00-01. The hiring need: testing it before opening a vacancy

Situation: three projects pull on the same people

You run an implementation department of eight specialists. Three projects run at once — A, B and C. Each has its own project manager, and each pulls your people onto its tasks.

On 17 March all three projects need mandatory verification on the same day. Two of your specialists land on 12 hours of tasks against a daily norm of 8. The manager of project A says: we need another person.

Before opening a vacancy, work out what you are actually looking at. A daily jam and a monthly shortfall of capacity are two different deficits, and they respond to different things.

The first step is a Hiring Need Decision Record. It answers one question: after testing the immediate conflict and the feasible alternatives, is there a sustained need for another employee?

The record holds eleven fields, and they follow the order of the decision:

1. role and horizon;
2. demand;
3. available capacity;
4. immediate conflict and action;
5. sustained gap;
6. facts, hypotheses and unknowns;
7. options;
8. status and basis;
9. boundary of the status;
10. authority and owners;
11. review.

The worked example and the working document later in this lesson use the same fields in the same order.

The record has not been externally validated. It makes your reasoning visible; it won't work the answer out for you.

1. Why nobody but you sees the overload

The manager of project A sees project A hours. The manager of project B sees his own. Neither orders more than a monthly norm from any one person, and neither sees anything alarming.

In the synthetic example the largest single claim is 124 hours of project B on one specialist against a norm of 164. For the manager of project B that is a normal request. But the same person also carries 52 hours of project C and 16 hours of internal department work.

124 + 52 + 16 = 192 hours against a norm of 164

The overload did not appear in anyone's request. It appeared in the row total. Only the person who owns the headcount sees the row.

2. Calculate from capacity, not from task count

Express demand through project work: what must be ready, for which project, by which milestone and after which dependency. Calculate capacity from a person's norm.

• the norm for one employee is 164 hours per month;
• department capacity is headcount × 164 hours, less the hours of leave and public holidays;
• load is the sum of task hours across all projects, as a percentage of the norm.

In the synthetic example, department capacity in March is 1248 hours across eight people, leave included. But eight people do not provide eight interchangeable sets of hours: mandatory verification can only be performed by someone holding a current clearance. Four people hold one, and all the capacity usable for verification is 656 hours.

Future clearance and a future employee are not in that figure. The specialist preparing for assessment provides zero verification hours until the clearance is confirmed.

How both figures are derived, and why neither matches the headcount, is worked through in the next lesson. What matters here is different: the hiring decision rests on usable capacity, not on a list of people.

Try before the answer

On 17 March three projects need 40 hours of mandatory verification. The four with clearance provide 32 hours that day. Two of them land on 12 hours against a norm of 8.

Is that enough to open hiring?

Write your answer and one reason before continuing.

3. Resolve the immediate conflict first

No. The load matrix has a quiet day — 20 March — so eight hours of project B verification move onto it. Both days land exactly on the norm, the 12-hour cells disappear, and project B's milestone doesn't move: the manager of project B agrees a three-working-day shift.

The monthly total hasn't changed by a single hour. Shuffling the calendar moves hours between columns and changes nothing in the row.

The move worked only because the ground allowed it. Nothing on 17 March depended on those particular hours, and project B's milestone held. A calendar move is off the table when a task waits on a colleague's output, or when the shift would break a date the company has promised a client — a moved milestone is a reputation cost, not a free rearrangement.

Moving hours is one lever. When it is not available, or when it only postpones the jam, the same conflict has other ways out:

• reassign the task to a free colleague who is qualified for it;
• split the task and run its independent parts in parallel;
• change the department's own process so the step costs fewer hours;
• widen who can do the work by training the team;
• automate the repetitive part of the work;
• resolve the overlap together with the managers of the projects that compete for the same people.

When the pressure is on speed, cut the work down to what the milestone actually needs now and finish the rest later. Hold one line while you do it: the result stays above the quality the company has agreed to deliver.

So the daily conflict on its own doesn't justify a permanent hire. Rearranging the days fixed it. That doesn't mean you don't need to hire — the month as a whole still has to be checked.

4. Now look at the month

The three projects have ordered 704 hours of mandatory verification for March. On top of that the same four people carry 80 hours of internal mandatory department work.

