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Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School, the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty. He is also the head of Wharton's Center for Human Resources.Knowledge@Wharton is the electronic journal of the Wharton School.
Most businesses think about their employment needs by trying to figure out how to find and keep its workers. But such an approach often overlooks two seemingly obvious but vital questions that should come first: How many workers and what types of skills does my company actually need? And how do I know my estimates are accurate?
Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli argues that if companies thought about and managed talent needs just like they do their supply chains, they would come far closer to effectively meeting their hiring and retention needs. "Managing supply chains is about managing uncertainty and variability. This same uncertainty exists inside companies with regard to talent development," says Cappelli, the author of Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty. "Companies rarely know what they will be building five years out and what skills they will need to make that happen; they also don't know if the people they have in their pipelines are going to be around."
Cappelli argues that most forecasts of staffing needs are usually way off the mark and that using supply-chain management techniques can make them more useful. Instead of simply making a prediction, Cappelli says companies must ask, What happens and how much will it cost if the forecast is wrong? Looking at whether hiring too many people or hiring too few people will almost always result in learning that a mistake in one direction is likely to be far more costly than in the other. "Then they know which way to bet and they greatly reduce their likelihood of losing a lot of money," Cappelli says.
An article by Knowledge@Wharton discusses Cappelli's theories with him and delves into other ways using supply-chain management techniques can improve the management of talent.
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