As a small business owner, you’re probably an expert multitasker out of necessity. You need to create, build, sell, market and network — and often need to do so with minimal staff. In fact, a recent Constant Contact study found that, despite increasing revenues and optimism, almost half (49 percent) of small business owners do not plan on hiring in 2014.

I understand why you may be hesitant to hire. Staffing can be one of the most stressful aspects to running a small business. Do you really want to sink that additional profit into a new paycheck? When do you recruit a salesperson versus, say, an IT specialist? What if you bring on too many employees? Even a misguided investment on a temporary employee or consultant could be damaging to a company operating on thin margins.

However, if you want to grow your business, you’re going to have to grow your staff as well. And today, a solution more often used to develop marketing and inventory strategies can also help drive staffing decisions: data.

1. Use sales and revenue numbers to plan proper employee growth

I imagine that you’re already using sales data to help replenish inventory, such as stocking up on certain types of jackets based on last year’s fall sales if you’re a clothing retailer. Previous years’ sales numbers can also be quite helpful when it comes to staffing initiatives.

For example, say you’ve noticed a trend over recent holiday seasons in which the bulk of your campaign sales have come from existing customers, whereas new customer sales have stagnated. If it’s a trend you wish to reverse, consider using your holiday staffing budget on a new outbound sales person or marketer with a background in lead generation and acquisition.

You can employ a similar strategy when hiring consultants for individual tasks or campaigns. You may traditionally have a budget surplus in the spring heading into the quieter summer months. If you’ve had a task that you’ve wanted to get off your plate but haven’t had the time or resources to devote to it, such as cleaning up your database or moving to a new CRM system, use that predicted surplus to your advantage. Start your search for the perfect consultant or freelancer well in advance of the summer and you will be confident in knowing you’ve taken the time to find the perfect person to help your business.

2. Tap into current employee productivity metrics to forecast prospective employee performance

So you’ve read the resume back and forth and went through the interview process, which included two phone calls, a meeting for coffee, and two in-office conversations. You also checked references, and they cleared with flying colors. Yet after finishing the long and arduous process of vetting a prospective employee, you still don’t feel like you have a real grasp on what you can expect from him or her.

I don’t blame you. No amount of vetting can completely assure you that the interviewee you like will end up being the employee you need.

In such cases you can often turn to your current employees to better help gauge the performance of future ones. Larger companies will often use a quantifiable metric (e.g. the number of phone calls a customer service representative can take while maintaining a high quality score) and compile the average mean across all employees in the same position. When bringing on new employees into that same position, those larger companies can assume that the mean average of the new employees will be roughly the same as the current ones (after the onboarding and learning process).

You can apply a similar strategy to your small business. Say you own a retail store that currently has three sales clerks and you are looking to hire one more. A quantifiable metric you could use to gauge performance may be “how many times per week did a customer say X employee helped me?” By averaging out that number over the three sales clerks, you will have a better idea how a future clerk will perform.

Of course, with a smaller data set the chances of a new employee deviating from the mean are greater. But as a small business owner you also have the advantage of being able to go through a more personal interview process, hopefully offsetting that risk.

Even if your new hire does struggle, at least you will now have a quantifiable metric by which to measure their performance and progress.

3. Leverage data to strategically recruit different positions

Recruiting is often a game of supply and demand. It might be easier to find a cashier than a HTML developer, so you can plan on the time it takes to find a cashier to be less than to find your next computer whiz.

But the answer to exactly how much time it will require to find a new employee may be important for how you map out your business initiatives going forward. Thankfully, there is data available to schedule when to start recruiting and for how long.

First, take a hard look at your previous recruiting efforts. The difference in time between when new positions were first open to when they were filled can be handy in forecasting employee hiring. If you haven’t tracked this data, start doing it now and segment it based on position.

Additionally, there is a bevy of third-party data already available for businesses looking to add positions outside their usual hiring. Talent acquisition firm Manpower Group releases an annual study based on survey data looking at the hardest jobs to fill in both the U.S. and abroad. In 2014, the company found that skilled trade workers are the hardest position for American companies to fill. So if you’re looking for an engineer, I’d recommend you start looking now.

Bringing on a new employee is a fulfilling way to visualize your success as a business owner. Not only is your company requiring the skills of a new talent, you are also giving someone else a job and helping them pursue their own ambitions. And the more specific your hiring data is, the easier it will be to find the right employee at the right time.