Hiring plan
A hiring plan lists the roles a company intends to fill over a period, with timing, budget, an owner and a sourcing route for each. It turns a headcount need into scheduled work; a short brief for each role then sets that role's criteria.
Hiring plan, workforce plan and role brief
Three documents get confused, and each answers a different question. Workforce planning sits upstream and is a wider exercise than this entry covers. CIPD describes it as balancing labour supply against the demand for people, and says it can be adjusted to the size and maturity of the organisation. The hiring plan takes the gap that exercise finds and schedules the hiring. A brief then pins down one role.
| Document | Question it answers | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce plan | How many people, with which skills, and when? | The whole organisation or a function |
| Hiring plan | Which roles do we open, in what order, with what budget? | Every role to be filled in the period |
| Role brief | What does this one hire need to show? | A single role |
What a hiring plan lists
For each role in the period, the plan records:
- Why it exists: the gap it closes, or the leaver it replaces.
- Owner: the hiring manager who decides, and who runs the process day to day.
- Priority: which role goes first when two compete for the same interviewers.
- Timing: the target start date, worked back through the stages. A candidate’s current notice period depends on their contract, so ask for it early rather than assuming a standard length.
- Budget: the pay band, plus any advertising or agency spend, agreed before the job ad goes live.
- Sourcing channels: where you look first and when you add a second route.
Revisit the plan when a start date slips, a role is cancelled or a leaver appears. A plan that nobody updates stops being the reference.
The brief for each role
Before each job ad is written, a short brief records what the plan cannot: the success criteria for the first year, the must-haves and the nice-to-haves, the interview panel and which dimension each person assesses, and the number of rounds. The hiring manager and the head of the function sign it off, so the team does not reopen the criteria at every debrief. Agreeing the pay band beforehand also spares you from negotiating it under time pressure with a candidate you want.