Is Your Competition Winning the Talent You Need?

The success or failure of your recruitment efforts can’t be measured over the short term. A company must assess and benchmark many aspects related to hiring – including compensation plans, culture, and the typical timeline of their hiring process – in order to successfully measure success or failure of recruitment methods.

This highlights the importance of strategic staffing – developing your workforce based on your short, medium, and long-term strategic goals. If you recruit based only on immediate need, you create problems for yourself while opening up opportunities for your competitors. Follow these strategies to put your first strategic staffing plan into place:

Audit Your Existing Talent

Make a comprehensive spreadsheet of everyone you employ, their education and background, their specialized skills, and the project(s) they are currently working on. That way you can easily see what you have, what you don’t, and what you are losing when someone leaves.

Analyze Accordingly

Consider the impact any strategic decision – large or small, short or long-term – will have on your workforce. That way you are not forced to rework your staff using a limited time frame and working from a disappointing candidate pool.

Recruit for the Long Term

Some of the most successful tech firms vet candidates based on their fit for the current vacancy, and the one above it. In that way, they are always filling their ranks with potential managers. That relieves the burden of recruiting upper-level employees from the outside, while populating the office with ambitious, innovative, and future-focused professionals.

Prioritize Retention

Your best employees aren’t just an asset to you, they are an asset to your competition too. Holding onto top talent needs to be a priority, even if it means offering more compensation/benefits than you had anticipated. Strategic staffing is about recognizing all the various consequences/opportunities that a vacancy produces, and losing a long-term employee can be particularly damaging.

Get Unconventional

Have you considered hiring contract or temporary IT workers to fill vacancies over the short term? Relying on these employees lets you maintain business continuity and seize new opportunities without committing to full-time employees that don’t fit your needs. When top talent does become available, you have the flexibility necessary to attract them away from the competition.

This is a broad outline of strategic staffing. In practice, it can be a lot more complicated if you want to go about it effectively. Access resources that can help and consult with strategic staffing experts by contacting Culture Fit.