Succession Planning: How to Fill the Gaps with HRMS Software

Succession Planning is often an intense, paper-driven exercise based on personal knowledge of staff skills and talents by HR and leadership. However, it is an area where your HRMS can drive competitive advantage! How can HRMS succession planning identify and help to fill the gaps in your organization?

Lay the Foundation for Succession Planning with Performance Management Data

For many years HRMS systems tracked little in the way of employee reviews, beyond a year end rating. Now, however, core HRMS systems offer much more in the way of evaluating performance, and niche systems provide in-depth options to rate employee performance and skills. Are you still doing employee reviews in Word documents that sit in a paper file? Or is the evaluation process minimal, a cursory exercise of managers writing one sentence answers when evaluating performance? If you do not have a systematic approach to evaluations, it will never be taken seriously with robust and full feedback. By putting evaluations and performance insight into your HRMS succession planning module, it offers better tracking capabilities, as well as more visibility and transparency to identify your upcoming talent.

Take Advantage of Data Possibilities and Self-Service

Most HRMS systems offer the possibility to track extended details about employees such as education, experience and willingness to relocate. However, these data elements are often deemed ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘planning essentials’. Knowing who you have available is a first step to be able to make three or five year projections of where staff will be needed to fill open positions. Then, it’s only a matter of connecting the dots, to ensure that staff receive the training or internal experience needed to fill an identified role. What details would help your decision making? Certifications, languages or other competencies are usually self-service data possibilities that will help you to identify internal talent and most employees will fill in such data when given the possibility.

Build the Talent Structure and Roadmap in the HRMS

Most HRMS have an organization structure or a rollup of positions. There is usually an option to assign competencies or skills to such a structure. The next logical step is then to compare your employee population against those needed skills, in particular with a view toward future state projections. If your organization is disciplined enough to enable the data, then the data in HRMS succession planning processes will fuel the answers you need to fill your organizational gaps. If you’re looking for a new succession planning system, check out the HRMS Software Guide for ideas and inspiration.