How to Get Started with the Workforce Planning Process: A Practical Playbook

Every growing, globally distributed organization knows that putting the right talent in the right roles is a make-or-break for success. But with shifting markets and complex hiring models, creating a future-ready workforce plan can feel daunting. Traditional approaches often unravel without a structured workforce planning process, leaving businesses exposed to skills gaps, budget overruns, or missed growth opportunities.

This workforce planning guide takes you through a step-by-step data-informed workforce planning process, including forecasting your needs, analyzing gaps, and building a plan that inspires action.

By following this process, you’ll gain the visibility and confidence to plan ahead, empower teams to execute efficiently and build a workforce equipped for whatever the future holds.

The four pillars of effective workforce planning

Workforce planning is the process of aligning talent with an organization’s current and long-term goals. Sounds simple enough, but to turn theory into practice, you’ll need a structured approach that starts with four foundational pillars of effective workforce planning.

Pillar 1: Strategic alignment

The perfect workforce contains the headcount, skills, and experience your company needs now and in the foreseeable future. Crucially, your dream workforce lineup must be within your HR budget, too.

It follows that strategic workforce planning closely links each of your talent decisions with your overall business strategy. That might mean:

1. Mapping hiring plans to product launches
2. Using revenue goals to model team expansions
3. Aligning location strategy with global market entry plans.

With plenty of complex decisions to make, workforce planning works best as a cross-functional process. Key contributors include:

• HR business partners (HRBPs) who first report the latest workforce insights, such as performance trends and manager feedback, then connect the dots between day-to-day people operations and long-term strategic goals.
• Finance teams that provide budget parameters, compensation modeling, and forecasts to keep your workforce planning decisions grounded in reality. Whether planning for new roles or restructuring teams, Finance aligns your plan with what the business can sustain financially.
• Operations leaders who bring the high-level perspective: what markets will the organization enter, what products will launch, and what capabilities will the team need to win? They anticipate changes ahead of schedule, so you can plan your workforce with foresight.

Pillar 2. Talent supply analysis

Before you can plan future staffing, you need an accurate snapshot of your current workforce. A talent supply analysis gives you a clear, high-level view of your existing workforce so you can choose where to grow, invest, or adapt. This pillar zooms in on:

1. What skills, roles, and experience already exist in your workforce
2. Where you may have redundancies or risk exposure
3. How internal movements, like promotions or lateral moves, shape your talent pipeline
4. Whether attrition trends affect your ability to retain critical knowledge and capabilities.

This analysis also reveals untapped potential in your current lineup. Your workers likely have adjacent or emerging skills to nurture and develop into future-ready capabilities. The more visibility you have into your talent supply, the better positioned you are to plan ahead, whether reskilling internally or hiring strategically.

Pillar 3. Future demand forecasting

According to the World Economic Forum, employers across 52 of 55 economies expect skill gaps to be the biggest challenge to transformation through 2030.

That’s where future demand forecasting is critical for anticipating the capabilities your organization needs, whether six months from now or three years down the line. Effective forecasting encompasses both headcount needs and capability shifts. That might mean planning for:

• Skills that are evolving quickly, like AI, automation, and data privacy
• Roles that don’t yet exist today but may become critical tomorrow
• Capacity requirements for different growth or economic scenarios.

Scenario planning helps in this context by modeling different paths, such as aggressive expansion, a hiring freeze, or organizational restructuring, to build flexibility into your plan. Each scenario highlights different risks, cost implications, and timing considerations so you can plan with confidence.

Pillar 4. Gap analysis and action planning

Analysis and modeling are integral to workforce planning. Still, the real magic comes from developing action plans based on the problem areas you’ve identified.

The most obvious gaps you’ll uncover are related to skills and headcount — whether you have enough people with the required skills to achieve your company goals. Where the answer to either question is “no,” decide how you’ll close that gap. In most cases, your options fall into one of five categories:

• Hire: Bring in new talent to fill critical gaps that can’t be addressed internally
• Reskill: Train existing workers to take on new roles or adopt emerging technologies
• Promote: Move high-potential workers into more strategic roles to close leadership or capability gaps
• Outsource: Contract external partners or consultants when it’s faster or more efficient than building in-house
• Assign to AI: Use automation or AI agents to handle repetitive or data-heavy tasks.

