Hiring managers: how to identify your hiring needs

You’re preparing for growth in your organisation – and it’s an exciting time ahead! Your business is doing well enough to succeed and your operations to scale. The challenge ahead lies in your recruitment process. How do you know who to hire in order to achieve my goals in 2021? 

When you’re preparing to expand, it is essential your hiring process is thorough and effective so you don’t waste time and effort training talent that doesn’t fit your needs. 

From how you develop and maintain your employer brand to how you hire for cultural fit, there are some significant areas to evaluate in order to determine your needs. 

Get an overview of your current staff 

If you’re going to attempt to identify what you need to hire for next year, it’s important that you gain an overview of your current staff. There are plenty of simple, low-cost methods of gaining this overview if you don’t already have a method for doing so. For a first step, you can start with a simple document such as this one. 

In your overview, you can experiment with different groupings of your staff that makes the most sense for your business. Group types of expertise and tasks you expect into various positions to identify gaps or redundancies. Group by seniority, salary, or performance to gain different insights. 

Once you’ve developed a method of grouping your staff, your next steps are to provide relevant details of each employee. At minimum, this is the kind of input you’ll need to include to draw relevant insights from your overview: 

• Salary 
• Contract type (including end date, if applicable) 
• Departure date (if applicable) 
• Main responsibility/tasks 
• Reporting manager 
• Performance 

Now that you have an overview of your staff, you’ll be using this document to identify knowledge, skill, or operational gaps in your groupings. Some of the more common gaps that occur are the result of promoted, or departing employees. You can identify these employees by evaluating their performance or departure date in your overview. 

In your situation as a rapidly growing business, you will most likely also experience gaps as a result of scaling your operations. These gaps tend to look like employees with increased responsibilities, or new organisational goals. These instances may be a bit more difficult to identify with an overview alone – therefore it’s critical to follow up with your business leaders and managers. 

Write your gaps as hiring goals 

Once you have your overview clearly defined and a general idea of the gaps that may occur next year, rewrite these gaps as ‘hiring goals’ that need to be achieved. These goals will enable you and your team to clearly communicate your hiring needs internally and with external hiring partners. 

Here’s an example of how you can translate an organisational gap into a hiring goal: 

Situation: Since opening an additional office, the Sales team is receiving more opportunities in the new market. The Sales team has not grown since opening the new office, therefore the need for administrative work has grown. 

Goal: Minimize the amount of administrative work required from the Sales team. 

Once your staffing needs are translated into hiring goals, it will be easier for you and your team to determine a budget needed in order to achieve this goal. Consider using this budget to grow your staff (for example, adding a Sales Administrator to the team) and translate this budget into a salary. Other solutions could include investing in new technology, or investing in training your current staff to pick up the required tasks. 

Evaluate your offer to candidates 

Now you have a mission, and a means to accomplish your mission (budget) and you can begin to find the perfect candidate to help you achieve your goals. But before you can begin posting job ads or diving into your network to look for candidates, take the time to evaluate exactly what you intend to offer. 

Ultimately, your offer is what’s going to make the difference between hiring a top performer and losing out on the talent you need. When we say “offer”, we’re not just referring to salary (although it is important to keep market expectations in mind), but your company culture, benefits, and employer brand all make an impact on your final offer to candidates. 

As a tip, try running through the hiring process with your employees and ask for their feedback on their experience. Ask them to research your company as though they were a serious candidate and give feedback on what they find. Likewise, you can also ask for their candid opinion of why they choose to work for your business to get an idea of the type of candidates your business attracts. 

Losing out on top talent is frustrating, but can be very preventable if you properly evaluate what you offer to potential new hires. We find that the majority of employers lose out on great candidates, or experience new hiring failures when their offer doesn’t align with the candidate’s expectations. Working with a recruitment partner can help manage expectations on both sides and save everybody the hassle. 

How to fulfill your staffing needs 

You’re staffing needs have been identified, goals written, buy-in achieved, and you know what you’re able to spend to meet your goals. With this work completed, the most time-consuming process can begin: sourcing for candidates. 

Sourcing is not only time-consuming, but it can be very ineffective if your hiring team is not familiar with market expectations or recruitment standards. For example, in the Netherlands most popular online job boards are not accessible to non-recruitment companies to post on. This means if your hiring team sticks only to the “open source” channels for attracting candidates, there’s a good chance you’re going to miss the candidate you really need. 

Aside from job boards, you’re hiring team’s best approach at finding the right fit is by sourcing proactively through networking. Consider attending job fairs, hosting your own “meet the company” events, or adopting an online recruitment strategy through social media and connect with talent directly. 

Look through communities online to find talent that has relevant expertise. Then, reach out personally to let them know they would be a great fit for your company. 

If you care about finding the perfect match, it’s important to go the extra mile in your hiring processes. Fortunately, you don’t need to dedicate your own internal resources to this process if you partner with a strategic recruitment firm such as Octagon Professionals. We have over 30 years of experience hiring talent across a wide range of functional areas, and regularly consult with our clients not just on selection requirements, but on strategy and aligning expectations. 

If your growing business is starting to evaluate your hiring needs for the coming year, reach out to our recruitment specialists to find out how we can help you achieve your goals.