Episode 14: Headcount Data is a New Dataset

Mar 9

Podcast Overview

Eric Guidice Headcount experts, another episode and this one's a good one because it's a little less planned than we normally do because we're talking about new data or how headcount is new data and we both have differing perspectives on it. I'm Eric Guidice, this is Chris Mannion, this is Headcount Experts. I lost count on the episode so we're just gonna call it the new best episode ever and dive right into it. What's your opener? What do you think about the headcount data set?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think what we're trying to get across here is a reframing of the way you think about the dataset that you've created. So think a lot of people go through this headcount planning process. You have this spreadsheet or slide deck potentially, and then that's the source of truth. And then that doesn't change for a year when in reality the actual plan does change. And so think what we're trying to push here is don't think about the headcount plan as a fixed point in time. Think about it as an ongoing dataset you have to manage along with all the different things that we're going to cover in this lesson about how to actually manage those different criteria of the data set.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I think that is true. By doing so, by that data set itself has a bunch of things in it for different teams that is extremely useful. So the whole reason I started my company, Headcount 365, is because I was doing consulting work. So one, I came up at Uber where there was a lot of information that was being pulled from the headcount data. So we had this meeting every month at 7 a.m. The whole recruiting team would come to an international call with the head of recruiting and we would say like how many jobs do you think we're going to fill this month? And at the end of the month, we'd do the same thing and we'd say, how many did we actually fill? And we would have this idea of like commits versus actuals. And then that was kind of the baseline for starting the recruiting conversation, but it came off of like, what is the demand and whether or not we're going to fill it. So like for me, that was the first kind of look into what's in this data set and why does this head of recruiting care about it and why is it so important? It was like the most important meeting so it just got me curious. I started learning all the different things and built a little playbook for myself that then became Unicorn Talent, which was a consulting firm, but now you can download these tools, right? A capacity demand forecast, a headcount plan, the QBR to report on it, which we'll talk about next month. And all that data was like a playbook that came from the headcount data set and then headcount 365 just automating it and finding more within all the little nuances of managing a live data set. But before I get into the specific pieces, I've written a bunch of articles on it, which I'm gonna pull from so it'll all be consolidated here. What do you mean by manage a whole new data set? What does it mean to have a living data set and how should people be thinking about that for 2026?
Chris Mannion Yeah, think if you think about how decisions get made right now on headcount data. So you have this plan. It might be once a year, it might be twice a year, it might be quarterly, it might be monthly if people are really aggressive. And then you have a narrative in addition to the plan. And then the plan plus the narrative of what's happened since the plan becomes the data that you make the decision on. And so the idea is everyone should know the narrative. And so that kind of is ongoing. And maybe it's, you know, have the plan in the spreadsheet, then you have your like monthly planning PowerPoint deck and then you have the meeting where that happens. I think you gave a good example about your experience at Uber. You're not creating a new PowerPoint every month and saying this is what's happened since we created this plan six months ago. You're updating the plan as a living breathing document in real time and the plan's never accurate. You know, if you create the plan on Friday and then someone resigns on Monday, Tuesday, the plan is out of date. So you have to go back and keep updating it. Otherwise, what happens is you're making decisions on stale data. We know how terrible that could be. And so you think about it as almost like a database. It's a Excel spreadsheet, but you're thinking about creating new entries on that spreadsheet, updating the things as soon as you get new information in, deleting things that are no longer relevant. And so it's that living, breathing document over time. It's not this kind of like one snapshot point that is then going to change and no one's going to know what's changed. It's that kind of single source of truth that everyone can go back to. And whether you do that in an Excel sheet or software like 365 or something else, having that thing that everyone can look to and say, okay, this is the point in time that we're at right now. And this is the decision I need to make. And so I'm making a decision based on the data that I have. And I'm confident that this data is accurate. And where we see it go wrong is when you make decisions on data that's not accurate or old or stale and then three months later try and figure out why you're well above or below where you expected your head count to be and I think that's the problem we're trying to solve here.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I rarely plug headcount 365 on here. think I'm more into sharing the knowledge, but to the point that the data is out of date over the weekend, that is one of the core things that we tried to solve. Like I think if you're a recruiting leader and you're trying to be credible in a meeting, if your data is not as, if someone who lost the person knows information that you don't, you kind of lose all of your credibility. So that is a problem that we're trying to solve. So when you have a direct connection to the HRIS, for that specific example, not only would we know when it was entered, largely there's a conversation happening with that employee and the manager earlier and we could even look at what the forecasted terms are looking like and bring those in and then map whether or not a backfill has been surfaced against this attrition. So we try to get the data correct. I think the process for management, like I consulted it a long time at Unicorn and I had, you know, feedback Friday and the headcount spreadsheet, I had the columns that I had for different changes and you can do it on spreadsheets. plenty of companies doing it today on spreadsheets. The question is like what is the cost not only of the time it takes to do that but of the data that's missing and that's kind of you know what my angle is on this conversation today is like just at the highest macro level we have this concept or I've brought this concept it's more accurate with headcount 365 but whatever the plan change rate right so how as a macro you have a hundred rolls and you ended the year with 120 rolls. So you have a 20 percent planned change rate and that's just kind of something that you could have in the back of your planning pocket as you look at what's being given to you every day. You can, you know, the specificity of tracking those changes is everything that I want to talk about today but it starts with this like overarching idea that plans do change. I think myself, my software company, my competitors, you, you're a consultant, the intern, everybody knows this is like not a secret. And it's just kind of like an accepted truth that it happens but it didn't feel like anyone was doing anything about it. So at a minimum, regardless of what your style is of managing a headcount data set or solving this problem, you should know about all the different changes and what they mean for your business and how to get in front of them so that you can be a little bit more proactive about managing this problem. Because it's like, bet my whole career on the idea that this data set helps you do better in your job, whether you're an FP&A person trying to make it more accurate forecast or you're a recruiting leader trying to get credibility about meeting demand or you're a hiring manager trying to drive accountability for something going on in your team, this is all the stuff that should matter. But yeah, do you think about global changes? Like what is your, how do you communicate either to your customers or when you're an internal, the idea of change?