Forecasting the number of employees for hiring

How do you calculate the almost exact number of employees that an organization needs for business expansion as a result of an improved national economy? — Yellow Submarine.

Organizations must compete with other companies to recruit and retain the most competent and motivated employees. To ensure that they are able to recruit the number of quality of workers they need to be effective, organizations must anticipate future staffing needs and hire qualified applicants.

The trouble is that worker shortages are a recurring reality that most people managers face. A recruitment program that operates on a regular basis (say from year to year), during periods of both shortages and abundance remains the best approach to approximate the number of employees for hiring.

But the question remains to be the same. Exactly how do you forecast the approximate number of employees for hiring given a situation, say, an expansion? The easy approach for planning purposes is to determine a variety of factors of including competitive strategy, technology, structure, and productivity. Generally, they can influence the approximate number of workers you will need.

In addition, external factors such as business cycles and economic and seasonal trends can also play a role. This includes certain sectors that rely heavily on temporary workers.

Given this backgrounder, let’s proceed with two approaches — quantitative and qualitative — recommended by Scott Snell and George Bohlander in their 2007 book simply titled Human Resource Management.

As you can imagine, a quantitative approach involves the use of statistical or mathematical techniques like trend analysis which “forecasts employment requirements on the basis of some organizational index.” It is one of the most commonly used approaches by theoreticians and professional planners for projecting HR demand.

If you want an exact number of employees to be hired for a certain period, then you have no choice but to use the quantitative approach.

On the other hand, a qualitative approach is used if you are satisfied with an “inexact approximation rather than absolute results.”

Qualitative forecasting is “frequently more an art than a science” because it is less statistical while it attempts to reconcile the interests, abilities, and aspirations of individual employees with the current and future staffing needs of an organization.

In this case, you have to rely on your internal experts like supervisors, department managers, consultants, or other knowledgeable individuals on the organization’s future employment needs.

To help reduce the amount of subjectivity in the hiring forecast, you may have to use the Delphi technique to summarize the judgment of a select group of individuals. The forecast represents a composite group judgment.

To get a better view, you have to employ both quantitative and qualitative approaches. By combining the results of these two options, you can secure a more complete forecast by bringing together the contributions of both the theoreticians and practitioners. –In The WorkPlace — By Reylito A.H Elbo, Businessworld