Best Strategy to Increase Hiring Velocity By 10X

Increase Hiring Velocity- Is your sales team missing the target because of vacancies? Let me guess. They are not giving you quota relief for those empty seats. Are you running a field operation, and you are running over budget on overtime expenses? Your team is pushing themselves to burnout levels trying to make up for the lost productivity. Usually, overcoming these tasks requires more energy as a leader, making you miss your objectives and stressing your work-life balance.

“Bad breath is better than NO Breath”-

Then there is the dreaded “Bad breath is better than NO breath” fear of performance management when you are short headcount. Leaders below their headcount budget are reluctant to performance-manage because it might leave them even shorter resources.

Operation Expense Risk Issues-

Operational expense issues require you to be able to start, stop and execute your hiring process. A leader needs to navigate these scenarios. These challenges include budget cycles, scaling headcount to grow business, headcount freezing, and OPEX concerns. You will frequently have to justify your headcount to finance. This can feel more like a proctologist visit. The challenges are ubiquitous for any size organization throughout the year.

Other Headcount Variables-

Other variables do affect headcount and creating similar but different challenges. Performance management is a headcount risk, and the potential of returning someone to the community creates a vacancy. Do not forget that people get promoted, resign for promotion elsewhere, and retire. Then there is this thing called ‘life’ which happens outside of work. Someone may get ill or injured for the short or long term, or someone goes on military duty (thank you for your service). Then there is the absolute worst thing is an employer having an employee pass away.

Force-to-Load Modeling-

Every time I have come into a new role, organization, or ecosystem, one of my first tasks is to break down what resources it takes to perform successfully.

Tactics-

1. It would be best if you built a range from ‘Optimal’ to ‘Minimum Viable.’ Optimal is the absolute ideal perfect world headcount figures. You can think of this as if the company would like to invest in the organization. The output is the number of resources you need. Minimum viable is the absolute least number of resources in OPEX crunch time or reallocating resource times; you can think of this as worst-case while keeping up moderate performance.
2. To generate a Force-to-Load Model, you need to take the tasks each role is required to perform their job, apply duration, and scale to it. It would be best to break down the average week, month, year and what it takes to assure you balance the work rationally across each employee at an average productivity rate.
3. In Sales, this might be the number of accounts to cover, the amount of revenue to support, or new sales expectations. For Support, the equation could be how many do you support, the size and scope of tasks and the hours to perform the tasks. For Field Operations, this might be how much incoming work, the average hours it takes to complete each job and how many available hours each person can perform.

Major Tip- 

Do not take administrative tasks lightly. Use true-time tasks, take by using averages, and not take the time from the most productive person. Adjust the Force-to-Load Model as you improve productivity and performance metrics. For example, you want more quality sales engagements, then reduce the accounts per rep. The narrow focus will allow them to have more significant time to provide a solution with each client. The goal is to minimize repeat field visits and decrease the jobs per day required to allow technicians to do quality work. But you need to measure those items.

Always Know Your Headcount Numbers- 

Your operations support should provide you an up-to-date real-time dashboard of headcount. If not then create one. This needs dashboard needs to be organization down to lower-level roles entirely. It needs to include budgeted headcount, current headcount, vacancies, posted requisitions, selected candidates, and their phase (selected, offered, background, start date), and several at-risk employees. The number of at-risk employees needs to include employees on performance steps, anyone receiving a promotion, retiring employees, and any other relevant reasoning for someone to be a churn risk. Use this information to track and trend important headcount information such as churn percentage, vacancy rate, retention rate, and other important KPIs. Then set a cadence of weekly or monthly inspection.

