Red Clover’s founder and Managing Director, Jen L’Estrange, recently provided her expertise to GoodFirms on strategic workforce planning.
We are a professional services firm, and our people are, in a sense, our inventory. We manage the workforce using a target utilization rate. We also know that it takes between 60 and 90 days for a new hire to be fully operational. So, when we are workforce planning, we loosely tie headcount growth to revenue projections, but we don’t lock in a hiring plan for the year. Rather, we will trigger new vacancies when we have an effective monthly utilization rate that is at target. It smooths out our hiring and ratcheting labor costs, and helps prevent employee burnout.”
