Importance

Human Resource Planning is an extremely important and useful activity. If used correctly, it offers a number of benefits following:

• Reservoir of talent: The organisation may have a reservoir of talent at any particular point of time. People with requisite skills are willingly available to carry out the assigned tasks.
• Prepare people for future: People may be trained, inspired and developed in advance and this helps in meeting future requirement for high-quality employees quite simply. Likewise, human resource shortages may also be met comfortably (while people quit the organisation for several reasons) through appropriate human resource planning.
• Expand or contract: If the organisation desires to expand its scale of operations, it may go ahead easily. Advance planning makes sure a constant supply of people with requisite skills who can easily handle challenging jobs.
• Cut costs: Planning facilitate the preparation of suitable HR budget for each of the department or division. In turn, this helps in controlling manpower expense by avoiding shortages/excesses in manpower supply. The physical facilities like, quarters, canteen school, medical help, etc., may also be planned in advance.
• Succession planning: Human Resource Planning, as pointed out earlier, prepares individuals for future challenges. The 'stars' may be picked up and kept prepared for further promotions whenever they grow. All of the multinational companies for instance, have this policy of having a 'hot list' of promising candidates ready in advance for example ., HLL, Proctor & Gamble, Godrej consumer manufacture etc.3 Such candidates are rolled over several jobs and assessed and assisted continuously. While the time comes, such kind of people 'switches hats' quickly and replaces their respective bosses without any difficulty.