Steps in strategic human resource planning: a 6-step guide

The steps in strategic human resource planning are the sequence HR and business leaders follow to make sure the company has the right people, with the right skills, when its strategy needs them. There are six: set the business goals, assess the current workforce, forecast demand and supply, analyse the gaps, choose the actions that close them, then implement and review the plan on a fixed cadence.

TL;DR:

• Strategic HR planning runs in six steps: business goals, workforce assessment, forecast, gap analysis, action plan, then implement and review.
• Start from the business plan, not from open requisitions. Every later step depends on knowing which goals the workforce must deliver.
• Assess skills with evidence such as skills tests and work samples, not job titles or CV keywords, or the gap analysis will be wrong.
• Close each gap with one of four moves: build (train), buy (hire), borrow (contract) or redeploy (move people internally).
• SHRM's 2025 Talent Trends research found 69% of organizations still struggle to fill full-time roles, so plans that rely only on hiring often miss their dates.
• Give each step an owner, a deadline and one KPI, and review the plan every quarter.

What are the steps in strategic human resource planning?

Strategic human resource planning follows six steps: set the business goals the plan must support, assess the current workforce, forecast future demand and supply, analyse the gaps between them, choose actions to close those gaps, and then implement, monitor and adjust the plan. Each step produces one output that the next step needs.

If you need the definition, benefits and types first, read our guide to strategic human resource planning. This page focuses on how to run the process.

Most guides list four to six steps. Shorter versions merge goal setting into the assessment or merge implementation and review. The work is the same.

Step 1: What business goals should the HR plan support?

The business goals an HR plan supports are the few company priorities that change how many people you need, which skills they need or where they work: entering a new market, launching a product, automating a process, cutting cost or opening a new site. Start here, because a workforce plan without a business goal is just a headcount budget.

Sit down with the leadership team and turn each priority into a people question:

• Growth goal: "We will open two new regions next year." The people question is how many sales, support and operations roles that needs, and by which month.
• Product goal: "We will ship an AI feature by Q3." The people question is which data and engineering skills the team has, and which it lacks.
• Efficiency goal: "We will automate 30% of invoice processing." The people question is which roles shrink, which grow, and who can move.

Write down three to five people goals with a date and a number. This is where HR earns its seat at the strategy table, and it is the step most teams skip. Our guide on how to align HR strategies with business objectives covers the conversation with leaders in more depth.

Step 2: How do you assess the current workforce?

Assessing the current workforce means building a factual picture of who you have today: headcount by team and location, cost, tenure, turnover and, most importantly, the skills people actually have. The output is a skills inventory you can compare against the future need in Step 4.

Collect four kinds of data:

1. Structure: Headcount, roles, reporting lines, locations and contract types from your HRIS.
2. Movement: Turnover by team, retirement eligibility, internal moves and time-to-fill for each role family.
3. Performance: Recent ratings and promotion readiness, used with care because ratings vary by manager.
4. Skills: What each person can do today, at what level.

Skills are where most plans go wrong. Job titles and CV keywords tell you what someone was hired to do, not what they can do now. Use a shared skills list for each role family (the US Department of Labor's O*NET OnLine database is a free starting point for skill and task definitions), then measure against it with skills tests, work samples or structured manager reviews.

Pro tip: Test a sample before you test everyone. Assessing 20 to 30 people in one role family shows whether your skills list is right before you roll it out across the company.

Step 3: How do you forecast future workforce demand and supply?

Forecasting future workforce needs means estimating two things for each role family over the plan period: demand, the people and skills the business goals from Step 1 will require, and supply, the people and skills you will still have after expected turnover, retirements and promotions. The difference between them feeds the gap analysis.

Demand forecasting: Start from the business drivers. If one support agent handles 1,200 tickets a month and ticket volume will grow 40%, you can estimate the extra agents needed. For new skills, ask department heads which tasks will change. According to SHRM's 2025 Talent Trends research, 28% of organizations say some job roles now need entirely new skill sets and 47% are updating existing roles (SHRM 2025 Talent Trends release).

Supply forecasting: Start from today's inventory and apply last year's turnover, retirement and internal move rates. A team of 50 with 15% annual turnover will have about 42 of today's people in a year, before any hiring.

Scenario planning: Build three versions, a base case, a fast-growth case and a slowdown case, so the plan does not break when one assumption changes. Keep each scenario to one page with its trigger, for example "if revenue grows above 25%, switch to the fast-growth hiring plan".

Step 4: How do you run a workforce gap analysis?

A workforce gap analysis compares the demand forecast with the supply forecast for each role family and skill, then ranks the differences by business impact. The output is a short, ordered list of the gaps that matter, not a spreadsheet of every role. For the method in detail, see our guide to skills gap analysis.

