Know Your Workforce Before the Prospect Asks

EDO AI PLAYBOOK · 4 OF 15 · VERSION 1.0

By Andy Greiner

A large population is not a hiring plan. A prospect needs to know whether the relevant occupations exist, what employers compete for them and whether training can deliver people on the required schedule. This workflow forces those questions into the same frame without pretending that every worker in a region is available to hire.

Project occupations and hiring schedule; wage and benefit assumptions; occupational employment and wage data; commuting evidence; employer information; training completions and placement data; housing, transport and childcare evidence. Supply source years and geographies.

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Act as an EDO workforce analyst preparing a prospect briefing. Define the proposed labor shed from supplied commuting evidence and the project’s shift requirements. If no defensible boundary is possible, show the alternatives and the missing evidence. Do not automatically equate a county with the recruiting market.

Map the project’s job titles to occupational categories, marking uncertain matches. For each occupation record employment stock, wage distribution, source year and geography, relevant training output, and the project’s planned demand. Explain what each measure captures. Separate residents from jobs located in the area; employment stock from job openings; training completions from available candidates; and annual demand from cumulative hiring. Avoid double counting overlapping geographies or programs.

Assess hiring pressure using documented competing demand, commuting flows, shift patterns, retention evidence and access constraints. Do not infer worker willingness to change jobs. If wage comparisons use different years, hours or compensation definitions, flag the mismatch before comparing them. Show all calculations and denominators.

Return an occupation-by-occupation evidence table, a source compatibility log and a risk register. Rank concerns by the consequence for the hiring schedule and confidence in the evidence. Create a training-partner question list addressing seats, instructors, equipment, completion, placement and lead time.

Offer a base case and conditional scenarios only where supplied assumptions support them. Keep every assumption visible. Finish with a prospect-ready paragraph limited to supported claims, then list the questions that require employer or workforce-partner confirmation. Do not promise a number of ready workers that the evidence cannot establish.

Have a workforce partner check occupational mappings, commuting boundaries and denominators. Confirm program capacity directly with providers; published completions do not establish future available seats.

Design a 30-minute partner meeting to resolve the three workforce uncertainties with the greatest effect on the project’s hiring timetable.

Select the project’s five critical occupations and reconcile their source dates and geographies.

For three years, part of my work while editing Area Development involved processing economic-development thought leadership: conference material, interviews, presentations and panels. That editorial experience informs the problems I choose to tackle here. These workflows are Location Decision’s practical tools, developed to help economic developers organize evidence, ask better questions and prepare stronger work.

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