JT Godfrey is a Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Seramount. In this role, he supports HR and talent leaders by producing high-value resources and events. A writer and producer by training, JT excels at translating complex research into clear, actionable insights. Prior to joining Seramount, he held roles across the K–12 edtech and higher education sectors, most recently at the University of Michigan.
JT holds a degree in History and Classics from Oberlin College and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with his partner, Mary. In his free time, he enjoys performing improv comedy, creative writing, and Olympic weightlifting.
Blog
Labor Market Disruption Opens the Door for HR Leaders to Reinvent Workforce Planning
The U.S. labor market is experiencing an era of disruption that far outpaces the traditional scope of workforce planning.
From a macroeconomic perspective, employers are caught between slowdowns in both labor supply and demand, a situation that is affecting an organization’s ability to forecast long-term needs. Simultaneously, employers are contending with micro-level shifts from changes in skill demand to rising employee disengagement.
For HR leaders, the impact of these trends is far from temporary or peripheral. However, these trends also represent an opportunity to break out of traditional workforce planning processes and develop new adaptive systems that better accommodate the current landscape.
Three Dramatic Shifts in Large-Scale Labor Supply and Demand
How can HR leaders begin to predict an increasingly unpredictable labor market?
This question has challenged many leading experts as analyses have continued to show that the labor market is exhibiting structural constraints, with sector-specific job shortages and historically high labor force participation rates.
In a recent webinar, economist Julius Probst, PhD, joined Seramount experts to share his insights on this pivotal moment in the economy. He shared three key factors that are currently driving this change.
- “The Great Stay” – The newest shift in the labor market is a sustained low-hire/low-fire equilibrium, giving rise to a static workforce. This stasis undermines models that rely on steady inflow and outflow of talent, placing new constraints on workforce flexibility.
- Heightened Policy Uncertainty – Rapid change in immigration policy has severely impacted labor supply and dramatically reduced visa pathways for foreign workers. Additionally, the implementation of new tariffs has slowed job growth as the private sector grows wary of capital investment in the current state of global trade.
- AI-Driven Split in Demand – In contrast to most sectors, the technology industry has seen a significant surge in AI-related investment, stimulating pockets of labor demand. However, white-collar hiring has stagnated, and youth unemployment has continued to rise across developed economies.
For HR leaders, the instability in macro-labor supply and demand necessitates a fundamental shift away from static or purely cyclical workforce planning. Under current market conditions, organizations need more adaptable models that can withstand labor supply and demand shocks, preparing for a range of outcomes rather than a single expected future.
More agile models allow HR leaders to strategically identify potential gaps and prioritize targeted interventions such as reskilling or alternative talent pipelines.
Navigating Micro Supply and Demand—Shifting Employee and Employer Priorities
In parallel to macroeconomic shifts, the employer value proposition is being rewritten in real time as both employers and employees modify their expectations. These dynamics exert direct influence on talent acquisition and retention patterns that older workforce planning models often take for granted.
Micro-Supply Shifts
Research consistently shows that employees want more from work than pay and traditional benefits.
- Work-life balance and the opportunity to do meaningful work are now central priorities for a large percentage of the workforce.
- Flexibility has emerged as a make-or-break factor across sectors and demographics.
- Early-career segments show a higher willingness to change jobs or relocate, fueling a more transactional relationship with employers.
Micro-Demand Shifts
On the demand side, employers’ adoption of new technologies has profoundly rebalanced the skills landscape.
- Unsurprisingly, demand for AI-related expertise is increasing.
- However, we are also seeing a declining value in certain white-collar technical skills, such as coding and routine data analysis, as these tasks become more easily automated.
- This shift has led to an elevation of roles (and their accompanying skills) that are uniquely human and difficult to automate, such as traditionally blue-collar roles.
- In traditional white-collar roles, skills such as communication and problem-solving are increasingly sought after.
