Building and Seeding Talent Pools 2

Nonetheless, planning is the essential element of acquiring and developing adequate talent supplies. Planning, the bugaboo of the rush-around-reactors who fight the daily fires of staffing problems, requires focused time that doesn't immediately produce results. Planning will save you a dozen hours for each hour you invest.

If you do not know the answer to the question, "how many of what type of employee will I need over the next X years?" (depending on the size and complexity of your organization), you will by SOL (S*** Out of Luck) when the competition gets really hot.

From there, the logic is simple (the work is a bit harder). Where you look is dependent on your time frame. If your horizon line is three years (as in I need to know where to get 25 security officers 3 years from now), the first thing to research is where the supply is. Longer horizons (for bigger and more established industries and enterprises) allow planning to consider reaching into the schools and communities (like the big technology companies and the military do).

Over time, how many of what type of worker with what type of training and when. That's the mantra of the Human Capital Planning Process. Attrition and its variants, retirement age, inducements to grow or shrink, even knowledge management (as we approach the Baby Boom Loss) are the inputs.

The outputs are a series of initiatives designed to build relationships with potential employees so that, when it's time, those relationships can be converted into employment contracts. These are the talent pools.

Next, we'll talk about appropriate size and investment.