Plan succession for a position

What this achieves

Succession planning on a position records who could take it over, how ready each of them is, and how exposed you are if the current holder leaves. It turns an unspoken continuity risk into something written down that somebody can be asked about.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

The position has to be marked as a critical position. The succession action only appears on positions carrying that flag, so a post nobody has flagged cannot have successors recorded against it.

Steps

Go to Organization → Positions.
Open the Critical tab to see the positions in scope.
Select Manage succession on the position.
Enter the Risk of vacancy, from 0 to 100.
Select Add successor.
Search for the Employee by name or email and select them.
Set the Readiness and add Notes explaining the nomination.
Save, and repeat for each successor.
Select Mark reviewed to stamp the Last review date.

Readiness here is your judgement, not a score

This is the single most important thing to understand about this panel. The Readiness you set against a successor is a value you choose, not a calculation.

Option	Description
Ready now	Could take the position today.
Ready in 1 year	Needs about a year of development first.
Ready in 2+ years	A longer-term candidate.

Elsewhere in Humavera, readiness is calculated by comparing a person against a job profile’s requirements and lands in one of five categories. That is a different measurement with a different meaning, produced by a different mechanism.

Use the Notes field to say what your judgement rests on. A readiness value with no note is an opinion nobody else can check, and it will be read as fact a year from now.

Example: recording James Whitfield as Ready in 1 year for a senior engineering post at HC Corp UK Ltd, with a note saying what he still needs to lead, is a judgement somebody can challenge. The same badge with no note is not.

Risk of vacancy

Risk of vacancy is a figure from 0 to 100 that you enter. Nothing calculates it, and the panel shades it as it rises.

Because everybody entering it is inventing their own scale, agree what the numbers mean before you use them across more than a handful of positions. Otherwise a 40 from one person and a 40 from another are not the same statement, and the comparison you want to make out of them is not available.

Last review

Mark reviewed stamps today’s date onto Last review. That date is the honest measure of whether your succession planning is alive.

A position with three named successors and a review date eighteen months old is telling you something specific: the plan exists and nobody has checked whether it is still true. Stamp the date when you actually review, not when you open the panel.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd reviews its critical positions each January. Positions still showing the previous January are the agenda for that meeting.

Removing a successor

Remove successor asks you to confirm by name. Remove somebody when the judgement has genuinely changed — a successor list that only ever grows stops being a shortlist.

Nobody outside this screen sees the list

The successor list lives on the position record, inside the organization structure, which only administrators reach. Nothing about it appears on the employee’s own career screens: being named here does not notify anybody, does not show on their profile, and does not appear in anything they can open.

Whether the person is told, and what they are told, is a conversation for their manager to have. The list is a statement about a role, not a promise to a person.

What happens next

Positions with successors recorded feed the succession pipeline view, where candidates are also scored against the position’s job profile and the critical positions with nobody ready are listed for you. Where a successor is not ready, the gap between them and the profile is what a development plan is built to close; where no internal successor is plausible, the position is a recruiting question rather than a development one.