Considered as a whole, these trends signal that the future of workforce strategy success depends on HR leaders’ ability to forecast the interplay between employer skill demand and evolving employee values. Given the speed with which we have seen changes to these two factors, planning models need to be more adaptive than ever, particularly models that can turn micro-level supply and demand insights into action quickly.
Interested in exploring the driving factors of employer value further?
Download our guide on changing workforce culture and employer value here.
Four Questions HR Leaders Should Be Asking About Workforce Planning Assumptions
Against the backdrop of economic disruption and shifting employer-employee dynamics, many of the assumptions that have historically anchored workforce planning are no longer accurate. The challenge for HR leaders is not simply to acknowledge that conditions have changed but to interrogate whether their current planning models still reflect the labor market reality.
Four questions, in particular, should sit at the center of that reassessment.
1. Is the “Great Stay” affecting our long-term workforce effectiveness?
Traditional workforce planning assumes a healthy level of churn, with external hiring and attrition providing natural mechanisms for refreshing skills and adjusting capacity. In a sustained low‑hire season, workforces can appear stable on the surface; however, long-term skill growth will slow, internal movement will decline, and progression bottlenecks will emerge.
When external hiring is constrained and layoffs are not a viable efficiency lever, organizations that lack strong internal mobility and reskilling pathwaysrisk losing a competitive adaptability edge.
2. Are we prioritizing the right skills for a future-proof workforce?
HR leaders have relied on historical data to forecast future capability needs with reasonable confidence. That logic is breaking down as technology adoption accelerates. Many companies still focus on yesterday’s technical requirements instead of updating their priorities as work changes. This means HR leaders must look beyond old job descriptions and focus on the abilities that will matter most as technology evolves, adjusting hiring and training goals to help these skills grow across the workforce.
Workforce plans anchored to static technical skill sets or legacy job architectures increasingly risk misalignment as the pace of skill reprioritization continues to intensify.
3. How resilient is our long-term talent pipeline?
Many workforce models still assume steady early‑career inflows and predictable retirement patterns. In practice, those assumptions are eroding as critical roles are becoming concentrated among late‑career employees and the talent pipeline is narrowing. At the same time, immigration pathways that once supplemented domestic talent pipelines have grown more variable, weakening a long‑standing source of workforce replenishment.
Without deliberate planning for alternative pipelines and phased transitions, organizations can find themselves over‑reliant on costly external hiring when labor markets tighten.
4. Are we offering enough to attract and retain employees with essential skills?
Given shifts in the labor supply and demand for a smaller pool of white-collar and blue-collar employees, HR leaders need to adjust their employer value proposition to better match employee needs.
Particularly given the speed at which favor has shifted in the employment market, companies with stronger perceived benefits will be better positioned to recruit and retain a greater share of the skills needed to be competitive in this era of work.
Learn more about how to adapt your workforce planning assumptions in the on-demand webinar, Workforce Planning for 2030.
Bottom Line: The Era of Static Planning Is Over
The current era brings a structural reset, where legacy planning assumptions around supply, demand, and value no longer align with labor market realities. Accordingly, traditional levers such as routine churn can no longer be relied upon as the primary engines of workforce renewal and capability development.
In response, HR leaders should reenvision their strategies to match the need for scenario-based planning, where multiple potential futures are modeled and can adapt quickly to change, including:
- Fluctuating workforce demographics and values
- Unpredictable policy shifts
- Shifting demands for frontline and specialized skills
This shift to adaptive workforce planning positions HR leaders to avoid being blindsided by the disruption we can’t yet name. Particularly as employers already expect that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030, the static one-size-fits-all solutions of the past will quickly force costly reconfiguration when assumptions inevitably break.
The question HR leaders must ask themselves is whether that future risk is worth the cost of innovating today.
Interested in modernizing your approach to Workforce Planning?
Speak to an HR Executive Board Expert about what this strategy might look like in your organization.
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