Lower costs, increased productivity, higher performance — wherever your business is looking to improve, a well-designed staffing strategy can deliver. Having a formalized staffing plan in place will allow you to hire proactively rather than reactively. With more time and advanced planning on your side, you’ll be less likely to get caught off guard by surprise vacancies, and have the stability you need to get the right talent at the right time for your business  — and that can have a major impact on your bottom line.    

Here, we've outlined some of the biggest benefits your company can expect from a more organized approach to staffing, and where you can go to get tips on how to build them into your own talent plan.

wondering what a staffing strategy is? get a quick, 5-minute overview at the staffing learning center.

improve productivity by reducing time to hire

Before you can engage, retain and train talent, you need to hire them. By incorporating a more focused hiring plan into your staffing strategy, you'll be able to find ideal candidates faster and eventually move on to hiring them at a faster rate. 

This brings major productivity gains to your current staff. While you're off searching for a worthy replacement, your existing employees are working overtime to pick up the slack. That means that not only will less work get done, the work that does will get done will be rushed and performed with less attention to detail.

According to one of our client surveys, the time to hire for a majority of companies is between two and three months — and that feels long enough already.* But when you factor in the fact that top talent is only on the market for 10 days, then it might as well be an eternity. Focus your hiring plan to avoid this, and put yourself in a better position to act quickly when securing talent.

learn how to reduce your time to hire.

a smart staffing strategy will allow you to fill positions faster, with less disruption to workflow. 

avoid the costs of making a bad hire 

Finding talent fast is important, but if you're just rushing to fill positions, you may not be spending enough time vetting the best fits for your business. A staffing strategy can help you achieve the perfect balance between speed and quality, so you can act swiftly and make good matches — all at the same time. 

By perfecting the art and science of achieving speed and quality, you'll be able to enjoy significant cost savings by reducing the amount of poor-fit hires you make. The average cost for replacing an employee is 21 percent of their annual salary, so there's a lot you could potentially save by designing a staffing strategy that helps you hone in on ideal candidates. 

follow these tips to attract the right talent for your business. 

it costs 21% of an employee's annual salary to replace them. a staffing strategy can help you save by avoiding bad hires. 

profitability and performance gains through better engagement

A comprehensive staffing strategy accounts for employees long after they've been sourced, interviewed and hired. If your team members aren't engaged at work or united around your company's mission, then the quality of their output will suffer. 

By broadening the reach of your staffing plan to extend throughout their term of employment, you'll be able to see significant returns in both the satisfaction of your workers and your bottom line.

Teams with highly engaged employees were found to be 21 percent more profitable than those with lower levels of engagement. They experienced a 41 percent reduction in absenteeism, too, which helped realize a significant increase in productivity.

see what you can do to improve employee engagement.

it pays to engage:
teams with high levels of employee engagement are 21% more profitable. 

get more out of your workforce

If productivity is your goal, then workforce management should be one of your main priorities. The idea is to find ways to improve productivity across your teams by implementing new tools that automate mundane tasks or streamline processes to free up bandwidth. 

Even just a simple digitalization of your onboarding process can bring about big gains. With managers now freed to pursue high-level activities, businesses that automated onboarding saw an 18 percent boost in new-employee productivity, according to one study. 

Improvements in performance can also be achieved by going beyond just the optimization of day-to-day tasks. Training and development is another key component of the workforce management part of your staffing plan. Upskilling existing team members will improve the capabilities of your staff, resulting in greater performance for your business in the end. 

what to do about workforce management. 

businesses increased new-employee productivity by 18% through automation of their onboarding processes.

putting the pieces together 

As you can see, there are a lot of areas to address in order to reap the full rewards of a comprehensive staffing strategy. Focus on the benefits that will help your business the most and start there, then work your way down the list until you've developed a complete all-around staffing plan. 

If the task of managing the many different faces of staffing seems like too much to take on in addition to your existing responsibilities, or if you just value additional input from an expert, consider working with a staffing agency. Staffing agencies have the knowledge and resources needed to help you develop the right staffing strategy for your business and can keep you updated on the latest trends and developments to ensure your plan stays effective. 

For more staffing tips that you can use on your own, check out our comprehensive guide to staffing, or get in touch with us today to see all the ways that Randstad can help your business. 

* Randstad US, “randstad client survey executive summaries.” 2019.