Right people. Right skills. Right positions.
This is the end goal of workforce planning1 – and can be the end result when HR leaders like you approach it with strategy and intention.
What happens, though, when you face major challenges in this process?
Each day, you work hard to hire, train, and retain your people, but you’re often fighting fires across your organization and resolving problems as they arise. You might feel powerless to pursue your top priorities, including workforce planning.
What Prevents Proper Workforce Planning?
Planning and prioritizing your workforce is tough enough. Working with misaligned, mismanaged job data, though, creates confusion about roles and responsibilities and leads to serious inefficiencies across your organization.
But you’re not alone.
For example, 67% percent of HR leaders rate their organizations as ineffective at using data for workforce planning.2 What’s more, “nearly 75% of businesses have missed objectives due to inadequate workforce planning, lawsuits or non-compliance with labor laws.”3
That’s why it’s so crucial to understand what job data is, why it’s important, and how it impacts key areas of your business. So, before diving into how job data can positively impact your workforce planning, let’s define it.
What is Job Data and Why Does It Matter?
Job data is the information that tells organizations exactly what work their employees do and how they deliver business value. This includes (but isn’t limited to) responsibilities, qualifications, core competencies, required skills, compensation details, compliance guidelines, and market trends.
When managed well, job data optimizes your workforce planning, boosts talent acquisition, and enables organizational success in key areas such as compliance, compensation, and fairness and inclusivity.
Still, 80% of HR leaders today rely on outdated, inefficient methods for storing and tracking – that is, managing – their job data4. This approach creates unorganized, misaligned, and ultimately unreliable data.
Why is Data-Driven Workforce Planning Important?
When you manage your job data well, you manage your workforce well.
Understanding the why behind managing your job data is essential to a successful workforce planning process.
Job data management helps you to:
Prepare New Hires— and Your Business — for Success
Properly managing your job data ensures that new hires have the skills needed to support company objectives and move strategic priorities forward.
Organized job data enables managers and their reports to meet objectives and key results by establishing the key performance indicators that will help them get there. From their first day, employees are set up for success and can start making progress toward these metrics.
On a larger scale, you can use organized job data to assess your organization’s goals and consider how your workforce, including new and future hires, will impact the goals’ success.
Demonstrate HR's True Business Value
With organized, reliable job data, HR leaders can show stakeholders how HR shapes and supports key company priorities.5 By demonstrating its strategic value, HR moves from a support area to a true business partner.6
Regularly assessing your workforce is one way to cement HR’s partner status.
As an HR leader participating in a recent job openings and turnover survey reveals, “Often planning is seen as an annual exercise, but in reality, it is a constant [one] where we are always adjusting to ensure we meet our goals.”5
The benefits are clear: By adopting this practice, you’ll gain and maintain the buy-in necessary to drive meaningful, measurable results for your organization.
Ensure Leaders Make Informed, Data-Driven Decisions
Together with leadership, HR can also use job data to identify current talent risks and skill gaps, assess future needs, and develop succession plans.
These exercises ensure that leaders like you can adapt to changing business landscapes and embrace a culture of data-driven decision making – hallmarks of a truly aligned, sustainable organization.
What's Next for HR and Workforce Planning?
Elevate Your HR Tech
You’ve learned why managing job data is crucial to successful workforce planning. Now, you might wonder, “What’s next?”
It’s time to consider a job data management (JDM) system. These systems do just as they suggest, enabling HR leaders to manage job data in a central place and approach workforce planning efficiently and effectively.
With a JDM system like JDXpert, HR leaders are empowered to manage job data and deliver true business value. JDXpert equips you with the tools to prioritize what matters most: building a truly exceptional workforce.
Explore Educational Content
Successful workforce planning is only one of the reasons why managing your job data matters. Ready to explore more?
Download our latest eBook, “Building a Better Workforce: 6 Insights into Why Job Data Matters,” which dives into why managing job data matters for HR leaders like you today – specifically, the key problems and solutions you face.
In our next eBook, we’ll guide you through ways to effectively implement these solutions, so you can build a better workforce tomorrow. Stay tuned!
1. https://www.icf.com/insights/workforce/strategic-workforce-planning
2. https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/trends/data-for-influential-workforce-planning
3. https://explore.visier.com/workforce-trends-2025
4. https://jdxpert.com/top-tips-to-attract-and-retain-talent
5. https://www.visier.com/blog/why-hr-needs-data-driven-workforce-planning-to-avoid-talent-shortfalls
6. https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/trends/data-for-influential-workforce-planning
Free eBook
Building a Better Workforce: 6 Insights into Why Job Data Matters
Are you struggling with unorganized, unreliable job data? Learn why managing job data matters for HR leaders today and how to build a better workforce tomorrow.
