Is it just me, or has the year basically disappeared? We’re officially in the final four months of the year, while exciting, it can also come with a sense of dread for those working towards a massive December delivery deadline.
If you’re hiring for a December deadline and you need to beef up your team to hit that deadline, I’ll tell you the cold hard truth, the decision needs to be made this month.
September’s a deceptively critical month for hiring, although it tends to fly under the radar a bit. It coincides with mountains of reporting requests and endless motivating for additional headcount and spend in next year’s budget. It also provides a unique opportunity to search for exceptional people to help you deliver quality work before the proverbial chapel bells ring come holiday season.
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From now until the third week of December, there are roughly 15 working weeks left before many people switch on their out-of-office and take a break. If you’re looking to hire and onboard people who can contribute between now and the end of the year, you are already running out of time, so let’s look at your options.
Option one: a permanent hire
While a permanent hire is possible, between the interview process, offers and notice periods, you’re likely looking at a November start at the earliest (and I say this conservatively), and this is if you can get a recruitment process completed within two weeks.
If you’re looking for this new hire to get stuck in and delivering this side of the year, it’s unlikely to result in much more than onboarding and context setting so they can be set up for success for the new year.
So, while a perm hire is absolutely possible, it’s probably unrealistic to help alleviate that looming delivery pressure you’re feeling, and I’d bet your grandfather’s Rolex that finance will ask you to wait till the new year.
Option two: an internal hire
A faster and typically underused option (and at the risk of sounding like ‘mystical Meg’) is to hire from within. While an attractive option to consider especially in businesses where employees are keen to stay but shift, it will depend on whether the team or department they’re leaving are also up against it.
I’d ask yourself if the shorter onboarding cycle, outweighs shifting the risk rather than removing it? It’s also worth mentioning that an internal promotion leaves a different gap in your operational requirements that will need to be addressed sooner or later.
Either way, make this decision in September to still allow for time to hire for the gap it creates.
Option three: specialist contractors
The benefit of working with contractors is the shorter notice periods and experience in adapting and delivering to new projects and teams quickly. I’m not saying contractors are superior to permanent hires, but they are faster, and it’s up to the business to decide the comfort level of investing into someone less likely to stay for the long term.
Contractors don’t automatically have to be short-term; I know clients who’ve held onto contractors for up to five years at a time. An added consideration is the ability to attach a contractor cost to a project budget rather than the wider business budget, which makes for a speedier hiring and approval process, and little to no impact on the wider headcount plan, your colleagues in HR and finance will thank you, and you’ll get to keep your grandfather’s Rolex too.
What I’ve noticed over the years is that seasoned specialist contractors, particularly in Tech and IT, will always prioritise continuity. I’ve seen exceptional contractors even soften their rates to ensure work to see them through the quieter hiring months between December and the end of February. This in no way impacts the quality of their delivery, and the businesses who hire them also benefit from their own form of continuity, where they’re reliant on a brave few to manage the fort.
At the end of the day they’re the cleanup crew you call in when your nuclear plant is in the middle of a meltdown. They know their stuff, and they want to deliver.
So where to from here?
The useful next move is to stop treating this as one decision and start treating it as four, because they have different deadlines and only one of them needs a budget approved.
- The single highest value thing available to you this month is to separate the decision to commit from the decision to look. These two things get linked together and they shouldn’t be. Start by understanding who is available, at what cost and notice period, so that by the time your approval lands you’re already making a choice between people and not starting the process from scratch. By then you’ll be too late and those great people, will be long gone. Remember, if your budget is only likely to be approved for next year, you can still start your search now with a view for the person to start in the new year.
- Remember those 15 working weeks? Remove the time to find someone and get them onboarded and what you’re actually left with is closer to eight weeks of real contribution. So be realistic about what is possible in eight weeks and not what you need ticked off on your ultimate wish list. If your December delivery window is real, shape the deliverable to it. I can assure you that a leadership team will be far more impressed ending the year clearing a big piece of work, than coming back to a larger piece of work in February. This will likely also work in your favour when you’re motivating for that increase for next year’s budget and your bonus.
- Be decisive on the type of hire you need. Whether you choose perm, contract or internal, it’s answerable now without a name or signed budget attached to it. Leaving it until the budget lands means making decisions under pressure and you land up with a perm hire when a contractor would have been the best decision.
- Be definitive about your December deadline, don’t position it as a ‘slow patch’. Once you’ve deployed that project or programme, you’ll head into a code freeze or pause followed by two to three weeks in January where the business is technically open, but functionally not at 100%. Being honest about this in your planning can lead to better decisions from the people approving them and your budget. If you’re being pessimistic and viewing December as a shut-down period, you need to view January as a warm-up/defrosting period too. So consider pushing your December deadline to February.
No one wants to be caught on the back foot in the new year with an approved budget but behind on delivery. I’m not being dramatic, it’s just a consequence of a decision made two months too late, I’ve seen it repeat each year across various sectors, not just tech.
