When you’re managing a team and you know it’s time to hire more staff, it can be hard to get the green light. It’s easy for senior management to say “no” when you don’t have a business case to back you up.
Building a business case for new hires helps move hiring initiatives from the cost column to the profit column.
Here are 8 top tips on how to do it:
- THE TOTAL REVENUE IMPACT OF YOUR PROJECT
Senior management care most about top line growth. So, don’t be subtle, start off with the total estimated impact that your new project will have on increasing corporate revenue.
- HOW HIRING WILL DIRECTLY IMPACT OTHER CORPORATE STRATEGIC GOALS
A company’s strategic goals are incredibly important to senior management, in part because their bonuses are based on meeting them. You need to show the direct connection between any improved recruiting results and those strategic goals.
- SOLVING BUSINESS PROBLEMS
Start every component of your business case focused 100% on business problems NOT recruiting problems and the impact recruiting will have on helping to resolve those problems.
- CONVERTING RECRUITMENT RESULTS TO £
Work with the CFO to convert recruiting results like the quality of hire, retention, vacant position days and higher offer acceptance rates to their impact on revenue.
- THE CONSEQUENCE OF DELAY / DOING NOTHING
Explain the financial cost on any likely major failure if you want to get the attention of management. But if you want fast action, you must also show that delaying a decision will make a problem far worse.
In fact, sometimes your strongest selling point is that both costs and the severity of the problems will escalate if you delay.
- SPEED
In a world where being the fastest matters, management have learned to look for speed aspects in proposals. Use phrases like “Filling jobs faster in the product development area will reduce new product time to market by 21% or 45 days.”
- PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE
Projects that are forward-thinking get a higher priority because they prepare the firm for the future. Therefore, projects that have a workforce planning component are more likely to be approved to avoid any lag in production, allowing managers to have enough time to find top quality replacements.
- CALCULATE THE PROGRAM’S RETURN ON INVESTMENT
The single most common calculated ratio in business is a return on investment. It is highly valued because it compares program costs to the value of its results.
