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Thoughts on Rapidly Growing Your Staff

Whether you’ve just won an amazing global account or the economy has just generally been good to your company, you may find yourself with the enviable problem of having to grow staff quickly to meet your company’s new demands. We’d like to make sure that as you grow, you are “staffing up smart”.

One of the important factors in deciding when and how to staff-up a company is to really strike the right cord with current staff’s time and responsibilities. As a company grows quickly, existing staff takes on extra responsibilities, which can be exciting at first then daunting after a while. You want to ensure that a plan is in place to bring in new employees to help ease the burden of the extra work before your core staff starts to falter under the pressure. Have a clear plan and timeline for hiring new talent and communicate it as appropriate to remind existing staff that help is on the way. Building out a plan also allows hiring managers and senior leadership to really leg out the details of staff expansion. The hiring process—especially hiring for many positions at once—can be surprisingly expensive in both staff time and money, and it’s crucial to be sure that the folks getting hired are in fact the ones with the skills, experience, and cultural fit to be a strong match for the company.

Needing to meet rapid growth with new staff comes back to a previous post we made about being proactive with recruiting. It’s not always easy to anticipate, say, five crucial staff members from the same department all leaving the same summer nor is it easy to project an unanticipated need to triple a department’s size in just a couple of months. It’s a great idea for your HR team or recruiters to continually be on the lookout for great talent and build the connections that can help you immeasurably when you need to move quickly on the staffing front.

Another stop-gap way to fill staffing needs is an obvious one—temporary employees. Depending on the role, having someone in the office starting tomorrow could be a lifesaver, and such a short-term match could turn into a more permanent one if the temporary employee seems like a good fit for the company and the role.

In the end, having to staff up because your company is growing is an exciting opportunity and our advice echoes what you’ve heard from us at Arthur Diamond Associates before—be proactive and build a plan that assesses the current and anticipated needs of your company.

Image courtesy of Vlado at freedigitalphotos.net