Picture this: Your business is doing good, way beyond what you could have imagined when it first kicked off.
Phones are ringing non-stop, orders are coming in from every angle, and growth is on the horizon.
But with this surge comes a new challenge — your current staffing can’t meet this new demand.
So, how do you navigate this new reality?
That’s where having a staffing plan comes in.
Don’t know what it is?
We’re gonna tell you about it in this guide.
More specifically, you’ll learn how to create a staffing strategy that will help meet your current business needs and get you prepared for future success.
Without further ado, let’s get the ball rolling!
Table of Contents
What Are the Benefits of a Staffing Plan?
Staffing Plan Examples for Two Different Industries
What Is a Staffing Plan?
A staffing plan is a specific document that helps you evaluate and identify your business’s personnel needs. It typically includes your business goals, tasks to be done, skills and experience required for the tasks, the number of employees needed, and more.
Essentially, a staffing plan will help you figure out the kind of talents you need to reach your goals.
Think of it as a guide or roadmap for all your talent needs, letting you know which direction to take regarding personnel.
Now, here’s why you need this plan:
- To increase employee retention and limit turnover.
- To improve the quality of new recruits.
- To improve employee engagement.
Having a staffing plan will ensure you hire the right people for your business. This way, you won’t have unhappy employees looking for an opportunity to leave.
“But isn’t this just another term for a workforce plan?”
No, it’s not.
Staffing plan and workforce plan are two different concepts.
Let’s show you how they differ.
What is the difference between a staffing plan and a workforce plan?
While both concepts are tools human resource managers and business owners use in personnel management, they’re different things.
A staffing plan is focused on helping you with immediate hiring needs. You know, like what skills to be on the lookout for or how many people you need.
The workforce plan, on the other hand, is concerned with the current staff. Do the guys have the right skills for their current role? Are you understaffed or overstaffed?
Here’s an overview of their difference:
Staffing Plan | A strategic roadmap outlining your approach to recruiting and managing talents. |
Workforce Plan | A continuous assessment of your workforce to determine the need for new talent, succession planning, and ensure there’s diversity and inclusion. |
While a workforce plan would help identify new-employee needs, a staffing plan lets you know what kind of staff is needed.
Now just in case you’re wondering why you need a staff plan if there’s a workforce plan, we’ll show you why in the next section.
What Are the Benefits of a Staffing Plan?
As an HR department professional or a business owner, recruiting new hires is not as easy as just putting out a call for applications on LinkedIn or the dailies.
You need a structured plan so you can hire better.
More specifically, you need a staffing plan to help you do that.
With this plan, you can:
Attract the right talent
Wanna ensure you find only people who are the perfect fit for your business?
Then you need a staffing plan.
It will help you analyze your current business needs to identify what skills to look for during the hiring process. You’ll also know on which platform to recruit them.
Essentially, a staffing plan provides the direction you need when searching for workers.
Achieve employee retention
Now because you were able to identify employees who fit your business, they’re more likely to stay with you long term. You’ll also be placing them in positions where they’ll thrive which would make them wanna stay.
Maintain employee productivity
Creating a staff plan can also help ensure you don’t experience downtime when searching for new hires. You get to find a new employee without waiting for too long.
Provide growth opportunities
Staffing plans can do more than help you recruit new employees, they can also assist in expanding your current workforce. You’ll learn what positions are required for expansions and which ones can be redesigned.
Ensure strategic alignment
Your strategic staffing plan will ensure your staff only comprises people who align with your business goals. Which, in turn, fosters growth. Alright, it’s clear why a staffing plan is important. Let’s show you how to create one.
How to Create a Staffing Plan: 7 Steps
Creating a staffing plan is a creative and practical work. It requires insight, research, and data.
It can involve a lot of factors but if you follow our seven-step process, you’ll be done in no time.
Here are the steps.
1. Define organizational and business goals
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the kind of staff you need, do you have clearly defined goals for your business?
You know, an objective you’re driving toward in the short and long term?
Figuring this out is the first step in creating a staff plan.
