Using the wrong tool for workforce planning can be frustrating. It wastes time, deters your company’s productivity, and creates talent gaps within your organization. 

Worse still, the inaccurate data it generates can lead to costly mistakes that can affect you in a competitive market. Since finding the right fit for your company is getting increasingly complex, you need the right tools to help you make data-driven decisions. 

The best workforce planning tools boost efficiency, improve employee collaboration, and assign appropriate tasks effectively. With the right tool, HR professionals and recruiters can easily build a talent pipeline that suits business needs. 

Workforce planning tools also allow you to plan toward future staffing needs. However, finding the ideal tool in a sea of software can be a hassle. 

This is why we’ve compiled a list of the six best workforce planning tools to help your business thrive. 

What is the difference between workforce planning and workforce management? 

Workforce planning is a forward-thinking approach that helps you access your current workforce to make provisions for the future. On the other hand, workforce management focuses on enhancing operational efficiency by ensuring that the right people are in roles that suit them. 

Workforce planning includes talent acquisition, forecasting, skill gap analysis, and succession planning. Conversely, workforce management accounts for scheduling, payroll, timekeeping, task allocation, and performance tracking. 

A clear distinction between both areas will help you identify the right activities to engage in and also guide you when picking the right tool for your team. 

5 best workforce planning software to look out for in 2024 

Whether you’re looking for an all-in-one solution or a straightforward fix, this list has everything you need. Here are the six best workforce planning tools that can help you unlock impressive results in 2024: 

1. Kula ATS 

The first on our list is Kula ATS: This is not just a regular recruitment tool but powerful software to include in your tech stake to plan headcount and track your team’s performance. 

With its impressive features, Kula ATS empowers hiring teams and recruiters to meet their targets. 

It distinguishes itself from other workforce planning tools with AI features that enhance candidate advancement through customized rule sets. This comprehensive tool uses recruitment automation features to help you improve your talent acquisition efforts. 

With its user-friendly interface, you can easily manage the crucial aspects without doing the heavy lifting. 

Kula ATS is highly customizable and designed to fit into the structure of your team’s activities. Its ad hoc reporting system allows you to customize your reports based on a standard or custom cadence. This software also has powerful reporting and analytics features that help you predict future outcomes faster. 

Best Features of Kula ATS 

• Candidate tracking: Monitor candidates easily throughout the pipeline to determine the average number of candidates in each step, their statuses, and the interaction history. 
• Workflow automation: Create automatic triggers for rejection emails, interview reminders, and specific recruiting process steps to reduce the grunt work. 
• Interview scheduling and management: Determine the availability of your candidates and interviewers using the same tool. Interviewers can easily access scorecard templates and candidate profiles while creating a resource library. 
• Collaboration features: Communicate easily with recruiters and hiring team members to share notes, resumes, and candidate ratings to speed up the hiring process. 
• Integrations:  Enable easy navigation using your favorite apps such as LinkedIn, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, and 100+ pre-integrated job boards. 
• Internal job boards: Use internal job boards and ads to enhance employee mobility while measuring internal applicants against external candidates. 

Kula Limitations 

• This software is mostly suitable for mid-market and enterprise 

Kula ATS is an ideal choice for hiring teams and recruiters seeking to track their recruitment process to identify the effectiveness of their efforts using a single tool. 

Pricing: Kula ATS uses a custom pricing system based on your peculiar business needs. You can also access a free trial by filling out a form. 

2. BambooHR 

If you’re looking for a tool to help you monitor and improve employee experience, BambooHR is a good option. With this tool, you can track your employees' performance against specific goals to determine if they’re genuinely making efforts that directly impact your organization to forecast your next hiring moves. 

BambooHR's employee community enhances communication, ensuring easy access to crucial announcements while facilitating collaboration. This workforce planning tool allows you to create project-specific, regional, or niche interest groups. 

With 49 built-in reports, you make data-driven decisions on employees and potential candidates. It helps you to handle all the crucial aspects of hiring, onboarding, and even offboarding without hampering candidate experience. 

Best Features of BambooHR 

• Performance management: Access features that ease the process of conducting reviews, generating reports, and providing feedback to improve communication between employees and their leaders. Managers can even identify employees who deserve special recognition.
• Employee database: This software helps you store your employee details so you can easily access them when necessary. It allows you to manage job levels and salary bands to ensure fair compensation.
• Custom workflows: BambooHR allows you to create and automate processes to speed up your data entry process.
• Applicant tracking: Organize candidate information throughout every recruiting phase and ensure every team member is on the same page.

BambooHR is ideal for teams seeking more detailed information about their employees to ensure business growth. 

BambooHR Limitations

• Customization features are limited, which makes users perform some tasks manually
• AI and machine learning capabilities are not built into the platform architecture 

Pricing: BambooHR uses a custom pricing model, so you need to contact the team for more details. A free trial is available. 

3. Workable 

Workable helps you prioritize employees and candidates by managing their information in a centralized location in a customizable manner. Even when a new employee is onboarded, this software automatically creates an employee profile to ensure they are easily integrated into the system. 

This workforce planning software for MNC companies help you automatically post job ads and perform targeted outreaches to reach top candidates. It streamlines feedback gathering between hiring teams with tools that maintain confidentiality and assign tasks to specific employees. 

It provides access to interview kits, scoreboards, and pre-employment tests that ease your planning process. If your remote team continues to expand beyond what you can control, Workable helps you manage your organizational structure to enhance collaboration.

