A Supply Chain Approach to

Workforce Planning

PETER CAPPELLI

T H E G O O D O L D D A Y S O F M A N P OW E R

P L A N N I N G

Workforce planning wasn’t always an afterthought.

‘‘Manpower plans,’’ as they were known, had long been

a crucial component of overall business planning.

Their roots were in the World War II War Manpower

Commission, which required businesses to report on

expected staffing levels and requirements to prevent

shortfalls in skilled workers that could derail production and the war effort. By the mid-1960s, a study of

personnel departments found that 96% of corporations

had a dedicated manpower planning function. The

assumption in these models was that the supply of

talent was within the control of the company, an

internal function. The plans began by estimating what

the internal supply of candidates would be in the

future for each position and then matched that to

assumptions about company growth in the demand

for talent. Because the supply for all but entry-level

jobs came only from within, managing that supply

involved some hiring but focused on internal advancement and the rate at which candidates progressed

from one job to the other.

The peak of workforce planning was probably a late

1960s model called MANPLAN, which attempted to

model the movement of individuals within a career

system by including in the forecasts individual behavior and psychological variables such as worker attitudes and aspirations, the practices of supervisors

(appraisals, compensation arrangements, practices

for employee transfers), the group norms in place in

the workplace, and the situation in labor markets.

These individual level estimates were then aggregated

up to the company level to produce overall estimates.

Arguably nothing more sophisticated has been created

since.