Scaling Your Workforce (continued)

Assignments

1. Audit your staffing. Review your staffing pre-pandemic and identify those positions (and people) who were critical or key to your operation. Build around that by assessing what you will need going forward, both near-term and long-term. Eliminate any positions that were redundant, outdated or ineffective.

2. Identify gaps. If you were able to maintain operations during the pandemic, think about how your business operations shifted to maintain viability. What did you have to staff up? What were you able to do without? What was working and what wasn’t? If you could start all over with an organization chart, how would you structure it to fill the gaps you identified?

3. Update position descriptions. If you have position descriptions to guide you in hiring, take the time to review them and change them to reflect any new realities or needs. If you don’t have them, you should create them to aid in recruitment going forward and to be able to create consistency between positions in terms of responsibilities, experience and compensation.

4. Scale strategically. As you build your team, think about how you can use contractors, freelancers and part-timers to fill in the gaps in your organization. Start by identifying work that can be completed on a project basis and find people who can deliver them. This will also allow you to bring in high-value experts on a per-project basis, benefitting from their expertise while gauging the need to bring that type of work in-house.

5. Standardize your recruitment. This is a great time to review your recruitment process and make any changes to it to reflect changes in the marketplace. Take time to think about your prospective recruitment targets and where they may be looking for job opportunities. The places millennials go can be very different from the sites that GenXers or Ys frequent. Your message may also be different for each of these audiences since they often they are looking for different things in a job. Some may want the benefits; others want the pay, still others will trade both for flexibility and advancement opportunities.