Customer Reviews

Strategic Staffing: A Comprehensive System for Effective Workforce Planning

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is packed with good information and it's one of the better books out there for helping someone understand the strategic staffing/workforce planning process. But, it's also tedious. I've been working my way through it for weeks now and I just can't seem to get through it (and, it's not even that large of a book!). The author could trim 25% of the book's heft and the result would be a better, more streamlined read. For example, the early chapters continually reiterate the same points and the author has a frustrating habit of describing a particular technique in detail only to tell you that it is the wrong way to do it at the end. Since I've been taking notes througout, this is particulary irritating because I have to unlearn what I've just read. While in can empathize with the author - the topic is far from a sexy one - the prose just lulls me to sleep.

That's too bad, because the author has great advice and offers a lot of effective tools for performing, step-by-step, the strategic staffing process.

It was tough to assign the rating to Strategic Staffing: A Comprehensive System for Effective Workforce Planning. The book gets its three stars because the overall framework it provides is enormously helpful to a reader who is savvy enough to customize it to the business whose staffing is being planned. Had it been more specific, more insightful and more readable, it would have gotten a higher rating. Unfortunately the book is so long on models (some of which graph the extremely obvious) and jargon, and so short on specifics that I can't imagine handing it to any but the most experienced and insightful Human Resource manager--someone who knows his or her business inside and out. I would never recommend this book to an undergraduate or graduate business or human resources student whose on the ground experience is limited. The book generalizes far too much and needs the balance provided by experience.

What Strategic Staffing: A Comprehensive System for Effective Workforce Plan, does well is to give a business planner, or HR executive, a place to start when developing the workforce plan for a large business, preferably one where labor needs and sources are predictable and skills are measurable. If you are planning the staffing of a retail organization, an IT area or a restaurant chain, particularly one with a history that can be analyzed, this would be a good tool.

One reason this book only works for experienced people is that it provides no guidance on the challenge of gathering the information, gaining leadership support, gathering information on the cost of tactics such as outside recruiting, internal development etc. Casestudies are included in the back of the book but these studies are so bereft of detail that they make the decisions made look much too simple-- One has no idea of the potential risks involved in making these decisions.

What makes the book unpleasant to use (even for experienced people) is the author's sometimes convoluted academic writing style lightened by absolutely nothing from real life. There are no examples of successes, failures or situations that may be tough to analyze. The book goes from the basic to the difficult. For example, large amounts of space are devoted to defining what a business strategy is and is not. Here's a typical quote "Staffing-strategies are longer term, directional plans of action that describe what an organization is actually going to do to direct staffing needs across all planning periods throughout its planning horizon." Yikes! If you don't already know this, its fair to say that you probably aren't knowledgeable enough to be writing a staffing plan.

In spite the writing style, Strategic Staffing provides a kind of skeleton of a useful staffing plan. If you are faced with the critical assignment of developing a very high level plan for a large organization, Strategic Staffing is a very good place to find the kind of basic framework that will reassure senior business people that you have a handle on staffing. Don't stop with this book though. If you do your audience will be shaking their heads at your lack of insight into the opportunities and risks of their specific business.