It is almost July. Halfway through the year. Six months ago you made promises as a hiring manager about who you would hire, who you would replace, and where your team would be by now. This is the mid year gut check most hiring managers skip. Here is why you should not.
I was at a client’s office in early June for what was supposed to be a twenty minute check in. It turned into an hour. Not because anything had gone wrong. Because I asked one question and the COO just sat back in his chair. I asked him what his hiring plan looked like for the year when we talked in January. He laughed and said he barely remembered January.
That is the thing about hiring goals. They get set with a lot of confidence at the start of the year and then life happens. Budgets shift. A key person leaves unexpectedly. A search that was supposed to take six weeks takes five months. By July nobody is looking back at the plan. They are just reacting to whatever is in front of them.
Why the mid year check matters more in financial services
In most industries a missed hiring goal is an inconvenience. In financial services it compounds. A compliance seat that stayed open too long means exam prep gets rushed. A COO search that stalled means operational risk sits with someone doing the job as an add on to their real job. A wealth advisor you meant to recruit in February took an offer somewhere else in April because nobody followed up.
The firms I talk to who are ahead right now are not the ones who set the most ambitious goals in January. They are the ones who actually looked back in June and asked what changed.
Three honest questions worth asking yourself right now
Did the roles you thought you would fill by now actually get filled. Not close. Not almost. Filled.
Did the reasons you gave in January for those hires still hold up, or has the business moved in a direction that makes the original plan outdated.
If you had to rebuild your hiring plan today with what you know now, would it look the same as the one you wrote in January.
Most executives I ask these questions to give me an answer somewhere between uncomfortable and honest. That is usually the sign the questions were worth asking.
What this looks like in practice
A client of mine runs a mid size private credit shop. In January he told me he wanted to add two underwriters and a compliance hire by summer. By the time we talked again in June he had one underwriter, no compliance hire, and a new problem he had not planned for. His existing compliance lead was being recruited away. What started as a plan to add headcount had quietly turned into a plan to avoid losing headcount.
Nobody plans for that in January. But it happens every year, and the firms who notice it in June have five months to fix it. The firms who notice it in November have five weeks.
The goal was never the plan. It was the direction.
Plans made in January are guesses, and reasonably good ones. But a plan is only useful if someone checks it against reality partway through. Half a year in is exactly the right time to ask whether you are still heading where you meant to go, or whether you have just been moving.
If the honest answer is that you are behind, that is not a crisis. That is just information. The firms who use it well right now are the ones who will be ahead by the time everyone else starts thinking about next year’s plan in November.
That is exactly the kind of conversation we have at Ramax Search and Staffing every day.
