firstPRO Shares How to Build an Effective Staffing Strategy
The fortunes of every company depend on a good staffing strategy. Your company is only as strong as your weakest employee, so you need to be sure that all of your employees have the optimum skills and experience for the job.
Human resource professionals need to follow a specific procedure in order to make sure that their companies have the best possible fit between the employee and the position. Staffing firm firstPRO explains this process and gives six tips for staffing professionals who want to up their game.
Create a Staffing Strategy
A staffing strategy is often confused with a recruitment strategy. Recruitment is only one part of staffing. Staffing is a process that is ongoing in most companies. It goes beyond simply recruiting new people to a role.
A good staffing strategy includes learning how to retain and manage a satisfied and competent workforce. You will need to find the right people and make sure they are in the right roles for the company to achieve maximum efficiency.
Together with the managers in your company, you will need to look at your workforce as a whole. This will help you gain insight and to design excellent workforce experiences. When you do this, you will be able to attract and retain the best employees.
A staffing strategy encompasses finding your highest performers and hanging onto them. It considers how you retain them and how you provide them with stimulating, meaningful work.
firstPRO has compiled these seven steps to teach you how to create the best possible staffing strategy for your team.
1. Find Your Business Goals
You should make all of your decisions based on the company’s business plan. This plan should include both the short-term and long-term aspirations for your company. If you need help with this, consult with upper management.
As a staffing professional, you may not always be sure which roles are the most pivotal to your company’s success. Getting in touch with management and team leaders will help make this possible for you.
2. Look at Existing Staffing
Once you have a firm grasp on your company’s organizational objectives, you will need to create a complete picture of your entire workforce as it stands.
You will need to put all of the data on your staff into a single system so that you can analyze it together. This can be a difficult step, and you may need help from your IT department and possibly a consultant to help you get your ideas together.
Once you have the data synthesized, you will need to be able to build reports about your staff. You will need to be able to establish any gaps in the skills that are required to keep your business running. You will want to identify candidates with high potential for a leadership role.
3. Understand Staffing Patterns
Especially in a large company, people are constantly coming and going. You will need to get a handle on where, when, and why these changes are happening. If you can predict a pattern in your company’s staffing, you will have an easier time planning for future movements.
Having a modern human resource planning system will provide insight as to how many employees are planning to retire soon, which employees have pending maternity or paternity leaves, and which employees will be promoted soon, leaving open positions below them.
Understanding these patterns can help you plan in advance so that there are no gaps in your staffing in the future.
4. Identify Staffing Needs
You should research and understand the resources, experience, and skills that your staff need to succeed. You will need to understand the timeline required to fill each role.
Understand which roles you need, how long it takes to recruit them, and how long it will take them to be fully trained and up and running. Training a new hire can be an expensive and difficult process, so it is a good idea to make sure you are planning ahead for this event.
5. Project Future Staffing Needs
Together with the top management figures in your company, it is a good idea to create future projections of your staffing patterns. Taking the time to create this long-term vision will help your company in many ways, not just in planning staffing levels. Your company executives need to understand that staffing is just as important as any other role in your company, and to give your department enough tools and training to get the job done.
You will need to understand how succession planning works in your company, and how many roles have succession plans already in place. You should get a good idea of which departments are going to take an active role in the future of your company and should expand.
6. Work on Branding and Corporate Culture
All of this work on staffing is not going to mean much if your company is not a good place to work. Enhancing your employees’ work environment is extremely important. Especially if you are working with a bright and talented base, you will need to find ways to keep these employees happy.
Make sure that your firm adheres to its own plan for company culture. All too often, these company culture plans are set out in idealistic terms and then are not carried over into the day-to-day work of your organization. Employees can become jaded if they can detect hypocrisy coming from human resources or from higher levels of management.
Taking Care of Your People
firstPRO believes strongly in the value of staffing professionals. In their best light, human resource and staffing professionals are responsible for keeping a workforce happy and able to complete their tasks on a high level.
Human resources and staffing can be a challenging field, but if you are ready to tackle it, you can provide your company with the basis for success far into the future.