If you have a business plan, then this shouldn’t be an issue as it’ll have been included.
But if not, you have to set business goals and ensure they’re aligned with your workforce planning.
Now, why do you need to define business goals for a staffing plan?
For starters, the talent you hire will impact how your business performs, so you need to ensure anyone you employ aligns with your business goals.
And for that to happen, you need well-defined goals.
Additionally, they help provide an overview of what your business will look like in the future and what kind of hires will be needed in that future.
So, how do you define your business goals?
Think about your dreams and use the SMART template to ensure that they are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound.
2. Conduct workforce and gap analysis
With your goals set, it’s time to put on your thinking cap and assess your current talent pool.
Does it align with your goals in terms of skills, potential, and productivity?
In other words, you wanna determine if it can take you from where you are to where you want to be.
Here’s how to do that in three steps:
Step #1: Skills diagnostics
First, you want to identify skills needed now and in the future to achieve your business goals.
You also wanna determine if a skill is crucial or not.
The way to do that is this: if one of your employees lacks a skill but is still able to complete their task, it’s not crucial.
Then, figure out what skills are trending in your industry and what jobs are likely to be automated.
What kind of jobs will your company need now and in the future?
Step #2: Data collection and analysis
Here’s what you wanna do in this step:
- Assess what tasks are being done and rate their importance.
- Research what other skills are required to get more tasks done.
- Create job profiles and identify skills needed for each role.
- Develop an inventory of the skills in your current talent pool.
- Identify your employees’ competencies and skill levels.
The idea here is to identify important jobs and the skills needed for them so you know if you’ve already got them or not.
You can also use a talent database to collect information from employees.
Step #3: Designing interventions
After finding skill gaps, you can now develop a strategy to fill those gaps. The best way to do this is to take a look at the needs you’ve identified and then answer this question:
Is hiring new employees the way to go? Or is it a matter of talent development?
Contracting freelancers might also be on the table too.
When you’re able to answer these questions, outline how you’re going to either get new staff or train current employees.
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3. Forecast future staffing needs
The next step in creating your staffing plan is to predict your future staffing requirements.
This means figuring out what talents your business will need in the future.
Why?
So it’ll be easy to hire the right staff when the time comes.
But don’t worry, it shouldn’t be too difficult since you’ve been able to define your business goals already.
Knowing what you want to achieve will provide a good perspective on who can help you make that goal a reality.
Anyway, here are some techniques that can help with the prediction:
- Delphi technique: It involves using the opinion of managers and consultants to make staffing predictions. You compile their opinions (based on experience within the company) and suggestions then vote on the best way forward.
- Productivity ratio: You calculate the productivity of one staff member and use that to predict talent needs. So imagine your one employee creates forty products in a day and the goal is to increase it to 240 products. You know you’ll have to hire 5 additional employees.
4. Develop a recruitment and hiring strategy
You’ll need a strategy after you’ve figured out what your hiring needs are. More like a step-by-step plan that you can always rely on during recruitment.
Here are some suggestions:
- Creating job descriptions and qualifications: For every role your business needs now or in the future, endeavor to create a job description. What would you have new hires do? Is there an academic qualification or particular skill set you want? All this should be in the strategy.
- Identify recruitment sources: Where do you want to share word about openings in your business? There are several options, including social media like LinkedIn, job boards, industry forums, daily newspapers, and referrals.
- Selection process: You need to identify key criteria that can help you select the right talent for your company. Like a filter that would help sieve out unqualified candidates. This could be work experience, skill set, location, etc.
- Recruitment and onboarding timeline: After you find the right people, you want to note how long the interview and onboarding process will take. One or two weeks?
- Company swag: Lastly, you also wanna determine if giving out company swag like branded hoodies, tumblers, or even a PC is something you wanna do when you hire new employees. It’s a way to get them excited about working with you.
If that’s something you wanna do, SwagDrop has your back. We’re your go-to guys for all things swag-related.
5. Create a training and development plan
After finding new hires, it becomes important to come up with a training plan to help them adjust to their work environment.
Current employees can benefit from training too.