Best Features of Workable 

• Automated features: Speed up mundane tasks and emails by accessing the custom email templates on the platform. Also, automated actions should be created based on the job, hiring stage, or department.
• Interview scheduling: Allow candidates to choose a convenient interview time and access seamless integrations with calendar applications.
• Anonymized screening: Eliminate hiring bias by hiding specific details of your candidates from their CVs so you can access them only after the screening is done.
• AI-powered candidate recommendations: Access a large talent pool by leveraging AI to identify qualified candidates by analyzing your job ad. Workable automatically includes these recommendations in your pipeline.
• Integrations: To enhance onboarding, connect this software to LinkedIn Recruiter, Zoom, and over 70 other recruiting tools.

This tool is best for teams seeking to expand their reach when sourcing candidates without sacrificing straightforward collaboration with team members. 

Workable Limitations 

• Inability to mass review new candidates 
• The interface can be chaotic 

Pricing: Paid plans start from $149/month for up to 50 employees. You can also access a free trial. 

4. Rippling

Rippling is a unique tool that combines HR, IT, and finance processes in one application so businesses can gain efficiency when managing employee data. With this software, you can automate administrative activities and boost productivity within a few clicks. Its robust security protocols put businesses at ease while using it. 

It eases employee onboarding, synchronizes data across various platforms, and boasts of extensive integration capabilities. Rippling allows you to plan your headcount effectively by enabling you to view vacant roles, costs, and new hires in one place. 

Talent teams can use Rippling to ensure the visibility of the headcount plans so everyone is aligned quickly. Instead of dealing with the silos spreadsheets created, Rippling provides access to a unified space for your team to plan workforce operations effectively. This way, employees and managers can avoid confusion and easily track the progress of their efforts. 

Best features of Rippling 

• Onboarding automation: Rippling allows you to generate HR documents such as offer letters, severance agreements, and handbooks. It also helps you collect e-signatures and track the progress of the documents for easy onboarding. 
• Performance management: Assign every team member specific goals and track their progress to identify areas for improvement. This will help you identify high-performing employees based on ratings and influence future decisions. 
• Time and attendance tracking: Employees can easily show their attendance using any of their gadgets. It syncs automatically with the payroll system once it aligns with their approved hours. 
• Applicant tracking system: Build a repeatable process and automate the hiring process using Rippling. Provide detailed reports of the recruitment pipeline for hiring teams to access. 

If you're looking for a platform that combines payroll and HR features for faster onboarding, this software might be best for you. 

Rippling Limitations 

• Many users complain about the poor customer support 
• This software supports multiple areas, so the learning curve can be steep 

Pricing: Paid plans start at £7 per user. You can also get a custom quote based on your business needs. 

5. Runn 

Runn distinguishes itself with its impressive forecasting features, which help eliminate guesswork. It uses an in-depth people planner that tracks projects to see how they would impact the budget while helping you remain adaptable to changes. 

This workforce planning software identifies the most profitable roles so you can prepare your team for the future. It helps you manage workloads, remain informed about your team's bookings, and even gain insights into how staff approach the assigned tasks. 

Runn gives you insight into your workforce activities to identify what’s missing, who is overbooked, and the departments that need extra hands. With this tool, you can tailor your hiring efforts to suit the results you derive. 

Best features of Runn

• Monitor your pipeline and projects: Strike a balance between the available workload and your team's capacity to handle it. If there’s overbooking, it might be a good opportunity to welcome new hires. 
• Resource scheduling: Use drag-and-drop features to assign projects to team members. Use Runn to find the right people for each task to avoid clashes with important events. 
• Comprehensive Reporting: With Runn, you can access actionable insights to reach your workforce targets based on customized metrics. 

Runn Limitations 

• It has limited customization features that make it difficult to adapt to your business needs. 
• Integration with some external systems is complex. 

This software is ideal for businesses seeking to track employee activities and identify hiring needs and skills gaps within their current workforce. However, it is not the best option if you're focusing more on recruitment and onboarding. 

Pricing: Runn has a free version, but the paid plans start at $8 per person when charged annually. 

How do you choose workforce planning software? 

When choosing workforce planning software, the first thing to realize is that they focus on different areas. Some tools are useful in aligning business strategy with workforce planning, while others account for recruitment planning, performance management, forecasting, and time tracking. 

Here are some specific factors to look out for: 

• Analytics and reporting: The best workforce planning software uses numbers, visualized data, and analytics to help you present data so you can interpret it easily. 
• User-friendliness: Regardless of how powerful a tool might be, if it isn't user-friendly, that’s a major problem. You need an intuitive platform that’s easy to use for workforce planning. 
• Integrations: Most teams already use numerous tools. Your workforce planning tool should integrate easily with your existing tech stack to boost productivity. 
• Automation and AI capabilities: Since you would be spending a lot of time using your workforce planning software, choosing one that automates tasks is wise. You get to create consistent workflows instead of wasting time on manual activities. 
• Customizability: You need a workforce planning tool that allows you to customize your dashboard reports and even use filters to access specific information. 

Access targeted workforce planning features with Kula ATS 

When analyzing the numerous options available, you must invest in a flexible tool to accommodate your business needs. 

Kula ATS allows recruiters and hiring managers to plan their recruitment activities more precisely by relying on accurate data. Every aspect, from your candidate’s first contact with your business to the onboarding process, is covered by Kula ATS. 

This software goes the extra mile by enhancing collaboration and communication between team members. 

Start a free trial today to use the powerful workforce planning features that Kula ATS provides.