Since their invention, businesses have hired employees. Businesses looking for the best results, however, hire strategically.
Strategic staffing seeks not only to hire the best person for this job, but to put together a team that is designed to meet the needs of your particular business and the demands of an ever-changing market. It also looks to the long term to predict the capabilities you’ll need and help you plan to find them – before the empty space on your team becomes a crisis.
Here’s how to start developing a strategic staffing plan that works for your company:
- Identify your core business needs and the resources that will meet them. What is your business’s mission? What are its primary goals? What do you seek to accomplish in six months, a year, five years, ten years? When you know where you’re headed, you can start to examine who you’ll need to reach each milestone.
- Look within. Before you start planning how to hire the people who have the skills you need, look at your existing team. Does anyone have the skills you’ve identified as crucial to your core business needs? If so, can you rearrange the workload, provide training, or make promotions so the people with the needed skills end up in a position to use them?
- Ask managers to evaluate employees for specialist or leadership positions. Work with your managers to evaluate the core skills and competencies of each member of the team. Who is exceptionally good at certain tasks or types of tasks? Who has leadership potential? Then, ask each manager to describe the ideal person to replace them (for instance, after a promotion). Does this person have the same skills and abilities as the current manager, or have times changed? This exercise can help you update job descriptions to make hiring more effective.
- Talk to your staffing partner. Recruiters specialize in thinking strategically when it comes to hiring. Their job is to connect each client to the people who can do the job best and who offer the most comprehensive “fit” with the company’s current team, culture, and goals.
At SoloPoint Solutions, our recruiters specialize not only in finding the best hidden talent, but also in helping our clients create strategic staffing plans that help them find better candidates within a limited budget. Contact us today to learn more about our engineering recruitment services in California!