How to Create a Strategic Staffing Plan for 2025
Recently a new client came to us in an unfortunate situation. A well-liked manager had resigned unexpectedly, leaving the company scrambling to cover that person’s duties and manage their team. In the chaos that followed, several of the employees on the departed manager’s team also left.
The firm came to us to fill the vacancy quickly and help restore order. We were happy to help, but couldn’t help noting that the whole situation could have been avoided by having a strong staffing plan in the first place.
Staffing plans are an essential tool in businesses of all types and sizes. When your business is growing or changing, addressing your staffing needs is critical. Even when things are business-as-usual, they help safeguard against the unexpected. If you wait too long to develop a hiring game plan, you risk not having the staff to keep up with operations or accomplish your goals.
A staffing plan will help as the economy shifts and changes over the months and years to come. It’s challenging to find the right talent and retain your current employees. Set yourself up for continued success by creating a strategic staffing plan. We’ll cover what’s included in a staffing plan and give you a step-by-step staffing plan template to follow as you map your talent needs for the future.
What Is a Staffing Plan?
A staffing plan is an intentional strategy by which an organization identifies its personnel needs and takes action to fulfill them. The HR department typically leads the company in creating the staffing plan, though input may be gathered from departments across the organization. One year is a typical time frame for a staffing plan to cover.
The purpose of a staffing plan is to directly identify not just a target headcount for personnel but the specific skills that will be required over the next 12 months. It identifies gaps between your current resources and your future needs and takes a tactical approach, focusing on using staffing to support and achieve the organization’s goals. The staffing plan will include employees, contractors, and consultants.
Why Do I Need a Staffing Plan?
As a business, you undoubtedly have a set of goals in mind. Whether it’s to increase profit margins by a certain amount, capture a bigger market share, make a difference in your community, or any other organizational aspiration, you can’t achieve it without the right people. A staffing plan ensures you have the team in place to make your goals a reality.
For example, one of our client’s business objectives for 2025 is to increase their customer satisfaction ratings by 20%. This goal could be achieved by decreasing wait times on their support calls and providing the product updates many customers have requested.
To decrease wait times, we’ll need to increase the number of customer support agents they have. And in order to provide product updates, we’ll need to hire or train agents with the appropriate technical expertise. By walking through this basic scenario, we’ve identified two hiring initiatives for this client: onboard more support agents and recruit for specific technical expertise. In a similar way, you can use your business objectives to inform your staffing goals.
Staffing plans are often created simultaneously or slightly ahead of budgets for the upcoming year. This ensures that when you need to hire, the financial resources to support it are available—another key argument for why you need a staffing plan.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
How Do I Create a Staffing Plan?
An effective staffing plan considers your operational needs, external and internal factors, available resources, and timing. Before crafting the staffing plan, you need to calculate your needs, so we’ve split the process into two parts. Follow these steps to gather all the necessary information and put it into a cohesive hiring roadmap.
How to Calculate Staffing Needs
1. Evaluate your goals and gain a clear understanding
What are the organization’s overarching objectives for the next 12 months? You may have several, or there may be just one. Ideally, these goals should be defined before the staffing plan is put together to ensure buy-in from all necessary stakeholders.
Looking at your goals, what needs to happen from a staffing perspective to achieve them? In the client example we shared earlier, we determined two specific staffing implications stemming from their goal of increasing customer satisfaction—hiring more customer service staff and identifying or hiring talent with specific technical skills.
Similarly, you can use your goals to define the related staffing requirements. The larger your organization is and the more goals on your list, the more action items you’ll likely come up with here. Ensure that each department’s goals align with the organization’s goals.
Related: How to Set Achievable Staff Growth Goals
2. Analyze the market
You’ll need to consider external factors that will impact your ability to hire. Is it a job seeker’s market or an employer’s market? What do the unemployment numbers look like in your field? Are there any imminent labor or skills shortages? What about legislation that will affect your industry? The Bureau of Labor Statistics, your state unemployment agency, and hiring industry blogs are all good resources for this step.
While the factors you uncover may be largely out of your control, considering them will help you come up with a staffing plan that’s not only strategic but realistic, given the circumstances of the market.
