Recruitment planning: anticipating the need for people
Reactive recruitment — looking for people only once they are missing — tends to be slower and more expensive than recruitment planned in advance. Planning connects the business outlook to the staffing need: how many people, in which roles, and by when. This page describes how to approach that, how to allow for seasonality and turnover, and why it is worth building in both a margin and time for permit procedures where foreign workers are involved. It gives no figures and no benchmarks; it is a method that each company fills with its own data.
From business outlook to staffing need
Planning starts from the expected volume of work — orders, production, season. From that follows how many people are needed, with what qualifications, and when.
It is worth separating the standing requirement from temporary peaks, because a different recruitment route covers each.
What the plan is built from:
- An estimate of the volume of work and of how it is expected to develop.
- Converting that estimate into headcount and role profiles.
- Distinguishing the standing requirement from the temporary one.
- A margin for turnover and for gaps in cover.
Seasonality, turnover and lead times
A plan has to carry seasonal swings, expected turnover, and the time recruitment itself takes. Where people are recruited from abroad, the time needed for residence and work authorisation extends the plan further.
This page states no procedural time limits. Verify them with the relevant authorities and put the result into your schedule.
Replacing someone who leaves
A specific person leaving is the most common reason a vacancy opens, and the one plans are least ready for. Unlike growth, the date is fixed by how the employment ends — yet the decision about what exactly to fill is often left to the final weeks.
It pays to separate two questions first: whether to fill the same role, or to divide the work differently. A departure is the one moment when a role can be reshaped without a further disruption to the team; once a replacement has started, every change means a second round. Only then does the search itself matter.
The second step is handover. If the two employments overlap even partly, the person leaving can pass knowledge on directly; if they do not, it has to be captured in writing before they go. This is the part of the plan most often underestimated, and it shows up later rather than immediately.
What to settle when a specific person gives notice:
- Whether to fill the same role, or to redistribute the work.
- How much time remains until the employment ends.
- Whether the two employments will overlap for the handover.
- What has to be captured in writing before the person leaves.
- Whether this is a repeated departure from the same role.
What you should be able to decide
The output is a plan that says when to start recruiting for which roles and by which route, so that people are available in time. That reduces the risk of expensive last-minute hiring.
The plan then feeds the choice of channels and the organisation of selection; for temporary peaks, consider agency employment.
For employers The employer guide covers the decisions that usually sit around a hiring plan.