why is HR planning important? what are the major steps involved in HR planning?

Answer 1

Without human resources, you have nothing--lots of material and orders, maybe, but no product and no service.

To plan means to look ahead and forecast your needs. Each company needs to look a year or more ahead and determine how many people with what skills it will need 3, 6, 9, 12, and so on months ahead. So, the first step in HR planning is forecasting HR requirements based on product or service orders (real or expected). The second step is to determine tasks are involved in the projected product/service mix and how many different people are needed to meet these requirements. The third step would then be to find "suppliers" for these HR needs. You need to recruit people, offer them jobs, and if they accept train them and move them into the flow of work in the company. So you need to go where the workers are--maybe colleges, maybe job fairs, maybe you also add employment bureaus. Also involved at this or an earlier step is job descriptions, benefits offered, salaries, source of salaries (must coordinate with finance and cash flow).

These views are based on my own experience in HR information system development work. I'm sure that there may be other steps or substeps, but these are the major ones: forecast, break down the forecast into actual warm bodies needed, recruit and hire. If you don't plan (i.e., if you don't take these steps), you may hire more or fewer people than you need, you may hire the wrong people, you may not be able to find the people you need, and your business may suffer (even go out of business because you didn't plan). HR planning is as important as production planning (manufacturing) and involves basically the same steps--forecast, material requirements planning, purchasing (supplies), which is equivalent to forecasting, human resource requirements planning, and recruiting.

Answer 2

Managing staff and their problems.