How to Create a Staffing Plan: Steps for Strategic Workforce Planning
Whether your organization is planning for growth or better aligning employee skillsets to priority roles, it's crucial to anticipate talent needs with a strategic staffing plan. Understanding how to create a staffing plan allows leaders to navigate business growth, workforce planning and changing budget realities. Here is a framework to help ensure that your organization has the right people with the right skills to achieve your business objectives.
As organizations face ongoing business uncertainty, a strategic staffing plan helps fuel growth, align hiring to critical goals, and adapt talent management to evolving budget forecasting while creating organizational resilience.
In a recent Gartner survey, 42% of chief human resource officers (CHROs) identified strategic workforce planning as a top priority. A staffing plan backed by a methodical process and workforce planning data helps ensure organizations have the right people with the right skills to achieve changing business objectives.
What is a strategic staffing plan?
A strategic staffing plan uses systematic research and forecasting to anticipate workplace needs, align hiring to broader business goals and effectively prepare for growth.
Your staffing plan should go beyond changes in headcount to identify the new skills and knowledge your business needs to stay competitive. Recent ADP research notes that 65% of large and mid-sized organizations struggle to provide skills training opportunities for staff, indicating workers may struggle to acquire key skills as their roles evolve. Strategic workforce planning helps organizations identify priority skills through a cross-functional lens, highlight gaps for hiring and develop upskilling plans for current staff.
A comprehensive strategic plan addresses three workforce planning priorities:
Short-term needs for a temporary, project-based or seasonal increase in employees
Long-term needs for skills and positions required for the foreseeable future
Succession planning to offer current and potential employees the training and development opportunities needed for promotion into key positions
The benefits of a strategic staffing plan: Reducing risk and fostering growth
Organizations that understand how to create a staffing plan develop a blueprint to align recruiting, retention and development efforts with critical business needs. Without a proper plan, your organization may find itself scrambling to fill last-minute roles or losing multiple long-time employees who feel underappreciated.
This strategic business function aligns HR functions like recruiting and talent management with leadership's vision for the business and current budget realities.
Visit the 2026 HR Trends site for resources.
How to create a staffing plan: A forward-focused strategic framework
Here's a five-step framework for creating a plan to help your organization keep up with its potential and ambitions.
1. Align workforce planning to key business goals
Proactive staffing plans anticipate changing needs and create a workforce that's ready to deliver on the organization's vision. Questions to consider include: What is the organization's plan for growth? What skills are essential to meet the needs of current customers while supporting future expansion? How will emerging technologies such as AI impact staffing and the skills your workforce needs?
ADP research shows that just 24% of workers are confident they have the skills to advance. Evaluating the skills required to deliver on your organization's strategic plan and getting perspectives from leadership around the organization lay a foundation for alignment between talent strategy and desired outcomes.
2. Analyze labor trends and workforce data to inform your staffing plan
Identify the labor trends that impact the availability of personnel and specific critical skillsets. Large national organizations can review relevant data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and ADP resources such as the National Employment Report and Pay Insights. These resources provide historical and up-to-date, sortable details on topics such as job openings, unemployment rates, average labor costs, changes in employment numbers and typical pay rates.
Regional and industry statistics can help further contextualize that information, with sources available from local chambers, business publications and industry associations. Organizations that use workforce software can assess their own data and benchmark it against federal, state and local insights. Together, these factors can help organizations better understand the pool of talent available and how that fits their needs.
3. Anticipate needs across teams and business functions
Keep in mind that not all personnel requirements necessitate hiring externally. The greatest opportunity to develop priority skills may already exist within your organization. Some talent needs can be found internally, and others can be outsourced to consultants, freelancers or independent contractors. It's smart to assess the specific skills and abilities you need and understand whether each group, department or division already has those capabilities available. ADP Research found that less than 4% of employees receive upskilling opportunities in their first two years on the job and 75% of employees leave organizations without ever getting promoted.
It's time to evaluate your internal management and training plan as part of larger strategy conversations. Ask whether training, mentoring or other development help current employees move up or over into the new or vacated positions. If so, what might this development look like? On the other hand, are these skills and personnel needed indefinitely for the long term? Or are the organization's needs more specific and short-term, like for a particular project, an initiative that calls for skill sets not found in-house or a time commitment simply not manageable for existing personnel?
4. Use gap analysis to find the missing skills that can limit business growth
When planning for growth or aligning to forecasted business needs, a gap analysis compares what you have with what you need. Are the gaps your analysis identified due to training and development deficiencies? Are the gaps due to heavy workloads during high seasonal demand periods? Do you need new skills due to changing technologies or shifting industry dynamics?
A gap analysis isn't just determining functional needs. Asking a series of questions like the ones above will allow you not just to determine the gaps but also potential solutions for filling them.
5. Turn workforce insights into a strategic staffing plan
The final step is to roll all this information into an actionable talent plan. A strategic plan offers recruiting and upskilling insights that can drive talent management across the organization. Once you have compared what you have with what you need, it's time to get granular with a plan that's tailored to your organization. Include factors like:
Current workforce: Understand where employees are and where they're headed. Span all applicable groups, departments and divisions. Look at the current organization chart to identify current roles and career paths. Consider cross-functional opportunities when looking at career paths.
Staff composition: Think about the employee's job title or function, salaries, length of employment, level of seniority, employee demographics, performance assessments and turnover rates. If you need seasonal employees or highly specific talent for a single project, consider including outsourcing in your plan.
Employees' skills: Compare employees' key skills and experience with those needed, and use those gaps to determine your next steps. If you need mid-level employees with specialized software skills, identify existing employees who have those skills or could acquire them. Likewise, consider whether to work with recruiters, schools or technical organizations for candidates.
Career pathways: Work with HR and managers to create development plans for critical employees who have the most needed skills or significant potential for senior-level positions. These development plans go beyond performance reviews by outlining the steps an employee needs to reach the next level through specific job experience, training or mentoring.
Employee retention: Examine how well your organization retains employees. Look at turnover rates by position, department and demographic. Is there a pattern to which employees are leaving? If so, delve into potential causes to determine if people, policies or practices are impacting retention. Are employees receiving development opportunities, promotions and salary increases? What issues have surfaced from employee satisfaction surveys that might impact turnover? If you identify problems, work on a plan to increase employee engagement.
Once you gather all the information and create a plan that identifies the anticipated job, skill and experience needs and includes details on how you plan to meet those needs, you can follow the necessary steps to implement the plan. As the labor market, in-demand skills and technologies are changing quickly, evaluate your plan every six to 12 months or more often if needed.
Effective workforce planning aligns the entire organization
Crafting a truly high-quality staffing plan involves organizational leadership, hiring managers and HR leaders. It's an organization-wide effort with broad impact like budget forecasting or IT strategy planning. So clear communication across functions and departments is key to crafting a plan that accounts for the needs of all and works for everyone.
To learn more, launch our on-demand webinar anytime, HR trends and priorities for 2026: People.
