"Strategic Human Capital Planning: The Missing Link"
It is easy to oversimplify the concept of workforce planning; in fact, some organizations do just that, assuming that workforce planning often will fix all of the human resources ills of an organization. Others formulate their plans in a vacuum, often isolated from other planning processes involving strategic direction, budget, and performance management.
An interview with Mary Lou Lindholm, former Associate Director for Employment at the Office of Personnel Management, on how to use new hiring tools with today's complex workforce.
What agencies have to accept is that they can't attract good people unless they're willing to spend a bit of money on marketing and on-site recruiting. That means having a formal recruiting strategy. "You need to step back and think about what kind of image are you trying to convey," says Mary Lou Lindholm, associate director for employment at the Office of Personnel Manage-ment. Agencies have to identify their target audience, as well as the exact type of information they want to convey through brochures and other advertising, she notes. "You have to have a plan. You can't just go at this haphazardly."
For some Defense Department employees, waiting for paper-based personnel records to arrive in the mail could have serious consequences, such as delaying loan applications to buy a new car or home. A system pioneered by the Defense Logistics Agency may eliminate such holdups by giving potentially more than 600,000 civilian employees immediate access to their files via the Web.