The workforce planning process step-by-step

Workforce planning is a continuous process you can ace with a set of repeatable steps. While every company’s planning cycle looks a little different, the fundamentals remain the same.

1. Secure leadership buy-in and cross-functional support

Even the best workforce plan will fall flat without the backing of your leadership team. Securing buy-in early keeps you on track with company goals and opens up cross-functional collaboration.

As a best practice, you’ll want to loop in key stakeholders beyond HR, such as department heads and finance team members. Consider forming a workforce planning task force with quarterly or biannual check-ins. This group can pressure test assumptions and identify blockers early, keeping your planning responsive as business priorities evolve.

This is also the right time to define the scope of your planning process by answering the following questions as early as possible:

• Will this be an annual, quarterly, or rolling process?
• Are you planning just for headcount or skills and workforce composition?
• How much flexibility do you need to account for economic changes, product pivots, or hiring freezes?

2. Collect and clean your workforce data

Before you analyze or plan anything, take a reliable baseline of current and accurate workforce data across your people systems. This dataset should answer critical questions about who’s working for you, what they do, and how they’re performing.

As a bare minimum, collect:

• Current headcount by department, location, and role
• Tenure and employee turnover data
• Skills and certifications (where tracked)
• Performance ratings and potential indicators
• Compensation and cost data.

Where to gather data from

This information often lives in multiple places, such as your HRIS, ATS, payroll platform, performance management tool, or learning system. Start by identifying your primary data sources, and work with your People Ops or HRIS team to validate accuracy. Clean data is the foundation of sound workforce planning.

If you’re working globally or managing a hybrid mix of employees and contractors, ensure your data reflects your entire workforce. You may need to standardize job titles, consolidate duplicate records, or build crosswalks between systems to get a full picture.

The goal here is usability so your information is complete enough for modeling. Focus on getting your data to a point where it’s consistent and trustworthy for decision-making.

3. Analyze your current workforce

With clean data at hand, the next step is to spot patterns, strengths, and risks within your existing workforce.

Start with a headcount audit of your global workforce. Do you have the right number of people in the right roles and locations? Then, build a high-level skills inventory to understand where your current capabilities are concentrated and where gaps or overlaps may exist. At this stage, look at indicators like:

• Performance and potential ratings
• Tenure and turnover patterns
• Internal mobility activity
• Critical roles with no succession plan.

Alongside highlighting problems, your analysis might surface teams with hidden strengths or workers ready to take on more. These insights pinpoint how well your current workforce supports business continuity and where you’ll need to take action, such as hiring or reskilling.

4. Understand your business goals

To make smart, strategic talent decisions, you need a firm grasp of where your business is headed and what it takes from a people perspective to get there.

Start by discussing high-level priorities with leadership. What’s on the roadmap for the next 6-18 months? This could include:

• Entering new markets
• Launching products
• Automating or streamlining operations
• Expanding or restructuring teams
• Responding to shifts in customer demand or compliance.

From here, translate those goals into talent implications. Ask:

• What roles or skill sets do we require to execute the plan?
• What capabilities are critical, and where do we need them?

Use this opportunity to map business objectives to specific functions and roles so every headcount decision ties back to something strategic.

This is also a good time to sense-check your assumptions with department leads. You may uncover new dependencies, evolving workflows, or planned changes that haven’t yet hit your radar.

5. Forecast future workforce needs

Forecasting is where you shift from understanding your workforce today to preparing for what your organization needs to thrive tomorrow. At this stage, you’re building forward-looking models based on change as well as growth.

Rather than adding more of what you already have, ask: What’s going to be different? Look ahead to:

• Strategic shifts in how work gets done (e.g., automation, cross-functional teams, AI augmentation)
• Roles that may evolve or disappear as tools and priorities change
• Emerging skill areas you’re not currently hiring for but may soon need to compete.

