Managers to Rethink Workforce Planning Strategies

Software engineer in front of computers

With the market downturn, this is a good time for managers to do a retrospective of their workforce planning over the last few years. The tech market went through hypergrowth, hyper valuations, a short-lived wave of COVID knee-jerk downshifts in 2020, and the current wave of tech downturn/market corrections with many layoffs starting in March 2022.

So through these upswings and downturns in the last few years, you, as a hiring manager, did you use the correct information to support your workforce planning correctly?

Some questions for food for thought:

• What data and metrics did you use to decide to open up new roles in your organization?
• Did you hire too many people too fast?
• Did your interview process work for you and your department?
• Did you have a fair and effective process for hiring new people?
• Did you have an effective way to onboard new people and make sure they are productive?
• Did your organization gain momentum and get more work done as you added more people? Or things slowed down because of the additional layer of communication?
• What data and metrics did you use to decide who in your department would let go during a downturn?