A dedicated staffing strategy is crucial for any business seeking to maximize its human capital.
Your workforce is your company’s biggest asset and can give your business a competitive edge, helping the organization grow its bottom line.
However, maintaining and developing that talent requires a consistently people-focused approach.
Staffing strategies are often confused with recruitment strategies, but they are not the same thing. Recruiting is a single step in the employment journey; it involves seeking and encouraging prospective candidates to apply for roles. Staffing is an ongoing, continuous process. It involves the initial recruitment step, but it extends far beyond that to include how you manage and retain a competent and satisfied workforce that is fit for purpose, placed in the right roles at the right time to meet the company’s goals.
Today, the modern staffing approach goes one step further: it is not simply about filling positions, but about viewing your workforce as a whole to gain insight and design great employee experiences so that you attract and retain the best talent. In this way, effective staffing strategies help you identify where your high-performers are, determine how to retain them, and consider factors such as how you provide them with meaningful work. Here are our seven steps to building an effective staffing, or people, strategy:
Determine Your Business Goals
The best starting point for a staffing strategy is your organization’s business plan, which should contain both short-term and long-term goals for the company.
Whether the goal is to increase revenue, expand into new sectors, launch new products, or grow through acquisition, these objectives are all inherently driven by your people. Therefore, your strategy needs to be fully aligned with the company’s goals.
Establish Your Current People Landscape
Now that you know your organization’s objectives, you need a complete picture of your current workforce.
Having an accurate view of your people starts with a single source of truth. If your people data is held in disparate systems and on spreadsheets, it must all be consolidated into one system to give you maximum insight into your people. From here, you can build reports and actionable insights about your workforce, such as accurate headcount reports, establishing skills gaps, and identifying high-potential candidates for leadership roles as part of succession planning.
It’s not just about accessing and tracking people analytics; it’s also about identifying and predicting trends to ensure you gain actionable insight into your workforce. This is an approach to understanding your employees’ behavior and performance so that your organization can gain actionable insights and make better decisions about its workforce.
At this initial stage, it means having the tools and data to know what is happening across the entire workforce.
Analyze People Patterns
There’s always a natural ebb and flow of staffing levels throughout any organization. Staying one step ahead of potential movements can ensure there are no surprises.
At the most basic level, having a clear view of departure dates and information will help you recruit and backfill these positions well in advance, minimizing the risk of losing knowledge when someone leaves without completing a handover.
Taking this a step further, you can analyze your workforce to identify potential movements well in advance. A modern HR system will tell you the number of employees nearing retirement age; forthcoming maternity and paternity leaves; upcoming promotions that will require a succession plan; or identify individuals who are approaching the company’s average service length.
By leveraging such reports and analyzing these patterns, you can plan ahead to address potential gaps and plan accordingly.
Identify Staffing and People Needs
For a successful staffing strategy, you first need to understand the skills, experience, and resources required to achieve your business goals. To maximize the efficiency of the recruitment process, you also need to consider the timeline of activities required to fill each role and plan accordingly.
You’ll need to analyze further data to establish this. For example: What roles do you need? How long does it typically take to recruit them? How many candidates do you need to contact to realistically find the right one? What’s the timeframe for induction and ramping up to full productivity? Your existing workforce data will provide useful insights that you can use as a benchmark.
Create a Future Staffing Projection
With the current workforce picture complete, it’s a good idea to build a long-term staffing plan for the next five to ten years.
This needs to be done alongside the business owners. They will need to share the long-term vision for the company so you can factor in whether there’s going to be a company restructure or any future acquisitions that will bring new or different staffing needs to the business..