This step is also where workforce planning intersects with transformation. For example, if your organization integrates generative AI across teams, what does that mean for future training needs? Do you require fewer individual contributors and more system-level thinkers? Fewer coordinators and more data-literate decision-makers?

Rather than just estimating headcount, build dynamic scenarios. Create a few contrasting outlooks, such as “conservative growth,” “aggressive expansion,” and “tech disruption,” then model how the workforce needs would shift in each. Consider:

• Which roles scale up, and which taper off?
• Where will you need more contract, part-time, or project-based roles?
• How will emerging skills, like AI prompting, ethical data use, or workflow automation, impact your organizational structure?

6. Run a workforce gap analysis. Identify gaps and risks

Once you’ve mapped your current workforce and modeled your future needs, it’s time to compare them side by side. Identify the disconnects that could hold your business back, such as:

• Skills gaps where your current workforce lacks the capabilities required to meet future demands
• Leadership or succession risks in critical roles with no clear internal pipeline
• Compliance or hiring constraints in global markets due to legal, regulatory, or workforce availability issues

Not every gap will be urgent, but some are business-critical. Use this step to triage issues and prioritize where you’ll need action plans. Consider whether you have the right people and if they’re ready and available when you need them. This is also a good time to identify structural challenges, such as:

• Are there roles that rely too heavily on a single person?
• Do teams operate without a clear talent pipeline?
• Are some functions consistently impacted by turnover or burnout?

7. Create your workforce plan

A strong HR gap analysis clarifies what’s at risk and sets the stage for building targeted action plans to close those gaps. There’s no one-size-fits-all format—your plan could be a dashboard, a deck, or a spreadsheet. The important thing is that it’s accessible and current and clearly communicates what needs to happen next. Make sure you include:

• Budget: Estimated costs by hiring track (internal, external, contingent), including compensation, training, and tech enablement
• Timelines: When specific roles or skills need to be in place, mapped to business milestones
• Ownership: Clear accountability for each action item, including who’s hiring, who’s training, and who’s tracking progress.

You’ll also want to outline how you’ll address gaps across these key strategy levers:

• Recruitment: Which roles will you fill externally, and in which markets?
• Upskilling/reskilling: What programs do you require to build critical skills from within?
• Internal mobility: Where can you promote, deploy, or give stretch roles to existing employees?

8. Implement and monitor the plan

Successful implementation relies on keeping your plan visible and active across the business.
Start by sharing the roadmap with key stakeholders, such as department leads and HR team members responsible for execution. Ensure they clearly understand your timelines and ownership so there’s no room for excuses.

Then, define how you’ll measure progress. Useful KPIs might include:

• Time-to-hire for critical roles
• Internal mobility rates
• Skills gap closure rates
• Attrition in priority teams or functions
• Budget variance on workforce-related initiatives

Review progress regularly and establish a cadence that works for your business, such as monthly, quarterly, or connected to key milestones. If you use workforce planning tools, use real-time dashboards to keep everyone on the same page.

9. Learn and iterate

Effective workforce planning is continuous. Once you’ve completed a cycle or reached a major milestone, take a step back and complete a retrospective. Gather feedback from the teams involved in execution and review both the results and the process. Ask questions such as:

• Did you meet your goals?
• Were the timelines realistic?
• Did you have the right data?
• Was the workforce plan flexible enough to adapt to change?

Then, update your assumptions. Business strategies shift, and market conditions evolve, each impacting your workforce needs. Use what you’ve learned to improve the next planning cycle, whether tweaking your forecasting models or rethinking how you approach internal mobility.

The best workforce planning is iterative. The more you revisit and refine your approach, the more strategic and future-ready your organization becomes.

7 Common workforce planning challenges (and how to overcome them)

Even with the proper framework, workforce planning can break down when structural, cultural, or operational barriers arise. Here’s what you can expect.

