Hiring when your team is understaffed

Look at recent vacancies stage by stage. A role with few suitable applicants needs a different response from one with strong applicants waiting for an interview or a decision. Check the role requirements, sourcing, compensation and process separately.

For delays inside the team, record the outstanding action, its owner and how long it has been waiting. Include interview scheduling, post-interview feedback, offer approval and the accepted-candidate handoff. A label such as “recruitment is slow” does not tell you which action to change.

Ask the people who will interview and onboard the hire what they can commit during the proposed period. Account for existing work, leave and other new starters. A headcount plan should include this workload, even when another team owns recruitment.

For each role, estimate the interviews, feedback, preparation, pairing and manager conversations required. Use recent experience as a starting point and revise the estimate as the hire progresses. These hours are a planning assumption, not a universal staffing ratio.

Hiring faster may help when suitable candidates are available and the team can support their starts. It may add pressure when the same colleagues already have more interviews and new starters than they can support. Neither outcome follows automatically from the hiring rate.

Compare several responses: reserve specialist time, redistribute existing work, use appropriate temporary support, adjust the hiring sequence or agree different start dates. Check the costs and consequences with the responsible managers. Slower hiring can leave essential work uncovered, so treat it as a decision to evaluate rather than a default recommendation.

Keep approved practical information, role context and common setup guidance easy to find. Give each item a maintainer and review date. Reusing an outdated document simply repeats the same confusion.

Acas recommends planning induction before someone starts, considering who needs to participate and fitting activities around other work. Its guidance also includes regular manager feedback. These are useful starting points for planning support in a stretched team.^[1]

Protect conversations where someone needs judgement, feedback or reassurance. A recorded introduction can explain how the company works; it cannot tell a new colleague whether their first piece of work meets the manager’s expectations.

Consider a fictional financial data aggregator hiring an Implementation colleague and a Support colleague. Both need an introduction from the same product specialist, who also has existing customer commitments.

The manager separates the shared company introduction from each role’s practical work. The specialist runs one approved context session, then reserves separate time for questions relevant to each role. Each manager owns early goals and feedback; the specialist’s availability is confirmed before the start plans are agreed.

If that time is unavailable, the team must change the workload, arrange qualified support or reconsider the sequence. A calendar booking alone does not create capacity. This financial-aggregator employee journey is an illustrative planning example, not a customer result.

Use the manager’s onboarding plan to agree initial work, check-in dates and where the employee can ask for help. During those meetings, ask what is unclear, what is blocked and whether the promised support is actually available.

Record missed activities and their reasons. A completed checklist does not show whether someone received useful feedback or understood the work. Compare the employee’s experience with the plan before adding more content.

Use the employee turnover rate guide to count departures consistently before reviewing the reasons. Workload, management, compensation, career prospects and personal circumstances can require different responses. The percentage alone does not establish that onboarding caused a departure.

Use voluntary feedback from employees and leavers responsibly, alongside other evidence. A better onboarding schedule cannot resolve every retention problem, and an early departure does not by itself prove that the hiring process failed.

Estimate the recurring coordination work you want to change, the current waiting time and the cost of the proposed response. Include setup, content maintenance, manager time and ongoing administration. Recovered hours are not automatically cash savings.

Use the ATS business case template if you are considering recruitment software. Compare it with an improvement to the current process, then test the assumptions on a defined group of hires. Do not count prevented departures or faster productivity as guaranteed benefits.

Review the bottleneck again after the change. If interview feedback is now prompt but new hires still wait for specialist support, the next action belongs in the start plan rather than the recruitment funnel.