How To Gauge When You Need to Hire

Every business is unique in its needs and challenges, and it can be difficult to determine the best time to expand.

But if your company is missing deadlines or suffering from an overloaded and overworked staff, it might be time to reassess.

Sometimes temporary positions can help take the load off, but there may also be a need for additional long-term help.

Here are some signs that it might be time to hire additional employees:

You're Losing Valuable Time on Nonessential Tasks

Look carefully at your current situation. Do you consistently end your workday with a host of unfinished tasks? Are you working at home as often as you're working in the office? If you find yourself bogged down by administrative duties, it's a clear sign that you need additional staff members to tackle tasks such as answering phones and paying bills. After all, your time would be better spent doing what you were hired for.

You Start Turning Down Jobs

You are landing so many lucrative opportunities that your team is always busy. So far, delivery of the work is on time, but you’re turning down jobs to avoid potential friction with current clients. After all, when the incoming demand is greater than your workforce can withstand, the output tends to be poor. When you begin passing on opportunities because you lack the employees, it's time to consider hiring more staff.

Customer Service Is Suffering

Most people remember when they receive bad service or have a negative experience with a business. It could be anything from not getting waited on quickly enough at a restaurant to not getting a call back from a doctor’s office. In these instances, the general rule of thumb is that for every bad experience a customer or client has with a business, they will tell 8-10 of their friends about it. While, for every good experience they have, they only tell 2-3.

Unfortunately, an insufficient workforce can result in customers falling through the cracks or the loss of prospective customers whose inquiries go unacknowledged. If you've noticed that you're struggling to provide stellar customer service, it may be time to consider increasing your staff. No business can afford to alienate existing customers or neglect potential new ones.

Your Staff Is Conspicuously Overworked

To help you determine when to hire more employees, consider your staff's current workload. It should be easy for you to tell when your employees are struggling to keep up with the demands of their jobs. They may experience increased stress levels, display a lack of attention to detail or request time off more frequently due to illness. Try not to ignore these red flags.

Senior Employees Are Doing The Work Of Junior Employees

If you or your senior employees spend a lot of valuable time assisting on junior level tasks, then it's likely time you made a job offer. One easy way to determine whether you need to hire additional support is to do a quick calculation on the dollar value of your time per hour. If you're performing tasks that would cost far less if assigned to somebody else, then consider delegating them to a new employee.

There's a Lot of Overtime

Your current employees are doing the very best they can, but there's still a need for them to work overtime. The problem with employees working overtime on a regular basis is that it results in extra expenses you could avoid if you had enough staff. If you're currently paying significant amounts of money for overtime work, add more employees.

Making the Case for More Employees

If you’re not the one in charge of hiring, it can be hard to make a case for additional support.

Hiring isn’t something most companies take lightly. When’s the last time you or someone in your organization asked for additional employees and the HR director automatically said ‘yes’?

The reason there is such tight control over staffing levels is because increasing the size of an organization represents a significant cost to the business.

To help justify the need for new-hires, consider collecting data that will back your suggestion, such as recording how much time employees spend on the job, including time at home, or adding up the number of jobs that had to be turned down each month.

Also, businesses should consider the following questions when determining if they need extra staff:

What will the increased staffing level do for you?  How will it help?  If you don’t get those people, what might be some of the impacts?

The Lee Group performs recruitment and selection processes for organizations that don't have the time, expertise or resources necessary to manage the employment processes. The independently-owned and operated staffing firm prides itself on matching its clients’ needs with the perfect employees.