3. Consider internal factors
Next, turn your attention inward and consider the factors at play within your organization that will impact staffing. This might include things like attrition, terminations, potential promotions, and upcoming retirements. All of these will result in staffing holes that need to be filled.
Additionally, look at your current labor costs and how they will change over the next 12 months. Raises, benefits, overtime, and bonuses will all contribute to your labor budget, which is a factor you’ll need to weigh when determining how many new hires are feasible and which roles will take priority.
Review the job descriptions and current openings to get a complete picture of where you currently stand. Check-in with your current employees to better understand the workplace culture and impacts on retention during this step.
4. Anticipate staffing needs
Once you have a better understanding of the current internal and external factors at play, it’s time to consider what obstacles could impact your business over the next 12 months. For many of our clients, it’s a once-per-year busy season where they need to significantly ramp up hiring for a short burst. Do you have a similar busy period? On the flip side, is there a slow period that maybe you can utilize for training?
Look at your current productivity so that you can understand your future demands. For example, if you plan to increase your sales by 15%, you’ll need to figure out what headcount adds will be needed to manage that increase. Don’t forget about additions on the management side to offset any additions.
5. Plan for the future
No one can predict what’s going to happen, but data can give us a pretty accurate idea of what our staffing needs are likely to be in the next 12 to 24 months. By layering predictive analytics on top of historic data on hiring, retention, and turnover, we can analyze which positions are most likely to become available and how many applicants we’ll need to bring in to ultimately fill them.
Hiring technology can predict with precision when employees are likely to leave, when you should ramp up hiring to stay fully staffed, and even what staffing challenges you’re likely to face at different times. You can use technology to weigh your staffing demands against the available supply of candidates, which will tell you how heavily you’ll need to invest in recruiting.
6. Identify gaps between available talent and upcoming needs
In this critical step, you’ll carefully examine the talent you already have in-house with an eye for how it can be leveraged to meet the needs you defined in step one. Determine the discrepancies between the skills you need and what you have on staff.
Sometimes, it’ll simply be a matter of headcount—your existing staff is running at max capacity, and you need more people. In other cases, the gaps will be more nuanced, like a niche technical skill you don’t currently have on staff or the need for the right kind of leader who can help the company navigate growth.
This is an important staffing plan step because it helps clarify where you need new talent instead of where you can better leverage your already existing talent.
7. Weigh all options
Now that you have clearly defined goals, you’ll need to determine the best type of employee to fill them. Remember: you’re not limited to full-time employees. Consider alternate staffing options like part-timers, contractors, consultants, and temporary hiring, which can help fill your needs without the added cost of a new full-time hire.
8 Steps to Build a Staffing Plan
1. Build a staffing chart
Having a detailed chart of your staff can help people see where you are and get quicker buy-in for an updated staffing plan. This is an optional but often-helpful step in your staffing plan template that defines where each employee falls into your overall staffing hierarchy. It’s especially useful for identifying relationships between departments and roles and identifying where, if at all, there’s overlap between needs.
Do sales and marketing have a shared need that could be filled by one new hire instead of two? Do you lack strong leadership in the IT department? A staffing chart will clarify these observations and help you set recruiting priorities for which hiring needs to address first.
2. Map out a game plan
Next, it’s time to create a concrete action plan to fill the future roles you’ve identified. What positions do you need to hire for right away? Which can wait a few months? What about six to twelve months from now? Which are must-haves and which would be nice to have if resources allow (and, importantly, who will make this decision)? Considering these questions will ensure you prioritize the most important team members and fill pressing needs before addressing less-urgent roles.
When creating your game plan, be sure to accurately factor in how long it will take to advertise the position, screen, interview candidates, hire, and onboard someone into the role. Depending on that time frame, it may mean you need to post the job opening a lot sooner than you think. Accurate forecasting is just one reason knowing your average time to hire and other key metrics like cost per hire is so important.
3. Develop a recruitment strategy
So you know what roles you need to fill, but how will you attract candidates for them? Your strategy should match the workforce analysis you’ve conducted thus far as well as your organizational culture.
Create candidate personas for upcoming openings to help you focus your recruitment campaigns. Decide which channels you’ll leverage to reach those personas. Some options include job boards, social media, paid advertising, employee referrals, and recruitment agencies.
