The staffing plan’s main purpose is to recruit the right people for the right positions. However, that’s only one benefit of using it. A good staffing plan helps with onboarding, training, employee satisfaction, and business development. Here are the main benefits of using a staffing plan.

With a long-term staffing plan, your recruitment process should improve significantly, hiring only people with the necessary skills to meet your business goals. It means that you can spend time on other business factors regarding recruiting, such as:

• A more detailed job ad.
• Candidate sourcing.
• Screening and interviewing with care.
• Interview schedule.
• A comprehensive onboarding process.

With such an approach, you’ll have higher chances of hiring a competent person for the job. Also, your potential candidates will surely notice the professional approach.

Employees won’t work for you forever, some will leave, and that’s inevitable. You could be the best employee ever, but sometimes life happens. It could be family reasons, moving to another city, or someone who wants to retrain. It’s unavoidable, but it doesn’t mean you can’t prepare for it. 

With a proper staffing management plan, finding a replacement for a vacant position is way easier. Maybe you won’t have to hire anyone when you see someone in your company with spare hours on your plan. It becomes way easier to split responsibilities between employees that way.

Recruiting and onboarding new people takes time and effort, so without planning ahead, you’ll sustain losses, especially when you need someone asap. Some opt to hire someone with skill shortages as a short-term replacement, but this only leads to even more losses in the long run.

Strategic staffing models help maintain the direction of the business and identify which skills are mandatory in your business to stay on track, regardless if we’re talking about short or long-term planning. Any lack of necessary skills can be seen beforehand, so you can focus on fixing that immediately. This might involve hiring new people or broadening the skills of existing staff while you still have the time.

You don’t have to create everything from scratch, but we encourage you to read carefully through this section. Here, you will learn what to include in a staffing management plan so that it perfectly aligns with your organizational objectives.

First, you must separate and identify your business goals and objectives. Once your strategic business plan is done, use it to outline your top priorities and relate them to the staffing plan. For example, it can help you decide whether you want to train employees in a related field or hire someone to bring that much-needed expertise to the new niche.

There may be some specific factors that can impact your staffing plan. Such factors differ between companies, but we can categorize them as internal, external, positive, and negative. This includes every aspect you have little to no control over that can impact your workforce.

You can include things like low unemployment or a competitor with a much better workforce. When it comes to internal factors, you can always include retirements, terminations, and promotions.

Analyzing your current staffing environment is mandatory to develop an effective staffing plan. Staffing environment data should include the following:

• The number of employees.
• Team size and who works where.
• Skills and competencies.
• High-performing employees and potential leaders.
• Low-performing employees.
• Staff age.

Collecting such data will help you identify the company’s current staffing needs and work on possible solutions. For example, if you hire a lot of workers near retirement age, you can plan out their replacements beforehand. It also helps identify skills your company lacks so you can hire someone to fill the gap or train a current employee.

At one point, you’ll have to invest in the well-being of your personnel, so try to forecast your future staffing needs. While it varies between companies and is often left to pure intuition, you can resort to the following methods:

• Trend analysis. If your company is old enough to gather historical data from the past 5 to 10 years, then do it asap. It involves collecting data like hiring patterns, employee experience, retention, turnover, and demographics.
• Ratio analysis. Calculate the ratio between future revenue predictions and personnel requirements. You can also use it to calculate the generated sales with the number of salespeople.

Do research on overall trends in staffing. When you happen to need a new employee, you’ll have to compete with other companies trying to hire someone with similar qualifications.

This one will help you to strengthen your team by looking at its current performance. You have to compare the current staff environment with future personnel needs,  so you’ll know your company’s standpoint and how far it is from set goals. For example, it will help you decide whether you need more skills or more employees to meet established organizational goals. In short, it helps to spot any gaps in your workforce.

Such gaps could include a lack of expertise, insufficient employees, or those hired at the wrong positions. Don’t let these gaps put you off, but think about the benefits of fixing them.

Once you’ve completed every step, it’s time to compile everything into a comprehensive staffing plan. Depending on your company’s needs, you might include the following:

• Staffing needs. List every position in your company that needs to be filled. Specify if it’s temporary or permanent, and don’t forget about the position name, department, location, and hours.
• Budget. How much funds you’re willing to spend on human capital. Estimate the budget for each position so you’ll know you can cover all costs.
• Hiring timeline. This will help you to determine when you’ll have to hire someone. It’s especially important for setting up a recruiting and onboarding timeline. You don’t want to be surprised by your employee retiring in three months, so you can start recruiting process beforehand and fill the position on time.
• Candidate sourcing. Explore different ways of candidate sourcing for upcoming vacancies. Apart from standard adverts, you can hire internally or use an agency for short-term employment or even hire on-demand employees.
• Onboarding and training. Include info about employee courses and onboarding processes to ensure smooth integration into the company every time.

Once you know the essentials behind the staffing plan, it’s time to use that knowledge in practice. The templates here are either in Word or Excel formats, so you’ll need proper software to open them. We know prices for MS Office through official canals are steep; thus, we come to the rescue.

At RoyalCDKeys, you can find Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global for less than $10, which you can legitimately activate through official canals. Once installed, choose your favorite staffing plan template and implement your business strategy!

Regardless of your chosen template, you must review it regularly and adapt it to your current business strategy. You can repeat the six steps above if needed and compare them with your template. Best of luck with managing your staff!