How to adopt a sustainable hiring method?

Ben Rutter, Lauren Peake and Rob Hussey @ Bond Global and Aaron Beider @ Vertical Aerospace discuss a present challenge in many businesses!

Hiring sustainably is in fashion again! 😉

The days of growth at all costs are fast becoming a distant memory, hallelujah!

So how do we hire sustainably and where did we potentially go wrong in the past?

The graph below may have some answers:

Purple = Hiring  for growth

Red = Efficiency, Automation and Flexible Power

Green = Hiring at an operational level

This graph shows a typical ‘hockey stick’ revenue curve all businesses are aiming to achieve and there is nothing wrong with that! However, if you adopt a ‘growth at all costs’ mindset and choose to hire all business functions on that growth curve, its probably not going to end well and lead to layoffs.

@Bond we use this graph as a way of trying to build more sustainable growth strategies.

Only a few business functions need to be hiring on that growth curve. This may be sales and software engineers for example; roles that are directly linked to revenue growth.

However, the rest of the operational business functions must challenge themselves to hire on a much flatter curve. Why? because if they don’t, at some stage in the near future they will have to make waves of redundancies as the business overheads will become unsustainable.

The graph can be used for two things:

1. To educate senior leaders as to what some functions can hire on the growth curve. They will think it’s unfair that they don’t get an open cheque book for growth and others do. But using a graph like this to open people’s eyes to what it takes to achieve sustainable growth will help.
2. Decide which business functions sit on which curve and which don’t so the leaders have clarity up front and can execute with a clear understanding of the strategy.

Now the real challenge! 💪🏻

HOW do those business functions on the flatter curve keep up??

They must go through a 3-step process before putting forward a business case (to grow their teams more aggressively)

1.  Increase efficiency in the team
2. Maximise automation
3. Adopt flexible power in the function

Unless the operational teams have built a SUPER efficient function, have maximised their use of automation to keep the team as lean as possible, and adopted flexible power in the team via some form of flexible partnership then they really shouldn’t be asking to aggressively grow their team.

IF they have done all the above and still need extra power in the team then of course there is a business case.

To be more sustainable when hiring and as a business, this methodology will help move forward and hopefully reduce the impact of redundancies and business failure in the future.