Stop Scrambling—Start Filling Open Positions Efficiently

By Jeanne Merchant

The need for strategic staffing solutions has never been more urgent than today. Job openings remain elevated at 6.9% across industries, up from 4.8% one year ago. Filling open positions takes 36-42 days on average, and the costs to hire are up to 40% of the position salary. While leaders scramble to hire staff, these challenges become cyclical. Due to short-staffing, employees become overwhelmed, resulting in further exits. Shortcuts are made in recruitment, hiring, and onboarding processes, contributing to early attrition.

The goal to attract and retain quality talent has motivated recruitment and engagement initiatives across the business community. Organizations must lower turnover costs and offset wage hikes that threaten profit margins and sustainability. At the same time, they must serve customer needs and remain competitive in the marketplace. Approaching positions strategically has become necessary for balancing stakeholder demands. Today’s hiring teams require adequate resources and support to meet these challenges. Have you provided your team with the tools to succeed?

Share Top-Level Insights

A strategic approach begins with communication from org leaders. Top-level insights are key to aligning organizational objectives with staffing strategies. A position management dashboard can help teams visualize open position data, track relevant trends, and prioritize goals. With clear direction, the hiring team can identify process gaps, propose solutions, and proceed with a plan of action. Providing the necessary information and feedback benefits processes and empowers the team to overcome obstacles.

Define Your Open Positions

The next step to successful recruitment is defining and budgeting for the open position. Once a position is accurately defined, a job description can be created (or updated). Though commonly under-prioritized, investing time and attention to a job description is central to achieving an ideal person-organization fit (or P-O fit) with your employee. In addition to clarifying expectations, it helps the recruitment team effectively target candidates. The job description also helps hiring managers form interview questions and guide employee selection. Defining the position is the foundation for all other processes that follow. Getting it right is critical.

Provide Planning Tools and Remove Barriers

Once positions are defined and budgeted, an org chart can serve as a map for identifying where openings exist in the org structure. This can help managers create a plan to fill the position by the target hire date and decide where to involve the team in the process. A collaborative, integrative platform enables everyone to access position data and share information in real-time, improving the flow of information and filling positions more efficiently.

Refine Your Processes

Processes should evolve as tools advance. For example, when filling open positions, leaders might first refer to an internal candidate pool to evaluate employee potential and performance before spending money and effort on recruiting. Tools such as the Built Succession Planning Module can simplify this task. Using a dynamic org chart, leaders can designate and compare candidates, determining how to develop employees for growth into future roles. If hiring is necessary, management can identify, plan, and budget for the open position to help facilitate the recruitment processes.

Schedule a demo today to learn how Built can help your organization track critical position data and fill open positions strategically. Look for our upcoming guides on interviewing and selection for retention.