An Overview of the Process

This book describes all aspects of the strategic staffing process in detail. From an overall perspective, the process usually includes the following steps:

• Identify and prioritize longer-term staffing issues and implications—those that arise from your business strategies and plans. A staffing issue usually involves a significant difference between the staff that will be available and the staff that will be needed to implement business strategies effectively. This might be a difference in skills, staffing levels, or both. It could also be a deficit or a surplus.
  
  
• Create a staffing model that calculates specific shortages and surpluses of talent. Such a model usually includes:
  
  

  • Defining the number (staffing levels) and types (capabilities) of employees that will be needed at a particular point in the future (or at several points in the future) to implement business plans effectively (often including how that staff should be organized and deployed)

  • Identifying the staffing resources that are currently available

  • Projecting the supply of talent that will be available at each future point for which requirements have been defined (e.g., factoring in the effects of turnover, retirements, planned movement, and other such factors)

  • Calculating specific differences between the anticipated demand for and the forecasted supply of talent

• Develop specific staffing strategies that address the most critical staffing issues most effectively in the long run. As defined earlier, staffing strategies are usually long-term, directional plans of action (spanning planning periods) that describe what will be done to address critical staffing issues.
  
  
• Define and evaluate near-term staffing alternatives within this strategic context, selecting and implementing those short-term (i.e., within a planning period) staffing actions (such as recruiting and internal placement) that best support the implementation of the staffing strategies.
  
  

By implementing this process, you can be sure that all staffing actions taken in the short term will fully support the implementation of your organization’s longer-term strategies.