Human resource planning: the steps and the hiring forecast

Human resource planning is forecasting the people your organization will need and closing the gap between that and the staff you have.

For a recruiter, the plan decides how many openings land on your desk and when they arrive. If you see it early, you can build pipelines before the hiring manager or client asks for a start date.

HR planning is the shorter name for the same process, and you'll see both terms used in planning decks and job titles.

What human resource planning covers

It covers four questions: who you have now, who you'll need, what's missing, and how you'll close that gap. The first question is about today's team, including headcount, roles, skills, and the people likely to leave. The second looks ahead to growth, new products, or new locations and the roles each one needs.

The gap between those two answers drives every decision that follows. A plan can cover a whole company or a single team, like a hospital nursing unit, a regional sales office, or a warehouse shift. It also reaches past hiring, since some leadership roles get a succession plan instead of an outside search.

Why the plan gets skipped

It gets skipped because next quarter's openings feel urgent and a three-year view feels optional. SHRM, citing McKinsey, notes 73% of organizations run operational workforce planning, but only 12% plan long term. The same SHRM article cites Gartner: just 15% of chief human resources officers (CHROs) report practicing strategic workforce planning. Yet it ranks third among HR priorities.

SHRM's planning hub adds that 40% of CHROs call workforce planning their top talent-management priority. For you, that gap between intent and practice can show up as surprise openings with tight deadlines. When the plan stops at next quarter, recruiting ends up filling roles that nobody forecast.

The five steps of HR planning

The five steps are to assess your current workforce, forecast demand, find the gap, plan actions, and monitor results. Each step feeds the next, so a weak count in step one throws off every number after it.

1. Assess your current workforce

Start by listing every role, who holds it, what skills they have, and who might leave this year. Managers can fill gaps the HR system misses, like who's close to retirement or quietly job hunting. Look outside too. Talent mapping shows where the people you'd want to hire work today.

2. Forecast demand

Demand comes from the business plan, such as revenue targets, product launches, new sites, or new contracts. Ask each leader what work their team must deliver next year, then which roles that work requires. A distribution center adding a second shift needs supervisors and forklift operators. A software launch may need engineers and support staff.

3. Find the gap

The gap is demand minus supply, counted in skills as well as heads. In SHRM's 2025 Talent Trends, 28% of organizations require new skills for full-time roles, and 47% are adding them to existing roles. That survey covered HR professionals at U.S. employers. It means a backfill isn't always a copy of the old job description.

4. Plan the actions

You close each gap in one of four ways: hire, build, borrow, or redeploy.

Only the hire rows become recruiting work, so ask HR which gaps are marked hire before anyone drafts a job description.

5. Monitor and adjust

Review the plan every quarter against actual hires, exits, and changes in the business. If a contract falls through or turnover jumps, the forecast moves, and recruiting should hear about it that same week.

HR planning vs workforce planning

They belong to the same family, but strategic workforce planning looks further ahead and focuses on skills. SHRM's coverage separates near-term operational planning from long-term strategic planning, which far fewer organizations do.

• HR planning: covers the current budget year and asks how many people each team needs and when.
• Strategic workforce planning: looks several years out and asks which skills the business will need as the work changes.

The labels overlap in practice, so ask which time horizon a plan covers rather than what it's called. A one-year plan gives you openings to forecast now, while a multi-year plan tells you which talent pools to start building.

Turning the plan into a hiring forecast

You turn the plan into a hiring forecast by converting each hire gap into dated openings by quarter. Start with the gaps marked hire, and list each one with a role, a location, and the date the new person must start.

Then work backward from each start date using time-to-fill, the time from opening a role to filling it. SHRM's 2025 benchmarking report puts the median at about a month and a half. That figure covers executive and nonexecutive roles at U.S. in-house employers. Add the new hire's notice period on top, and you have the date each opening needs to post.

Planned growth is only half the load, since people leave during the year too. Use the attrition rate to estimate backfills. SHRM's formula divides departed employees by total employees, then multiplies by 100. Say a 200-person team lost 30 people last year, giving a 15% rate.

If nothing changes, plan for a similar number of backfills on top of new roles, spread across the quarters. Put the result in a hiring plan that shows openings by quarter, split into new roles and backfills. That split matters because backfills arrive without warning, while new roles follow the budget.

Check recruiter capacity before you commit

Check capacity by dividing the year's openings by your recruiter headcount. Then compare the result with a benchmark. SHRM's benchmarking data shows a median of 20 requisitions a year for each recruiter at U.S. in-house employers. The same SHRM report puts the median at 50 for organizations with 500 to 4,999 employees and 60 for those with 5,000 or more.

Say your forecast shows 90 openings for the year and you have three recruiters, which works out to 30 each. That's above the overall median of 20, though below the medians for organizations with 500 or more employees. Compare against the band that matches your company's size, and if you're over it, ask for more time, a contractor, or an agency partner before the year starts. Agency recruiters can run the same math on their own past load to decide which searches to accept.

Start with the gap before the next planning cycle

Ask HR for the current gap analysis before the next planning cycle locks in budgets. If there isn't one, build a rough version from last year's hires, exits, and open roles. Bring it to the hiring manager or client with your capacity math. Then human resource planning becomes something you shape, not something you react to.