4. Plan for training and development
As we’ve covered, investing in your existing workforce can help close skills gaps, prepare employees for advancement, and keep your organization on the cutting edge. Identify what kind of training and development programs will help you upskill and reskill workers to fill key openings.
5. Consider succession plans
Succession planning helps your organization avoid business disruptions in the face of planned and unplanned departures and ensures continuity in your leadership team. Not only that, it aids in retention by showing your investment in future leaders.
Identify key positions for succession planning (team leads, department heads, and executive team members are all good examples). Then, pinpoint internal candidates who would make strong successors and outline the leadership opportunities and other development programs that will be available to them.
6. Set KPIs
As with any recruitment initiative, metrics will be key to your staffing plan’s success. Set goals for KPIs like time to hire, application completion rate, offer acceptance rate, retention rate and employee engagement score. Tracking these insights over time will not only help demonstrate the effectiveness of your staffing plan to stakeholders, but allow you to continuously refine it.
Related: How to Leverage Recruiting Metrics to Improve Your Hiring Process
7. Present staffing plan to stakeholders
The staffing plan impacts each department in the organization, so it’s important to present your plan to the leadership team. Keep it simple and allow people to ask questions when they want to dive deeper into a specific portion. Use visual aids to outline your priorities and how to address them.
8. Adjust as needed
A strong staffing plan is dynamic, changing continuously in response to internal and external factors. Schedule periodic evaluations of your plan and update it as needed to address new challenges, needs, and opportunities. Regular reviews will ensure your staffing plan remains aligned with evolving business priorities and market conditions.
Strategic Staffing Planning Tools
Tools and technology can help you hire the right talent at the right time. Here are some popular types of staffing plan tools to consider.
Workforce analytics tools
These tools analyze workforce data to gain insights into trends, costs, and talent gaps. They enable data-driven decisions about headcount and resource allocation.
Examples: Workday Adaptive Planning, Visier
Applicant tracking systems (ATS)
My team’s most-used tool by far. ATS platforms streamlining the recruitment process by helping you track candidates and move them through the hiring pipeline. Many systems combine additional functionalities including candidate messaging, interview scheduling, reporting, and more.
Examples: Greenhouse, JobDiva, iCIMS, BambooHR
Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS)
HRMS platforms centralize employee data, automate administrative tasks, and provide insights into workforce dynamics. They can help you track workforce trends and manage employee life cycles.
Examples: Workday, Zoho People
Forecasting tools
These tools enable organizations to model various workforce scenarios and plan for future needs. They can help you improve decision-making by predicting trends and outcomes.
Examples: Eightfold AI, PeopleFluent
Collaboration/project management tools
These tools keep everyone on your team on the same page. They improve communication and allow you to track your shared progress toward goals.
Examples: Monday.com, Asana, Jira
Succession planning tools
Succession planning tools help you identify high-performing employees and plan for leadership transitions.
Examples: Saba Cloud, UltiPro
Enlist the Experts to Bring Your Strategic Staffing Plan to Life
Whether you’re starting at step one and need a partner to build a staffing plan alongside you or just need help with the final step, hiring a professional staffing agency can be a valuable resource in putting the right team in place to achieve your goals. We specialize in helping businesses of all sizes hire for skill and fit, identifying talent who will grow with you and help advance your mission.
We offer direct placement, contract staffing, temporary hiring, and administrative services like rapid onboarding to make your life easier. Our extensive network of relationships with passive and active candidates can help you reach untapped talent and even attract new hires from the competition, all done in a way that supports your overall business objectives.
FAQs
What information is required to create a staffing plan?
To create a strong staffing plan, you need to know the business goals, the internal and external factors affecting the business and hiring, and be able to anticipate the needs of the business.
What is the first step in creating a staffing plan?
When working on a staffing plan, the first step is to review all the organization’s goals and ensure you understand them. The plan will ensure that the goals can be met, so you must ensure everything is clearly outlined.
How often should I create a staffing plan?
Typically, HR teams revisit staffing plans once a year when planning budgets and growth for the next 12 months. It’s a good idea to visit the plan monthly or quarterly to ensure you’re on track.
Who is responsible for creating a staffing plan?
The HR team will work with strategic leaders and partners within the business to gather the appropriate information to create a staffing plan. Once they gather the information, the HR team will assemble the plan and present it to the stakeholders.
