In an article published on HR.BLR.com®, recruiting expert Miranda Nash emphasized the importance of long-term staffing and provided 5 tips on how to handle it effectively.
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Nash is the president of Jobscience and has worked as a hiring manager, entrepreneur, and C-suite executive, positions that have given her a thorough knowledge of the art of recruiting.
For most HR professionals, Nash notes that hiring is primarily a reactionary effort: A position opens up, and it’s time to get to work filling it. If you’re lucky, you have the luxury of a 2-week notice, a month-long notice in advance of retirement, or preplanning ahead of new department expansions or other new hiring needs.
But, in most cases, many HR teams can only dream of having time to plan ahead for hiring. They’re simply too preoccupied with other responsibilities, like benefits administration, compliance training, tracking personnel time off, payroll coordination, and other duties.
Unfortunately, this quite often puts the organization behind the eight ball, with no way to be strategic in their hiring efforts, writes Nash. This means the company could be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to finding the best talent at the right times to fill critical positions.
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In order to prioritize and plan ahead, recruiters instead must take a more strategic, forward-thinking approach to hiring. By looking beyond immediate vacancies to longer-term staffing needs, HR pros can anticipate needs, maintain a full pipeline of candidates, and give their organization a more strategic and agile competitive advantage for recruiting new employees.
Here are Nash’s tips for your long-term staffing:
1) Assess each position based on its strategic vs. tactical value.
Most organizations make the mistake of treating every job as though each is of equal importance to the organization. Certainly, we all know intuitively that this is not the case, but from an HR perspective, this is how they’re handled: An opening emerges and we seek to fill it with the best-qualified candidate that we can afford.
But, this focused approach ignores the importance the role plays within the larger organization. Instead, start by examining every position within the organization, from the C-suite to entry-level, and determine whether each job is strategic or tactical—whether the role is to lead the organization with vision, creativity, and insight, or to implement and execute those strategies. Identifying this distinction will help build a foundation for a more-strategic approach to staffing prioritization.
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2) Identify the ideal candidate.
Of course, each job will have specific qualifications and skills requirements that any worthy candidate must possess. But, beyond these qualitative factors, finding the right fit for the job is only half the battle.
You must also find candidates who fit with the company culture, values, and principles. Candidates who “look good on paper” and are otherwise equal in skills and qualifications may be very different in their “soft skills” that determine whether they’re truly a good fit for the organization.
Just as sales professionals know they have to go beyond demographics to the qualitative details that are the hallmark of their ideal customers, HR teams should also identify the personality characteristics and nuances that the ideal candidate for any job role should possess, both for the entire organization—but most importantly—for those strategic positions.
3) Conduct supply and demand research.
Here again, intuition often guides HR pros in knowing what types of jobs will be most in demand and how this will impact their hiring efforts. But, it’s critical to conduct formal, early-stage research on the supply and demand, especially in the most highly competitive industries.
Each year, the strategic HR team should identify in-demand positions and the competitors who are also looking to fill them, and plot these on a competitive matrix. Visualizing the challenge can help you see more clearly how difficult or easy it may be to fill those positions. Tools and research are one way to gain access to this real-time labor market intelligence.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we present Nash’s final two secrets to prioritizing your long-term staffing needs, plus we introduce the all-things-HR-in-one-place website, HR.BLR.com.