Think You Need to Hire? Start Here

Think you need to hire because the work is piling up? Before you ask for, or approve, another hire, work out what problem you actually need that person to solve.

When deadlines are slipping, customers are waiting longer and your team is struggling to keep up, another person can feel like the obvious answer.

Sometimes, it is exactly what you need. But being busy does not always mean you are short staffed.

Unclear responsibilities, capability gaps, shifting priorities, poor communication and inefficient processes can all make a team look understaffed. If any of these are causing the pressure, another hire may not be the solution.

Start by looking at what is actually happening inside the team.

Is there too much work?

Before you hire, work out whether the extra workload is a permanent change or a temporary squeeze.

Look back over the past few months. Has the volume of work consistently increased because of new clients, projects or business growth? Or are you dealing with a short-term spike, a busy season, someone being away or one unusually demanding project?

If the pressure is temporary, short-term cover may solve it without adding a permanent salary.

Look at where the pressure sits. If the team regularly misses deadlines, customers are waiting longer, overtime is becoming normal or important tasks are falling through the cracks because there simply are not enough hours available, you may have a genuine capacity gap.

But if most of the backlog sits with one person or at one stage of the process, you may have a bottleneck rather than a capacity problem. Look at how work is allocated, who has authority to make decisions and where the process is getting stuck.

A useful test is to ask: if we fixed the obvious bottlenecks and spread the work properly, would we still have more work than the current team can reasonably handle?

If the answer is yes, you have a much stronger case for hiring, and a clearer idea of what the new person needs to take off the team’s plate.

Are unclear responsibilities the cause?

Sometimes work is not falling behind because there are too few people. It is falling behind because nobody is quite sure who owns it.

Look at the work that keeps going wrong. Focus on the tasks that are regularly delayed, duplicated, handed back and forth or missed altogether. For each of those tasks, ask:

1. Who owns it from start to finish?
2. Who has the authority to make decisions about it?
3. Does everyone involved give you the same answer?
4. Is someone doing work that actually belongs to another role?
5. Are two people doing parts of the same job unnecessarily?
6. Has work been redistributed after someone left or a role changed, without anyone properly reviewing who now owns what?

If you are getting different answers, finding tasks with no clear owner or seeing work regularly bounce between people, you may have found the problem.

Fix those grey areas first. Give important work a clear owner and make it clear who can make the decisions that keep it moving.

Once ownership is clear, see whether the work starts moving again. If it does, another person may not have been the answer.

Are you short on people, or short on skills?

You can have enough people in the team and still struggle to get certain work done because nobody has the right skills or experience.

Look at the work that is being delayed, avoided, outsourced repeatedly or falling back to the same experienced person because they are the only one who knows how to do it.

Then ask:

• What specific skill or experience is missing?
• How often does the business actually need it?
• Could someone in the existing team develop that capability with training or coaching?
• Is the work ongoing, or is the gap tied to a particular project or period?
• Could a contractor or temporary employee cover a short-term or specialist need?
• Is one skilled person becoming a bottleneck because too much work depends on them?

The important part is being specific. “We need another person in finance” tells you very little. “We need someone who can take ownership of month-end reporting and reduce the amount of operational work sitting with the Finance Manager” gives you something you can actually recruit for.

If the capability is needed regularly, there is enough work to justify the role and developing it internally is not practical, you may have a genuine hiring need. More importantly, you now know what you need that person to be able to do.

Are priorities clear?

A team can struggle even when it has enough people if priorities keep shifting, decisions stall or expectations are unclear. Look at how the team is being led day to day:

• Does everyone know what the top priorities are?
• When something urgent comes in, is it clear what should be pushed back?
• Is work being redone because the brief, expectations or outcome were not clear?
• Are priorities changing so often that work is started but not finished?
• Are managers regularly stepping in to resolve issues that could have been dealt with earlier?

If people are regularly changing direction or redoing work, look at the leadership around them. Clear priorities and consistent direction are what keep the team moving.

A new hire will not fix unclear direction. Get that sorted first or the new person is likely to run into the same problems.

Are processes slowing things down?

Before you hire another person to help get through the work, check how much time your team is losing to the way the work gets done.

Ask them one simple question: where do you lose the most time every week?

The answers can be revealing. It might be entering the same information into two systems, manually creating a report that could be automated, waiting for an approval that does not really need to happen, fixing errors caused by an awkward handover, or following a process that made sense three years ago but no longer does.

Look particularly closely at tasks that happen frequently. Saving ten minutes on something that happens once a month will not change much. Saving ten minutes on something five people do several times a day could give you meaningful capacity back.

You do not need to overhaul every process before you recruit. Fix the obvious time wasters first. If you do hire, you want that person spending their time on work that matters, not inheriting inefficiencies you already knew were there.

Are you paying people to wait?

Before you decide you need another pair of hands, look at how often the hands you already have are waiting.

Waiting for a brief. Chasing an answer. Needing information from another team. Holding for an approval. Trying to find out what changed after a decision was made.

A team can look incredibly busy while losing a surprising amount of its week simply trying to get the information it needs to keep moving.

Take a recent piece of work that took longer than expected and trace what happened. Where did it stop? What was missing? Who was waiting for whom? What had to be clarified or done again?

If the same delays keep coming up, look at how information is being shared, how handovers happen and whether people know who to go to when they need an answer. Fix those gaps before you add another person into the mix.

Are you replacing the person or the role?

Sometimes you do not realise how difficult someone will be to replace until you start looking.

We worked with a high-end, niche business where an employee had started in a reception-based role, taking sales orders, booking clients and building relationships with regular and referred customers.

As the business grew, the person grew with it. They took on invoicing, then gradually picked up more accounting responsibilities. By the time they left, one role combined reception, sales administration, client relationships and substantial accounting work.

Finding someone in the market who already had that combination of skills was much harder.

Someone with strong accounting experience may not want a highly customer-facing role, while a great communicator with strong administration skills may not have the accounting experience the business now expected.

So the question changed from “How do we replace this person?” to “What do we actually need from this role now?”

This is where an experienced recruiter can help you understand what is realistic in the candidate market, what the salary will attract and where you may need to rethink the brief.

Sometimes the best replacement is not an exact replacement at all.

Still not sure if you need to hire?

Sometimes it helps to talk it through with someone outside the business. Book a 20 minute conversation with Recruitment Central to talk through what is happening in your team, whether recruitment is the right next step and, if it is, what you actually need from the role.