What Are the Methods of Staffing?

Your business’s human capital – or the invaluable asset created by each employer’s skills, experience, loyalty, productivity, education, and personality – plays a decisive role in how successful your organization will be.

Designing a winning staffing plan and choosing the best staffing strategy for your company’s unique needs can help you attract world-class talents, establish the foundations of a successful business, and sail through the Great Resignation.

Unsure where to start? Below you’ll find the best staffing methods, models, and strategies to choose from and create a plan that is fully tailored to your business’s vision and goals.

Designing a staffing plan can help you understand the current goals of your business, visualize future manpower needs, and ensure that each hire complements the skills, knowledge, and experience of the next.

Staffing Plan: Step-by-Step

Ultimately, a staffing plan is a professional roadmap that can guide you through the staffing process. Start designing yours with the tips below:

• Determine your business need and staffing goals (i.e.: company expansion or entering new markets)
• Create accurate job descriptions that outline job requirements, duties, and required skills. You’ll use these to match the right person with the right job for their skillset.
• Spend time analyzing your company’s current staffing dynamics. Your staffing plan should account for your company’s scalability, seasonal growth patterns, and upcoming retirements or promotions.
• Look into your current workforce, assess each employee’s skills, and reorganize your available manpower to optimize the different job roles
• Create training plans and orientation programs for your new hires to streamline the staffing process from the screening step to deployment.
• Account for future manpower needs. Crafting a staffing plan involves forecasting and creating estimates of potential future staffing needs. You might use a general rule of thumb, the Delphi Technique, or Productivity Ratio to craft your estimates.
• Create the right culture and work environment to attract top talents and promote higher job satisfaction among new recruits. After all, employee turnover can cost over 33% of your employee’s annual salary!

Don’t forget to keep your staffing plan up to date!

• Improve your work environment and company culture
• Review the compensation provided monetarily to ensure you are meeting industry standards
• Work with a specialized hiring manager, human resources department, or recruitment agency.
• Understand the job market and availability of skills. If you operate within a narrow niche, you might consider training your talents in-house
• Implement a stellar personal development and training program. This is not only a selling point for the most desirable candidates, but it can also help you keep your teams current. Don’t forget that over 50% of the world’s workforce will need reskilling by 2025.

If you are looking to expand your business, establishing a comprehensive staffing policy can ensure that your hiring manager and recruitment agencies will uphold your company’s values and goals during the hiring process.

• Full-time employment – refers to hiring in-house teams
• Staff augmentation – refers to augmenting your full-time staff with temporary workers to meet a time-sensitive change in demand
• Consultants and contractors – if you require specialized knowledge, you might work with professional service providers
• Outsourcing – this staffing model is becoming increasingly popular and allows businesses to access full-scale teams of specialized professionals at a lower cost
• Hybrid staffing models – this is the most common staffing model, chosen by businesses to make the most of all options above

What Are the 7 Components of Strategic Staffing?

The seven components of strategic staffing include:

• Strategically evaluating the company’s manpower needs
• Sourcing and finding the right candidates
• Recruiting suitable candidates
• Efficiently selecting the right workers
• Acquiring new and complementary talent
• Deploying the right people in the right place within the organization
• Retaining employees and leveraging the company’s human capital

However, according to a study by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Maury A. Peiperl, the four staffing strategies companies tend to use are:

• The Academy Strategy – hiring talented but inexperienced people to train them in-house
• The Club Strategy – values loyalty and seniority in the promotion process. New hires aim to fill ground-level positions.
• The Team Strategy – focuses on recruiting the best free agents, even if they are not loyal to the company yet. This strategy involves providing high compensation and extra benefits to a prospective employee.
• The Fortress Strategy – this strategy is the least competitive one and focuses on maintaining employees that can perform essential functions or jobs.

So, what are the best staffing methods? The most efficient staffing methods are:

• Tapping into an international talent pool
• Advertise externally to your company
• Using digital and traditional marketing strategies, including job boards, social media, and web advertising
• Using recruitment agencies
• Leveraging the potential of today’s remote workforce.

Don’t forget that the very first step of the hiring process is to invest in an applicant tracking system – especially if your hiring plan is for a growing enterprise. This strategy can help you assess the efficiency of your recruitment process and ensure to be attracting the best candidates for the jobs.

• Long-term staffing – a proactive approach that changes alongside your company’s staffing needs
• Short-term staffing – a response to the need for a certain skill or job position to be filled
• Employee succession strategy – plan for each of your employee’s next steps and succession plan to ensure that you can easily replace key members of your management team
• Strategic staffing – a combination of the three types of staffing strategies above

Unsure how to choose the right staffing methods, models, strategies, and types for your needs? At Buddy Punch, we can help you design a winning employee hiring and retaining strategy.