Establish a Plus 1 Hiring Culture- 

Vacant headcount puts duress on the current workforce by pulling the weight of the missing resource. Additionally, to avoid the ‘Bad breath is better than no breath’ issue of performance managing, you need to constantly push to recruit, hire, and aim to be one headcount above your budget. The act of recruiting does not mean over-hire without proper approval. It means either have the additional resource ready to bring on or be prepared to increase hiring against your churn risk. However, if you can or during peak resource times, I recommend getting over hiring in place or approved. Here are some keys to executing Plus 1 hiring:

1. ALWAYS Be Recruiting- Use your LinkedIn Profile or other mediums to find successful people. Especially, look for ‘Recognition,’ people holding trophies or presidents club announcements. Congratulate those people and then message them to set up a time to ‘hear how they achieved such great success.’
2. Mentor Internal/External Candidates- Mentor people you would like to hire in different departments or externally potentially. Mentoring also allows them to know your culture and expectations before you bring them on board.
3. Create a Sourcing Req- Constantly cast a big net for chances to upgrade your talent. Have HR post a requisition to have a consistent pool of candidates. Review the talent, look for the diamond in the rough, or potentially a top performer who is not satisfied with their current company.
4. Interview People Regularly- Between the three motions above, be on a cadence of talking with your recruiters and potential candidates.

Hire Like Lightning- 

When you have an open requisition, you need to act with incredible velocity. An approved headcount should be viewed as a race to get individuals hired, onboarded, trained, ramped, and productive at a record pace. Nothing says, “maybe we do not need this additional head or expense, ” like leaving a vacancy open for extended periods. Vacant budgeted headcount might get absorbed during OPEX reduction or freezing cycles throughout different corporate scenarios. So, you would have wished you acted fast on the openings. If you are behind on the steps in section 3 and do not have a candidate pool, do not stress or fear but rather take a lean methodology approach to the issue. The following are a couple of ways to accelerate the process:

Tactics-

1. Divide and Conquer- Pull your team together to ‘Blitz’ review resumes and candidates. You and your closest set of trusted peers or employees can run through 5, 10, 20 resumes in a short afternoon session.
2. Narrow the Qualified Pool- You do not have to interview the entire pool of candidates. Use scoring metrics of what you want in candidates to make better interview selections.
3. Interview Blow Outs! – Again, use the team model and get the interviews on the calendar. Please put them in blocks where you can set the time aside and knock them out. Score them together right afterward to speed up the process. 

Invest in Employees- 

The real key to increase hiring and headcount issues is to reduce employee churn in the first place. From the time you hire someone until you promote them or retire, it is your responsibility to onboard, train, coach, and spend valuable time working on employee engagement. Yeah, yeah, I get it, sometimes it is not always the culture you have on your team but the larger company or corporation satisfaction causing churn. However, you can do so many things to create a stable work environment where employees seek to be productive. The more time you help your resources hit their targets, help them make their compensation, enjoy the work they do and focus on making their lives happier when they are at work, the better the performance. Here are some recommendations on how to increase employee engagement:

Tactics-

1. Provide Proper Onboarding, Training, and Continuous Coaching- These are great opportunities to work with your employees, establish a culture, clear expectations, and genuinely show your interest in their success.
2. What Does Success Look Like- Whether it is having a session on obtaining the compensation plan or reviewing the tactics to achieving the targets, this should be a constant effort from the leader. It goes a long way for you to spend the time showing them the secrets and coaching to make them be recognized.
3. Positive Performance Management Programs- There is always a negative connotation associated with Performance Management Plans because NO one likes when it heads south. However, it is also because very few companies employ a ‘positive’ based plan or define positive as an employee should be happy to have a paycheck. Too many times, we look at the stick and not the carrot. What I mean by this is we all know the heavy-handed, ‘you may get fired if you miss the target,’ but I have always been in favor of, ‘if you regularly achieve the target, you get this pay increase or title promotion or advanced training/development.’ No one wants to feel like they are at a dead-end job. Having a performance plan driving clear aspirational goals can create a culture of success.

In Conclusion-

Regardless of what your company, division, organization, or corporation does or makes, it is critical to have a firm grasp on the headcount. The leader at any level must build a cadence around reviewing and executing the headcount budget. Each organization, ecosystems, or results rebuild during my career required me to right-size and stabilize the headcount challenges. The steps I have laid out above are the keys to increase hiring velocity and creating a cultural expectation of how to accomplish a good headcount process. Depending on what phase your team or organization is in, these steps will solidify your resources and create short- and long-term performance.

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