1. Working with scattered data

It’s typical for businesses of any size or type to work with more systems than they need. But when workforce data is scattered across disconnected tools, it’s almost impossible to build an accurate, holistic plan. Start by integrating your HRIS, ATS, and payroll systems so they sync key data, or use a centralized platform like Deel that unifies this vital data in one place.

2. Planning in isolation from your business strategy

Workforce plans fall short when they’re built separately from strategic planning.

Example: Imagine a company preparing to launch a new product in six months. HR wasn’t looped in until three months before launch. Suddenly, they’re rushing around hiring specialized engineers and a customer success team in a tight market with limited runway for onboarding.
If the company had included workforce planning earlier in the product planning cycle, HR could have forecasted the headcount and skills required and started to recruit or reskill much sooner.

The lesson from this workforce planning example? Make the prep work a regular part of your leadership conversations. Include Finance, operations, and department heads from the beginning so your hiring strategy moves at the speed of your business.

3. Operating without clear ownership

Only 39% of employees say their company does a great job at creating shared ownership. Yet, 92% of senior leaders think they’re nailing it. That disconnect can stall even the best workforce plans.

The fix is to be explicit and assign clear ownership for every part of the process, including forecasting, approvals, hiring, training, and tracking. But don’t just delegate from the top down; build shared accountability across teams so execution isn’t stuck in limbo.

4. Managing change poorly across the organization

Change is constant in workforce planning, whether it’s new systems, roles, or strategic priorities. However, how leaders manage that change varies widely. According to the same report, 45% of senior leaders think change is handled “very well,” but only 23% of individual contributors agree.

To improve this, clearly communicate the “why” behind workforce planning decisions. And don’t forget to identify change champions to drive adoption.

5. Skipping operational readiness

Hiring plans often fail because new hires don’t have what they need to succeed. If you’re not coordinating with IT, onboarding, and facilities teams, people may show up without laptops, access, or training, meaning they’re unable to contribute.

A crucial part of achieving operational readiness is aligning IT budgeting with workforce planning. After all, you need to understand the clear connection between adding headcount or skills and your balance sheet.

6. Overlooking non-traditional and contingent workers

Many companies rely on a combination of full-time employees (FTEs), contractors, freelancers, and EOR (employer of record) talent, who make up 35% of the global workforce. However, planning tools and strategies often focus only on FTEs, leaving gaps in visibility and control.

Make sure your workforce plan includes all contributors. That means tracking cost, compliance, availability, and conversion potential across every worker type.

7. Ignoring turnover and succession planning

Even your most stable team isn’t immune to a change of faces. If you’re not planning for turnover or thinking long-term about leadership continuity, you’re leaving your organization exposed.

According to SHRM, only 21% of HR professionals say their company has a formal succession plan, which is a huge missed opportunity. Use your gap analysis to identify critical roles without backup and build internal pipelines to reduce disruption when change inevitably occurs.

How Deel supports modern workforce planning

As your company grows, evolves, or enters new markets, your workforce planning process needs to keep pace with every team, location, and hiring model accounted for. That’s where Deel Workforce Planning is essential.

Part of the Deel HR platform, it supports global organizations by combining strategy, headcount, and execution in one connected workspace. With Deel Workforce Planning, you can:

• See your global workforce at a glance, including employees, contractors, and EOR hires, in one platform
• Use Deel’s built-in Global HRIS for unified visibility across people data, job roles, and employment types, no matter where they sit in your org chart
• Standardize job profiles across functions and geographies with reusable templates for titles, levels, and job families
• Give hiring managers the tools to act with self-serve job requests and clear approval workflows
• Model hiring scenarios and forecast costs by location, role type, or currency to stay agile and on budget
• Push approved roles directly into your ATS so you can go from planning to recruiting without delay
• Track open and filled roles in real-time, keeping your org chart tidy and your teams focused
• Launch new roles faster with one-click creation and integrated onboarding workflows.

From forecasting skills to managing costs to navigating global compliance, Deel brings everything into one place so you can plan smarter, move faster, and scale without surprises.

Book a demo to see how Deel can power your workforce planning.