Succession planning should be applied to all employees—not just top executives

It’s not uncommon for CHROs to have successors lined up for executives. But imagine if they had to do the same for the entire organization…

Well, if you ask Colin Klein, managing director and co-founder of learning and development platform Skills Copilot for Microsoft 365, HR leaders should have succession plans for every role. Recruiters, he said, often rely on external hiring to fill positions, but focusing on internal candidates can save time and money.

“What we’re really seeing is just a very small rarefied group of folks, typically the C-suite, who are included in that succession-based planning, whereas 95% of the rest of the company is not,” Klein told HR Brew. “Instead of always seeking for these unicorns, let’s create the unicorns internally.”

To that end, he suggested a skills-based approach to succession planning. By identifying successors based on employees’ skills, or the skills they have the aptitude to learn, rather than their titles, HR can have a variety of candidates ready to fill roles before they even open up.

Klein and Janice Burns, chief transformation officer at elearning platform Degreed, shared how HR can create skills-based succession plans.

Build an internal pipeline

There’s usually a “knee-jerk reaction,” Klein said, to fill open jobs with external candidates. But if a warehouse employer, for example, is looking to fill a data analyst position, it could have associates spend a few months learning the skills required of the job, he suggested, noting that it would likely take a recruiter the same amount of time to fill the role with an external candidate. Meanwhile, other employees, like material handlers, could train to step into any soon-to-be-open associate roles.

“Through something like succession-based planning, you’re going to not only reduce your talent gaps, you’re going to improve your organizational agility,” he said. “You’re going to foment better talent retention…I want to stay somewhere where people are looking at me, and I’m part of the long game.”

Klein said companies should also take inventory of existing employees’ skills, because most “have no clue” what skills their workers have. While some companies may have a framework on their HCM platform that shows the skills associated with certain roles, he suggests HR leaders have employees self-report skills, which managers can then validate.

Burns recommended that companies outline “adjacent skills” for roles. “You may not have the exact skill, but you have a skill that’s very similar that with a little bit of training or experience, you can easily grow into that exact skill,” she told HR Brew.

Skills of the future

Burns advised that HR leaders identify potential successors with the skills that their company will need in the next few years.

“Mak[e] the business case for why this investment is necessary. It’s all about positioning your company to be agile and responsive to changes that happen in the marketplace, and you can’t be agile and responsive if you don’t have data on the human capital that exists within your organization,” she said.

Skills-based succession planning may require a mindset shift from the entire organization, Klein added, and HR pros can help by creating pipelines for employees to develop their skills and branch out into new roles.

“You may not find that unicorn, but you may find that unicorn’s cousin that has 10 to 15 of these adjacent skills that they can slot right in and within one to three months, they’re going to learn everything they need to do on the job,” he said.