Every gap falls into one of three types:

Rank each gap by two questions: how much revenue, cost or risk depends on it, and how long it will take to close. A shortage in a critical role that takes six months to hire for goes to the top of the list. Do not forget leadership roles: link the gaps you find in senior positions to your succession planning work.

Step 5: How do you choose between build, buy, borrow and redeploy?

The choice between build, buy, borrow and redeploy depends on how fast you need the skill and how long you will need it. Build (train current staff) suits long-term skills close to existing roles. Buy (hire) suits skills that are new to the business. Borrow (contract) suits short or uncertain needs. Redeploy suits a surplus in one team and a shortage in another.

Employers are leaning toward build. The CIPD's Resourcing and talent planning report 2026 found that 91% of UK employers are upskilling people in-house or considering it, and 48% increased their efforts to develop talent internally over the last year (CIPD Resourcing and talent planning 2026). SHRM found that 38% of organizations now train existing employees to fill critical roles. Read internal mobility vs external hiring for the trade-offs.

Whichever option you choose, measure the skill first. Test current staff before you fund training, and test candidates before you hire. A skills-based hiring process makes the buy option faster and the build option cheaper, because you only train the gap that exists.

Step 6: How do you implement, monitor and adjust the plan?

Implementing a strategic HR plan means giving every action an owner, a budget and a deadline, then tracking a small set of KPIs and reviewing them every quarter. Adjusting means changing the plan when a business goal, forecast or scenario trigger changes, not waiting for the annual cycle.

Track one or two KPIs per action, not twenty:

Our list of key HR metrics explains how to calculate each one, and our guide on how to measure the success of strategic HR planning shows how to report results to leadership.

Key takeaway: A plan is only as good as its review. Put the quarterly review in the calendar on the day the plan is approved.

What do the steps in strategic human resource planning look like in practice?

The steps in strategic human resource planning look like this for a mid-sized company. This is an illustrative example, not a client case: a 600-person software company plans to open a customer support hub in a new region within 12 months.

1. Business goal: Open the hub with 60 support agents and 6 team leads by month 12.
2. Assessment: The current support team has 80 agents. Skills tests show 15 are ready to lead a team and 9 speak the region's language.
3. Forecast: Demand is 66 people in the new hub. Supply: with 18% turnover, the current team will lose about 14 agents a year who also need replacing.
4. Gap analysis: The largest gap is 51 agents with the regional language. The second is 6 team leads, which can be met internally.
5. Actions: Redeploy 6 team leads and 9 bilingual agents. Buy the remaining agents with a high-volume hiring process that tests language and customer service skills. Borrow a recruitment agency for the first 3 months.
6. Review: Track agents hired per month, 90-day retention and customer satisfaction in the new hub, reviewed monthly in year one.

What gets in the way of strategic HR planning?

The most common barriers to strategic HR planning are poor workforce data, plans built only around hiring, short-term pressure that pushes the plan aside, and weak ownership outside HR. Each one has a practical fix.

• Poor skills data: Plans built on job titles miss real gaps. Fix it by measuring skills in the roles that matter most first.
• Plans that rely on hiring: The CIPD found 53% of employers that tried to recruit struggled to attract candidates, especially for senior and skilled roles, and 58% saw more unsuitable applicants. Fix it by adding build and redeploy options for every critical gap.
• Short-term pressure: Urgent requisitions crowd out the plan. Fix it by linking each requisition to a plan line, so hiring managers see the bigger picture.
• No owners outside HR: Department heads own the forecasts and the results. Fix it by making the plan part of their quarterly business review.

Our article on the mistakes to avoid in strategic HR planning covers more pitfalls, and our workforce planning glossary entry explains how the two disciplines fit together.

How does Testlify support the planning steps?

Testlify supports the assessment, gap analysis and action steps by measuring skills directly. Hiring teams use it to test current staff and candidates against the same skills, so the plan works from evidence rather than titles.

• Skills data for Steps 2 and 4: The Testlify test library has 3,500+ tests covering role-specific, software, coding, cognitive ability, situational judgment, language and personality skills, so one platform covers technical and non-technical roles.
• Faster buy decisions in Step 5: The AI test builder turns a job description into a role-specific assessment, and automated scoring ranks candidates on the skills the plan needs.
• Benchmarks for Step 6: Skill reports with benchmarking let you compare before and after training, or compare new hires with your current top performers.
• Fits your stack: Testlify connects with 100+ ATS and HRIS tools, so results sit next to the rest of your workforce data.

Ready to put real skills data behind your HR plan?

Browse the Testlify test library to find assessments for the role families in your plan, or start a 7-day free trial with no credit card and test one team before you roll it out.

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