Strategic staffing means making sure your organisation has the workforce it needs to deliver its current and planned business objectives.
Markets and plans can change. Many organisations have short, medium and long-term strategic staffing plans and review them regularly in context of overall business strategy.
Business leaders look ahead to the work they hope to deliver and planned growth over the coming months and years.
From this, they can determine how many employees they need and the kinds of skills they’ll require. HR teams can map this against current staff profiles, numbers and skills.
The strategic staffing plan means identifying gaps and working to fix them, so that when the time comes, there are enough appropriately skilled staff available at the right times to meet business and market demands.
This may mean recruitment and retraining, upskilling or reviewing the mix of permanent, contract, freelance and temporary staff.
HR managers can use historic data to look at patterns of staffing in the past, along with projections to model future needs, taking into account company growth, plans and focus.
This may include attrition and recruitment information as well as characteristics of successful leaders and executives, skills, potential, aspirations and location.
HR technology to support strategic staffing can help make sense of a vast amount of data in the context of business needs.
It’s key to have a single, business-wide people database for accurate planning.
Powerful analytics tools that are easy to use make forecasts more reliable and can continually update requirements as market and company data changes.