It’s gonna help them become more effective and hone their skills so productivity is increased.
When creating your training plan, it should cover:
- Formal training programs.
- On-the-job training about how to perform their tasks better.
- Career development opportunities.
- Soft skills.
- Succession for key positions.
Wondering how you’ll know if your workforce needs training, especially when they’ve been doing a good job?
Well, you can put out surveys for them to fill out or use performance reviews.
6. Determine optimal resource allocation
And then you have to look at the different departments, projects, or tasks in your business and classify them in order of efficiency.
By that, we mean figuring out which departments contribute more to helping you realize your short- and long-term goals.
Why is this important?
So you know how to assign the right personnel to the right task, ensuring your resources are used appropriately in meeting your business goals.
Now, here’s how to allocate resources optimally:
- Identify needs based on goals broken down into smaller tasks and workload.
- Assign professionals with a particular skill to their matching roles.
- Ensure the workload for each employee is fair across the board and is manageable.
- Track individual output based on their performance and your evolving business needs.
7. Establish budget and performance metrics
Last but not least when creating your staffing plan, you need to set a budget.
Even though human capital is an investment, you don’t want to go overboard and put your business in a bad financial situation.
That’s why having a budget will come in handy and here’s how to set up one:
- Outline employee-related expenses including labor costs, bonuses, training, recruitment costs, etc.
- Review industry data and trends so you have an estimate of the costs.
- Once again, factor in future staffing needs based on your business goals.
- Put a number on each staffing category in order of importance.
- Monitor expenses and adjust your budget accordingly.
Remember to allocate resources for roles in order of their priorities to your business.
After that, you need some metrics in place to know if your staffing plan is good or needs to be adjusted. Let’s go over a few of them:
- Employee retention rate: How many employees stay over a certain period?
- Employee satisfaction scores: To let you know if your workers consider their workspace a happy place to work in. You can use surveys to determine this.
- Diversity and inclusion: What percentage of minority groups are represented in your workforce?
- Turnover rate: The number of employees leaving your organization; a potential pointer that there may be an underlying problem.
- Time-to-fill: How long it will take your recruitment team to find a new hire.
- Productivity: The time it takes for new employees to become productive or contribute to business goals.
Now, let’s bring all we’ve discussed to life and show you what a staffing plan might look like.
Staffing Plan Examples for Two Different Industries
We’ll create an example for different industries so you have the inspiration you need to create your strategic staffing plan.
1. Tech industry
Company name: TT Solutions
Business goals and objectives: To help SaaS businesses preserve their reputation by safeguarding their digital and physical assets.
Staff plan objective: To provide adequate staffing levels to grow the business and provide high-quality service.
Positions and roles:
- Software developer: Developing new software and maintaining existing ones for clients.
- Customer support office: Providing on-time assistance to clients.
- Growth manager: Creating strategies and techniques for business growth.
Recruitment strategy: Job posting on industry forums and on LinkedIn.
Training and development:
Developer (Industry conferences), customer support (mentorship program), growth manager (on-the-job training).
Budget: $300,000
Performance metrics: Productivity, customer and employee satisfaction, retention rate.
2. Engineering industry
Company name: Hitaqi Innovations Ltd.
Business goals and objectives: To provide innovative solutions that will build a sustainable environment.
Staff plan objective: Ensure there’s no shortage of new team members to meet project demands and provide quality engineering work.
Positions and roles:
- Structural engineers: Experienced and specializing in structural analysis for high-rise buildings.
- Engineering intern: Assisting structural engineers, dealing with external factors, and collaborating with contractors for on-site assistance to clients.
- Quality assurance officers: Ensuring projects and processes are up-to-date with quality and safety standards.
Recruitment strategy: Job posting in newspapers and leveraging professional recruiters.
Training and development:
Industry conferences, annual general meetings, growth manager (on-the-job training).
Budget: $500,000
Performance metrics: Productivity, customer satisfaction, technical proficiency, retention rate.
And that brings us to the end of this guide, so let’s wrap things up.
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Learn More About Recruitment and HR
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