Listen to the field before you recruit
📋 SUMMARY
A dashboard shows you figures: expenses, staff numbers, overtime. It's useful, but it's incomplete.
When a team is overstaffed, the reflex is often to open a new position. However, on the ground, we observe that the real need is almost never what we think.
The difference plays out somewhere no spreadsheet cell can reach: the conversation with your managers.
The table says "how many". It never says "why".
In an SME, when the pressure builds, the first tool people reach for is almost always the same: a file. You line up the headcount, the volumes, the backlog piling up. And the conclusion looks obvious: someone is missing .
The trouble is that a spreadsheet measures only one thing: quantity . It doesn't tell you whether that's because an extra pair of hands is genuinely needed, or because a task is poorly distributed, or because one tool costs everyone two hours a day, or because a single person holds knowledge nobody else has.
The logic is simple: a number indicates a symptom, never its cause .
Deciding to recruit on the strength of a file alone is a bit like prescribing medication without asking the patient a single question.
What the interview reveals that the file ignores
Consider the case of a director convinced they must open a position in their admin team. The spreadsheet is unambiguous: the team has been falling behind for months. The decision seems made in advance.
Then they take the time to sit down with the team lead. Within twenty minutes, the spreadsheet loses its certainty. The backlog isn't down to a shortage of people, but to one recurring, badly equipped task that comes round every week and blocks everyone. The real need wasn't another position.
It was rethinking a process and helping someone already on the team build one specific skill.
This is exactly what the Leaning Tower of Pisa syndrome covers in HR : before you repair, you diagnose the ground.
The tower is leaning for a structural reason;
Adding a floor does not straighten it, it worsens the imbalance.
Recruiting based on a poorly defined need produces the same effect.
You spend energy and budget on a problem you haven't understood..
A conversation with a manager brings to light what no column contains: the daily feelings, the irritants that cannot be quantified, the workarounds that the teams have invented to cope.
That's where the true nature of the need lies.
How to listen to the field without spending weeks there
Good news: this kind of listening doesn't require a complex system . It mainly requires asking the right questions to the right people. Here are a few concrete suggestions:
Talk to those who are experiencing the problem , not just those who report it. The team leader sees things that the management board never shows.
Look for the task, not the position : ask what takes time, what is annoying, what is repeated unnecessarily.
Listen the field and what keeps coming up. When several people describe the same irritant with different words, you've probably found the real cause.
This approach changes the nature of the decision. You no longer simply ask yourself, " Should we recruit? " but rather, " What does this team truly need to function better? " Sometimes the answer remains recruitment. Often, it's something else, and this nuance makes all the difference between an unavoidable expense and a deliberate decision.
The file remains a good starting point. It indicates where to look.
But it's the field that dictates what to do.
A question to reflect on
The last time you decided on an HR need,
What weighed most heavily: what the table said, or what your teams were experiencing?
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