Buy, build, borrow for a successful workforce planning strategy

When Baker Tilly’s Brad Fisher joined a panel discussion about employee engagement during the Oracle CloudWorld conference in October, he opened with some startling statistics.

Citing the September 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLT) report, Fisher noted that nearly 11 million available jobs in the U.S. were unfilled. With the national unemployment rate at less than 4%, there were two open positions for every qualified job seeker.

With so many job opportunities available, workers know they have a choice of employers. That makes hiring more challenging for chief human resources officers (CHROs) and their HR teams, who oversee employee recruiting and retention, to maintain employee loyalty and engagement. “Workforce planning is a major challenge for CHROs today,” Fisher said. “And the challenge is industry agnostic.”

As an Oracle Cloud practice director for Baker Tilly, Fisher stays in constant contact with CHROs who are moving their human resources operations to the cloud. He said the emerging “buy, build, borrow” approach to workforce planning is becoming more popular. Organizations have to think of workforce planning as a portfolio and not just going out to the marketplace to hire someone externally every time.

“Buying” talent: the traditional approach

The “buy” side of the hiring equation, Fisher said, refers to the traditional approach of developing a job requisition, then interviewing and hiring candidates. While many organizations have internal career sites where employees usually have a week or two to apply to a job before it would be posted externally, often there is insufficient communication to employees to look at internal resources and actually apply. As a result, a majority of openings end up with external candidates.

Based on the current imbalance of supply and demand for employees, this strategy has become less effective. Some companies may take six to nine months filling jobs, a gap that will negatively impact an organization. Recruiters become desperate, lowering qualifications and standards. This can lead to hires who are less productive, less adequately skilled and less likely to be a cultural fit which in turn will lead to higher attrition or lower utilization/productivity for the company, further impacting profitability which can quickly turn into a negative spiral.