As 2026 begins and business leaders are transitioning into the new year, one area that deserves intentional focus is strategic staffing. Regardless of what stage your company is at — scaling up, maintaining, or streamlining — the new year is great time to take a deep dive into your current workforce and align current and future staff with your business goals.
A strong staffing strategy will position your company for long-term success, agility, and higher productivity.
But how do you properly plan for talent?
Analyze your past years’ hiring trends and talent gaps.
Take a look at the roles that were the most difficult to fill, the positions with the highest turnover, skill gaps that slowed productivity, and capacity crunches that impacted your delivery. Taking a deep dive into all of these points will help you truly understand your needs and potential challenges in the new year.
Align your talent with business goals and strategy.
Whatever your organization’s plan is for the new year, your staffing strategy should align. Here’s some questions to ask yourself: are you entering a new market? Are you expanding product lines? Increasing production? Enhancing customer experience? Implementing new systems or technologies? Each of these requires different talent, and taking a look at these priorities in advance will allow you to be better prepared upon execution of each goal. If you understand these goals at the front end, you can better forecast hiring needs. Create a quarterly forecast that outlines:
- Anticipated openings
- Key skill sets required
- Timing for hiring
- Budget allocations
Building this roadmap will allow HR and leadership to stay aligned, which is critical to fill your positions in a timely manner. Prioritize your harder to fill roles and those that will have the biggest impact on your business.
Strengthen and upskill your current talent.
Conduct a skills audit to identify what you currently have and what you’ll need in the new year. Every good leader knows that utilizing your current talent and promoting from within is ideal, so assess what you have before hiring from the outside. I always encourage leaders and HR to incorporate goal planning in the performance review process, which will give you a clear picture of the areas your current staff wants to grow and develop in. Build personalized training plans around those goals. Promoting from within increases retention and greatly reduces the time to productivity, as the existing staff is already familiar with your business operations, technology, etc.
Leverage data-driven decision making.
I’ve mentioned this many times in previous blogs, but I can’t stress it enough – the days of posting a position and hoping you get the right candidate to apply, is over. The technology we have available to us changes the way business leaders are making decisions. If you maintain proper workforce analytics throughout the year, you’ll be able to analyze and properly plan for the next year. Data from the previous year can reveal powerful insights:
Analyze patterns such as:
- Time-to-fill trends by role or departmen
- Turnover patterns broken down by tenure, team, or manager
- Peak workload periods that created staffing shortages
- Historical hiring spikes and when they occurred
- Skills gaps that delayed projects
Looking ahead
This is just scratching the surface of a thoughtful strategic staffing plan. A thoughtful staffing strategy sets the tone for a productive and successful year ahead. By planning intentionally, aligning talent with business goals, and leveraging data-driven insights, your organization can build a workforce that is both agile and future-ready. Need help getting started on your staffing plan? Reach out to learn how Wegner CPA’s Recruiting Services can help you reach your workforce goals in 2026!
