that contracting for a skill needed for a limited time or a surge is kinder than hiring and then firing.

Three more options belong on the list inside a freeze.

They are redeploying someone from another team, redistributing the work and stopping it.

Each option is priced, and the price is set beside the cost of leaving the work undone.