0345 646 5201
When your best employee hands in their notice, your first instinct is to replace them. The sudden gap is painful; managers are already juggling a heavy workload, the team is stretched thin, and the priority becomes getting someone through the door as quickly as possible.
For many growing businesses, that feels like the only realistic option. When you’re moving at pace and feeling pressure from all angles, there’s rarely enough time to pause and ask whether the role you’re filling is the role you need. It’s only natural to solve the problem directly in front of you, and these quick hires work well enough in the short term that they become habit.
But that habit can shape your organisation before you’ve even had chance to catch your breath. When roles get replicated rather than reconsidered, you end up with a team built for the business you were when you started. Progress eventually starts to slow down, and what once felt like momentum starts to feel like friction. It rarely looks like a people problem at first, until it becomes a business problem.
The good news is that with a bit of breathing room and the right approach, hiring can work very differently.
Start with the business you want to become
Instead of asking “who do we need right now?”, businesses that scale well consider what they need to look like in twelve months, three years, five years – and what kind of team will get them there.
That means getting a few things clear:
- What will your team need to look like at double the revenue, or when that major investment lands?
- Is your current structure the right one to fulfil those long-term goals?
- Do you have the leadership capability to deliver that level of scale?
- Do you have a clear picture of who your future leaders are, and how you’ll help them get there?
- Which skills and capabilities will matter most over the next few years?
- Do you know what impact AI is likely to have in your sector, and are you hiring people with the mindset to leap on that opportunity?
These questions can feel difficult to prioritise. But in our experience, taking the time to answer them leads to better hiring decisions, because it means recruitment becomes part of a broader strategic plan.
What it looks like in practice
Corinthian, a sports hospitality business, came to People Puzzles having grown quickly and organically, but with a structure that couldn’t keep up with their ambition. Their leadership team had grown beyond what the business needed, which slowed decision-making, and they were spending heavily on external recruiters for roles they could have filled themselves.
Working with an expert People Director, Corinthian redesigned their business around where they were going, not where they had been. Leadership was streamlined, recruitment was brought in-house, and proper onboarding processes and development pathways were built. Over the following 18 months, headcount increased by 50%, recruitment costs reduced by 35%, and they established the foundations needed to continue scaling sustainably.
What worked for Corinthian was learning to make every decision deliberately and with the bigger picture in mind. Roles were designed around the future needs of the business, and hiring became intentional rather than reactive. As MD Mark Hoskins summed up, “We are in a much stronger position to support future growth and our recruitment costs have been massively reduced.”
Don’t assume every vacancy needs replacing
Strategic workforce planning isn’t just about changing who you hire. There’s one more question a successful business asks before filling an empty role: does it need filling at all?
Elsa Critchley, People Director for Scotland and Northern Ireland, has put this question to plenty of leaders at the exact moment someone hands in their notice. Before recruitment begins, she encourages them to consider three things:
- Does the role still add value to the success of the business?
- Could the work be redistributed, made more efficient, or automated?
- Could this be a chance to develop someone already in the business, rather than hiring externally?
Businesses that have done the planning work usually find the answers come quickly. Some roles remain critical and can’t be absorbed elsewhere. Others open the door to doing things differently, whether that’s developing a current employee or reorganising responsibilities. Either way, the decision becomes an intentional one.
The cost of reactive hiring adds up
Wrong hires are expensive; they cost money in recruitment fees, drain management resources and cause disruption for already overstretched teams. Research consistently puts the cost of replacing a senior hire at anywhere between half and twice their annual salary. Businesses that plan ahead tend to spend less on hiring overall, because they’re not filling the same gaps repeatedly or correcting decisions made under pressure.
Getting ahead of your hiring, even by a few months, changes the quality of the decisions you make. And with AI reshaping roles and skills requirements faster than most businesses can keep up with, the case for thinking ahead has never been stronger.
Nobody can predict exactly what their organisation will look like three, five or ten years from now, and good workforce planning doesn’t ask you to. It just asks that you get clear enough on your direction that when the next notice lands on your desk, you’re making a considered decision rather than a panicked one.
It’s a small shift in thinking. But over time, it’s the difference between a team that holds you back and a team that drives you forward.