Staffing Strategies

As stated previously, staffing strategies are long-term, directional plans that describe what will be done over the course of the organization’s planning horizon to address critical staffing issues. Therefore, staffing strategies usually span several planning periods (e.g., all three years of a three-year business strategy); they are not developed for each planning period individually. Staffing strategies should be specific enough to describe how staffing needs are to be met, but not so specific that they describe individual staffing needs or actions. “Promote from within” is an example of a simple staffing strategy. It describes, in directional terms, the approach that an organization will take to meet certain staffing needs, yet it does not specifically identify who should be promoted when. Those specific descriptions are part of the organization’s short-term staffing plans. Other examples of staffing strategies include:

• Meeting needs for management talent by blending hires and promotions from within

• Developing and retaining critical technical capabilities within the organization while contracting out noncritical skills

• Using accelerated development and redeployment to eliminate a major talent surplus in one area while meeting a critical need in another

• Building a full-time staffing base for minimum (or “foundation”) workloads and using part-time employees to meet workloads that exceed those minimum levels

In almost every case, staffing strategies are (or at least should be) an integral part of the organization’s business strategy. Business strategies might even include the specific staffing implications of those strategies and what will be done to address those implications.