Want to hire or not? When is the question?

When is the right time to hire more employees? Recent layoffs Especially in the technology sector, it is mainly due to over-recruitment and expectations for ambitious growth. There are no one or two unexpected events in your life, but there are a few things you can think about when deciding whether it is the right time to hire or stay lean.

Recruitment often feels chicken and eggs – we need talent and extra capacity to drive growth. At the same time, if there is no growth or changes in external market factors – we are in a expensive and disappointing position of having to lose talent.

Recent technical layoffs are a good example According to experts .The pandemic (favoring online services), rising costs and interest rates, uncertain global economy and recruitment intersections of European wars. Technology stock prices have been Decline since Q1 2022, With Netflix, Meta and Amazon hovering around May 2020 writing time, but this kind of business tends to avoid long-term gaming to avoid short-term moves in investor sentiment.

So when is the right time to invest in more capabilities or maintain leanness?

First, I will consider the talents you have before hiring more people.

Take the time to regularly evaluate its productivity or output and fit your company culture and behavior. Are both of them tall? These are your A-player.

C-Glayers’ skills may be high, but may have lower value/behavior alignment and weaken your culture. Make everyone’s motivation and performance less.

D players should never be hired (usually brief accidents or shareholder relatives). Are there too many C and D players? Your A player will eventually leave. This limits your ability to attract new A players and puts you in a talent death spiral.

This exercise to understand your A, B, and C players (if evaluated frequently) will make room for more A players on your team, and overall your cost and efficiency may increase.

How many A-glayers should you aim for?

Quick Workout – How many A, B, C and D players are there in your business today? The chances are less than 90%. Ensure that leadership or executive teams are growing to 100% A player and becoming a top priority for CEOs (and KPIs!). (If you don’t believe this is possible Check out these short cases). Hiring A-Glayers is the skill every CEO should learn how to master.

For more A players, you may attract and recruit more organizations’ A-Glayers. Business performance will improve and may increase your cost base.

Before approving new employees, make sure your recruitment truly spans economic, industry and market trends.

Are there any signs that this is a trend? For example, did customers delay new spending, delays in contract renewal, continuous spread of economic indexes such as inflation or interest rates? Maybe it’s time to invest in process innovation to improve output and return on capital invested in marketing and sales, rather than return on capital for hiring.

If you are sure that the trend is in your favor, consider your growth phase. In a current market with tight funds, if you are not yet positive for cash flow, you may want to run as much as possible. And focus on ways to improve current cash flow stances, such as pricing, margin and addressing payment terms.

Confidence is backed by the data – so if you are not quite sure, do some small-scale tests before investing in the entire exercise. Or does your customers have a strong verification point that is trending based on today’s activity, revenue, returns and cash flow?

Once you are satisfied, you can fund growth and already have the right amount of money, it is usually time to invest in building growth capacity, but naturally pay attention to the impact on your burn rate and the runway.

Business growth is slower every 9-12 months. Sometimes it takes about 12 months for a new talent to return their salary to positive cash flow (rather than income), so be aware that too many senior management is implemented too quickly.

Another aspect of your growth strategy is to determine the efficiency of growth, not just how fast it is. It’s one thing to grow your business just by adding employees or investing in more marketing and sales. Extension is another thing. Scaling is different from growing. In the process of expansion, companies are able to grow and serve their customers at reduced costs or unit efforts. The unit cost per new revenue unit or acquire customer queue is lower than the previous unit cost.

Therefore, it is better not to hire more sales or production/delivery personnel, but instead consider automation or technology first, which may reduce the need for additional staff in the future when expanding the customer base. This could mean reducing or accelerating the “human” part of the process, such as deployment time, reporting or facing time through CRM and marketing automation in the sales process.

Please note if your people are doing the right thing. This is another great exercise that sounds simple, but sometimes overlooked for fear of feeling like a “helicopter CEO.” how?

in every weekly meeting. “What is your top priority this week?”

This can help you hear things people pay attention to each week.

You will find trends, and if they aren’t focused on the right thing, immediately get back on the company’s top priorities.

As a leadership team, the team takes the time to “review” how you spend your time in your next monthly or quarterly meeting.

It takes 10-15 minutes for everyone to return to the calendar and see what the week looks like. How much time do you spend on big rocks and priorities, not on projects, low impact activities, management and reporting.

I bet there is one or two things people are doing that they no longer need or outsource. Actively look for activities to help your team let go. It tends to gather garbage like the top drawer in the kitchen, and it takes time to clean up from time to time to make time for priorities and big rocks.

• View your current talent in a 2 x 2 matrix based on values ​​and talent/skills/productivity (high vs. low). How many players do you have?

• Before planning the number of employees, run SWT (Strengths, Disadvantages, Trends) exercises and look for signals from customers and industry/economic environments.

• Train yourself and your team to master the recruitment of A-Glayers and use them as a top KPI for CEOs.

• Challenge your hiring managers suggest hiring alternatives, such as automation and processing innovation, or reevaluating how they spend time regularly today to avoid over-hiring.

• Ask your team about their highest priority every day and weekly tasks to make sure you play the right role in the right thing.