Bridging HR and finance through continuous workforce planning

According to Gartner, 58% of recruiting leaders struggle to acquire talent to support current business activities, emphasizing the need for effective workforce planning. With workforce planning playing such a critical role in business performance, it’s surprising why it doesn’t get the attention and prioritized higher in so many organizations.  Part of the answer lies in process ownership — there is a disconnect that needs to be bridged — the one between human resources (HR) and finance. While finance focuses on headcount forecasts and personnel costs, HR and talent acquisition are busy managing the complex realities of their hiring needs. As outlined in our recent blog about integrated workforce planning, even if an organization is headcount neutral, or finance forecasts low growth, HR could still need to hire at many times that volume to keep up with, for example, attrition and internal movement. 

What happens if this disconnect isn't addressed? Well, you're looking at misaligned goals, missed targets, and increased costs that undermine business performance. The solution is continuous workforce planning — powered by real-time insights and data-driven decision-making — which allows you to consider finance, HR, and business objectives simultaneously. 

Why you need better workforce planning?

When you get workforce plans wrong or if they don’t keep up with the pace of your business, you put your business performance at risk. Upwards of 70% of business spend goes toward the workforce, making it the largest operational cost for most organizations. Yet despite the significance of this budget spend, many organizations are failing to effectively use data to inform their workforce planning decisions.

Without access to real-time data, you’ll make decisions based on past experiences and gut feel without insight into hard realities of the market at the point in time. By being reactive (not by choice), you’ll likely experience regular budget overruns due to last-minute and unplanned hiring. Conversely, understaffed teams can lead to poor customer service and missed growth opportunities, while low employee engagement can result when internal movements and promotions are not factored into planning. Balancing workforce needs with budget and business demand is something that requires agility and collaboration.

What do finance and HR teams need to be successful? 

Deciding whether to hire, re-allocate, automate, upskill, or contract your workforce requires careful consideration across the organization. You need access to accurate, comprehensive data to inform workforce movement, hiring demands, and evolving business priorities, so that decisions are not made in isolation. When you get this right, finance and HR teams are empowered to do three key things:

1. Balance immediate cost pressures with long-term talent investments 

While cutting workforce costs in the short term can ease financial burdens, it may hinder your ability to meet future demand or innovate. But, if you choose to invest in talent — through disciplined recruitment, upskilling, and retention — you're likely to benefit from long-term competitive advantages. The goal is to align workforce decisions and costs with broader business objectives to ensure long-term sustainability. 

2. Align (sometimes conflicting) strategic priorities

Business priorities can shift rapidly, often creating conflicting guidance for workforce planning. Finance may focus on reducing costs while HR is tasked with growing a diverse and highly skilled workforce to meet future business demands. Achieving alignment between these objectives requires scenario modeling, cross-functional collaboration, and clear governance structures that facilitate trade-off decisions when priorities evolve.

3. Consider multiple time horizons: Next quarter, next year, and beyond

Workforce planning is not just about meeting immediate needs — it’s about anticipating future challenges and ensuring your business has the right talent at the right time. You need to simultaneously have your eye on:

• Short-term talents gaps and operational costs

• Mid-term workforce needs and operational costs for upcoming projects

• Long-term pipelines that align with strategic growth, innovation, and digital transformation goals

Successful organizations plan across multiple time horizons. 

Pulling the correct set of levers for an optimized workforce

Traditional approaches to workforce planning make it impossible to identify with greater precision which set of talent levers you can pull to achieve your strategic goals and what the cost impacts could be. When your tools are primarily rooted in spreadsheets and manual wrangling of data, you can easily come short and late in offering the insights needed to decide which of these levers to pull — and when:

Which lever will you pull?

Lever 1: Bind/Boost/Bounce: Hire, upskill, or exit talent, to eliminate redundances and optimize your workforce

Lever 2: Bot: Use automation and AI to free workforce capacity and enable employees to focus on more high-impact tasks

Lever 3: Build: Invest in internal talent development and promotion pipelines

Lever 4: Buy/Borrow: Balance external hiring and use of contract and temporary workforce with internal mobility to meet evolving demands

By using workforce analytics and AI-driven insights, finance and HR teams can inform agile workforce models that dynamically adjust based on changing business conditions and future projections.

What HR needs: Real-time visibility into workforce movement

For HR to deliver accurate workforce plans, they can benefit from visibility through a real-time dashboard that captures information at the position level. This dashboard should provide insights into:

• Job roles and skills

• Churn rates, attrition, retirement and transfers

• Internal promotions and external hires

• Movement trends across business units, departments, and locations

With this information at hand, HR can generate dynamic insights that inform hiring plans, ensure recruiter capacity is aligned with demand, and proactively address skill gaps. Instead of relying on static, historical data, HR business partners can help the business make agile, real-time decisions that support the organization’s goals.

The goal: Enabling continuous planning capabilities

Continuous workforce planning helps bridge the gap between finance, HR, and the business by providing real-time, dynamic insights and guidance that address the needs of all stakeholders. 

• HR and Talent Acquisition (TA) teams gain the workforce capacity to meet business demands — whether through internal movements or external hiring — also by ensuring recruiter capacity can meet forecasted requisitions. 

• Finance benefits by seeing more accurate headcount cost forecasts, ensuring financial plans are aligned with real workforce needs.  

By continuously synchronizing data across these traditionally siloed teams, organizations can eliminate inefficiencies and ongoing reconciliations, reduce mismatched hiring goals, and improve decision-making. This level of transparency and collaboration ensures that workforce planning is no longer a reactive process but a strategic enabler of business performance.

Continuous workforce planning in action

Anaplan’s Operational Workforce Planning application provides a secure, accurate, and real-time view of jobs, positions, requisitions, and workforce trends across your organization, with the ability to drill into pertinent details. It helps you accelerate alignment of your strategic plans with execution, translating those plans into unified talent needs, and ensuring cohesion between top-down and bottom-up planning. 

Key benefits for HR and finance teams include:

• Real-time visibility: Gain insights into workforce size, composition, and open positions.

• Streamlined processes: Automate position and requisition creation while maintaining financial controls.

• Flexible modeling: Model and project workforce needs for different business units.

• Data-driven insights: Leverage hiring, turnover, and internal mobility trends to reduce budget variance and improve forecast accuracy.

• Enhanced collaboration: Improve alignment between HR, finance, and business leaders.

Unlock business success with continuous workforce planning

By moving to an integrated, continuous workforce planning model, you can break down the silos between finance and HR, align workforce goals with business objectives, and drive better outcomes. 

Anaplan solutions for workforce planning help translate business plans into actionable talent needs, ensuring seamless alignment between planning and execution.