As businesses move into the last quarter of 2015, their sales and marketing departments are concerned with hitting their yearly targets and preparing for next year. By reviewing your staffing strategies and outcomes, you can better prepare to find the right sales and marketing professionals next year in order to meet or exceed 2016’s goals.

Conducting a year-end staffing recap is a bit different from conducting an annual performance review. In a performance review, you look at how each staff member performed individually. In a staffing recap, you examine your staffing needs and decisions as a whole and how they affected your department and its goals.

Start here:

1. Create a month-by-month “outline” of major staffing decisions. Who did you hire? Who left? When you brought on new staff, was it on a temporary, permanent, or temp-to-hire basis? Which additions to the team worked out to be fantastic hires? Who didn’t live up to your expectations, and why? At any point, did you find yourself in a “crunch” – for instance, because you couldn’t find a qualified candidate or because your top candidate said “no thanks”?
2. Review your strategic staffing plan. Your department’s strategic staffing plan should contain guidelines for staffing growth. Review it both in terms of how well it operated in 2015 and what it predicts and recommends for the upcoming year. If your strategic staffing plan doesn’t have guidelines for 2016, or if your department doesn’t have a current staffing plan, talk to your recruiter as soon as possible. With a staffing plan in hand, you can measure how well your hiring has supported your department’s goals and make concrete plans for the coming year.
3. Revise job descriptions as necessary. Go back to your yearly outline and focus on any applicants who didn’t meet your requirements or employees who seemed surprised, stressed, or blindsided by the job requirements once they came on board. Talk to the staff in each sales and marketing position to find out: What are their top day-to-day tasks? What skills and abilities are essential? Which did they learn on the job, and which did they possess when they were hired? Revise the job description for each sales and marketing position to more closely meet the job’s demands. Your recruiter can help.

At SMR Group Ltd, our recruiters specialize in matching qualified sales and marketing staff to clients in the medical device, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries. For help finding great new staff in 2016, contact us today.