When is the Right Time to Hire Employees? 5 Workforce Planning Tips

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Workforce planning is the strategic process of ensuring you have the personnel needed to meet your business goals and plans. Essentially, it’s the approach you use to figure out when to hire employees for your business.

This graphic illustrates many of the key stages of workforce planning, including strategic planning, workforce analysis, gap analysis, and execution. 

According to a recent report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 73% of business leaders claim to have missed key objectives due to poor workforce planning. This isn’t surprising. Workforce planning is a complex process, and it’s easy to get it wrong. 

In our experience, here are some of the most common mistakes organizations make when hiring new engineers, IT professionals, operations managers, and other high-skill talent. 

At the first uptick in growth, many leaders jump the gun and want to hire as fast as possible. While the motivation is understandable, hiring too quickly presents several risks:

On the other hand, being too perfectionist and methodical in your hiring processes—or lacking internal recruiting resources—comes with its own risks:

If you’re only pursuing active job seekers, you’re missing out on over two-thirds of the job market, according to data from LinkedIn. 

What’s more, top performers are only in the job market for a short period of time. While the number varies depending on which source you view, most top performers are on the market for as few as 10 days. 

This makes sense. Top performers don’t have to spend months on end or submit hundreds of resumés to get interviews and offers. Their record, network, and experience speak for themselves.

And while some top performers may currently be in-market, many aren’t. Targeting only active job seekers means you’re going after a small percentage of top performers, and you might miss out on someone who’s an excellent fit for the role. 

Yes, it’s important to hire for hard skills. No question. But hard skills alone don’t translate to team synergy. To do that, you need a combination of soft skills and cultural fit. Failure to consider these factors increases your chances of internal friction post-hire. 

The key to success in workforce planning and expansion is timing. You want to hit the Goldilocks zone: not too quickly, not too slowly. So as you go about your workforce planning initiatives, here are clear signs it’s time to make it a priority. 

If you have a team filled with high performers but your projects are consistently behind schedule, that’s a sure sign you don’t have enough people on board. Missing deadlines not only hurts internal team morale, but erodes client trust and stymies future growth potential. 

Among the high-value talent that Brightwing places, burnout is far more common than it should be. 46% of engineers report team-wide burnout (only 34% of executives reported the same). 40% of tech workers are overworked to the point of burnout. 

While overwork is one cause of burnout, poor culture and employee experience also contribute to it. So hiring more employees without considering culture and soft skills may do more harm than good. Keep this in mind when planning out your workforce.  

If your organization has ambitious growth goals—significantly above and beyond what you’ve accomplished in the past—you’ll likely exceed your current team capacity. A mandate for growth means a mandate to hire more employees. Otherwise, your sales pipelines will start to bottleneck quickly. 

According to Brightwing President Jeff Genovich, “When your growth goals exceed your team capacity, that’s a sure-fire sign you need to find outside help. A staffing partner can help you identify who to bring in, then will go out and find those people for you.” 

Once your sales pipelines start to accelerate, that’s a surefire sign you need to hire more employees. Otherwise, you won’t be able to service all that new business you just attracted. 

The problem is that as quickly as sales accelerate, they could very well decelerate. Obviously we’d prefer sales to keep on growing. But market downturns, sudden customer churn, and other factors can cause unexpected losses. You need to hedge against those risks. 

That’s one reason why many organizations will hire contractors for short-term projects. If sales keep coming in, you can rehire those contractors. And if they don’t, you’re not saddled with a team your business can’t support. 

“A popular option among our candidates is contract-to-hire,” says Genovich. “When expenses are tight, people want to reduce their risk of sales pipeline misses. Or, adopt a fractional recruiting model to hire talent at the scale of a recruiting firm without the typical expense.” 

Disgruntled employees often give clear warning signs and red flags. These include vocal complaints, chronic exhaustion, poor attendance, frequent absences and tardiness, and more. 

If you have a strong company culture, it’s easy to tell if an employee isn’t a good fit—especially within the first 90 days. New employees should come out the gate hot and showcase their best habits early and often. 

Key warning signs include performance issues, lack of alignment with company values, negative impact on team morale, and unhappiness during work. 

The four stages of workforce planning include: 1) analyzing your current workforce, 2) determining your strategic business goals and the workforce needed to support them, 3) identifying gaps, and 4) developing talent acquisition strategies to close those gaps. 

Figuring out when to hire employees is a tough game. There’s certainly an element of risk involved. That’s why it’s a good idea to run your workforce planning strategies by someone who has extensive experience and knows all the mistakes to avoid. 

Brightwing’s hiring process is strategic in nature. We not only hunt down candidates, but help you figure out what talent you need and when. So if you’re struggling to time employee expansion right, consider partnering with us and we’ll help ensure your success.