704 + 80 = 784 hours of demand Capacity of the four: 656 hours 784 − 656 = 128 hours of overload per month 784 / 656 = 119.5% load against a 100% limit

This is a different deficit, and moving hours can't touch it: row totals don't change when you rearrange days, and pushing hours past the month only doubles the overload in April.

The department does hold spare hours, but the wrong kind: the four without clearance are left with sixteen hours, and none of them can serve mandatory verification. That's why the department load reads 109.0% while the cleared subgroup sits at 119.5%. The decision follows the second figure.

April and May are confirmed with the same volume of verification — the deficit is not a one-off.

Separate the grounds:

• confirmed: the projects' March orders, capacity, leave, current clearances;
• hypothesis: a temporary verifier or the preparation of your own specialist will close part of the deficit;
• unknown: whether the projects' orders hold after 31 March.

Every unknown needs a question, source, owner and answer date.

5. Compare actions by duration

The duration column is what changes the conclusion. Temporary capacity arrives earlier than a hire but ends on 31 May, whereas the deficit runs across the whole confirmed horizon and doesn't end with it. So temporary capacity covers April and May, and the hire provides the permanent capacity.

No option closes March's 128 hours. You and the three project managers agree which 128 hours of verification move beyond March and record them as debt with an owner and a review date. The debt carries into the April matrix as its own row; otherwise April's overload is counted too low.

For each option, review when capacity appears, how long it runs, its effect on milestones, quality and safety conditions, reversibility, implementation load, contractual constraints and applicable law. Weigh those for your own situation — there are no universal weights to borrow.

6. Record status and authority

Use one of four statuses:

1. Open hiring. The sustained need is confirmed, alternatives are compared, and permanent capacity matches the horizon.
2. Add temporary capacity. A person or external resource is needed for a limited period.
3. Proceed without another person. The deficit closes through scope, sequence, dependencies, preparation or redistribution.
4. Investigate first. Material data is missing; a specific question, owner and deadline are named.

You select the status as head of the department: headcount, capacity and the load matrix are yours. Project managers agree shifts to their own milestones. Employment, budget, contractual and legal confirmation stays with the authorised participants — name them in the record beside the status.

In the synthetic example, on 27 February 2026 the department head recommends opening hiring for one implementation specialist. Two actions run beside it: review a temporary verifier for April and May, and continue preparing your own specialist for clearance. The next review is 31 March, against the closed month of March.

Worked example

The sequence matters more than the chosen status: resolve the daily conflict, show the monthly shortfall of capacity, compare actions by how long they run, then prepare the hiring recommendation.

Working document

Practice

Do this on your own department — your real roster, leave and projects (see the "Run this course on your own department" track). Answer the daily-conflict question yourself first, then complete the record, and check your result against the worked example. If you cannot use real figures yet, work the synthetic example and return to your own team later — the method is identical.

In 35 minutes, calculate department capacity and the capacity of the relevant subgroup, separate the daily conflict from the monthly shortfall, separate confirmed grounds from hypotheses and unknowns, compare at least three actions, choose a status and name owners, the boundary of your authority and a review date.

Readiness check

The record is ready when capacity is derived from a person's norm net of leave and public holidays, the daily conflict is tested before any permanent-hiring decision, the monthly shortfall is stated both in hours and as a load percentage, work pushed beyond the month is recorded as debt, future capacity is not counted as available, options are comparable by how long they run, and the status can be revisited against observable conditions.

If you lean on a model to sanity-check this need record, keep the inputs abstract: no real CVs, names, contact details, health information, candidate assessments or confidential internal information should leave your own systems for an outside AI service, and nothing a model hands back counts as legal advice.

Method boundary and bridge

The record confirms or rejects the need against the data you hold. But if a reviewer asks which days and whose hours produced the 128 hours of overload, the record can't answer — it only carries the conclusion.

In the next lesson you will build the department load matrix: employees as rows, days of the month as columns, a norm row net of leave and holidays, a load percentage and a monthly total.

Sources and limits

CIPD, Workforce planning factsheet: a practical framework for comparing current and future need and selecting responses. It provides no universal threshold or guaranteed outcome: https://www.cipd.org/en/knowledge/factsheets/workforce-planning-factsheet/