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think just starting from that kind of setup that you currently have. And you touched on a good point there. It doesn't matter what software you have or what tools you have. There's kind of like this whole framework that you need. And I kind of think of it as like three buckets that are overlapping or three, the Venn diagram of you need people, product and process. And if you invest more in one, it should make the other two easier. So if you invest in a really good product, it means you shouldn't have to have as much people time spent and your process can be simpler because it should be managed by that product. But if you have really basic product, if you're doing everything from spreadsheets, you have to make sure your people are trained. You have to make sure the process is in place. And so it's kind of like, don't know if it's a Venn diagram or one of those kind of trade-off triangles or the frameworks there. I think when we see people that are doing it with the free tools that you have available, the Excel spreadsheets or whatever, there's kind of four main root causes of where this normally falls apart. One is they're not defining the schema correctly.
Eric Guidice I like it.
Chris Mannion Two is they don't have a definition for how fresh the data should be. Three is no one is actually the named owner of this process. And then four, there's no versioning control. And so with a schema, you can have HR and finance and the business using different terminology. Like everything on the spreadsheet should be the same terminology. If you don't have a freshness standard, you don't know if this was updated on Friday or if it was updated two months ago. Like there should be a line in the sand of this is when this sheet is going to be updated each week or each month. And so we have all our data accurate as of this date. And everyone understands that if you look at something three days later, it may be different, but because we know we're updating it frequently, then we can at least trust the data that we have. I think if you don't have a clear owner, it's that thing of everyone uses the data, no one actually owns it. So if something's wrong, no one necessarily is going to step up and say, okay, I'm going to take ownership of this. So having that single point of contact, which I think we're going to talk about the talentful report a little bit later, but the ownership of that spirit can really push HR to own that. I'm surprised that only 11 percent of organizations actually have HR own this process. But given that they're the ones who manage headcount, essentially, I think there's a strong argument there. And then the version in control, if you are constantly overwriting the data, and you see this all the time with the business build, within PowerPoint decks and that's how they manage their head count rather than this kind of like line by line, this is what's changed. And to your point about variance, you can't actually go back and look at the variance if you don't have the audit trail. And so rather than overriding the data each month, have this kind of like month to month view or week to week view if you're moving quickly, so you can see where things are changing and actually go back and diagnose what causes the problems, but also just feel a little bit more confident. think those four things together, are really solid and if you have a tool that can do that for you, that's great. If you don't, you have to get that process right and you have to make sure that people are bought in in order to support that.
Eric Guidice I love the idea of a agreed upon version or what did you call it, a freshness standard or a freshness date, right? That to me is, I think if people implemented that is probably going to save a lot more headaches than almost every, like that to me is the most important thing because there's only, you're managing the expectation especially during conflict of like what someone thinks should be happening and so if you constantly have to be as up-to-date as the executive or the owner for every headcount and you're working off of a spreadsheet, that's extremely difficult. I think with Headcount 365 we have tried to push the freshness date from being a what is how the business, does the business operate off a freshness date? We've kind of gotten, we were able to eliminate that. The new freshness date is in the FP&A tool. There are scenarios that are what happens to the business and do I release headcount as a function of that. like in every, there's the front end of the business, which is here's what I have today and what I want to happen. But there's this, there are plans behind the plan that live in an FP&A tool, whether that's a spreadsheet or a system. That's like the scenarios of do we close a deal? Do we get fundraising? Do we expand this product? And there's a second data set of headcount that is the goal and the target to goal. And every so often, sometimes this is twice a year, sometimes four times a year, and it could be more ad hoc, the finance team is changing that target and asking the business to kind of re-forecast what's going on. And so, you know, that is the updated freshness date or I think that's the finance freshness date but I this is the first this is the first I've heard someone kind of codify the idea that your peer set as if you're a head of HR or on the executive team is agreeing to the idea that the Friday update or the Monday update that's the closest to the source of truth that we have. So that to me that does the standout of those four things. Say those four things again it's a
Chris Mannion Yeah, so there's the schema, the freshness standard, there's the named owner of the process, and then there's the version in control.
Eric Guidice Okay, so on the versioning side, you said something super interesting that I think there's a lot more overlap here than when we first started the recording of what you're doing to manage the change in version or why the change in version happened is the new data set that I'm talking about, right? So that could be down at an individual requisition. So a requisition changed a salary, a level, a location, a title. Those have downstream effects on the business. So if you have a large percentage of your roles changing the, like let's call it organizational impact, you have an HR problem, right? So if the most common thing in smaller companies or scale-ups is that new executives try to hire larger titles than they were originally given, therefore increasing the cost, but that might create like org impacts and management ratio issues down the road. So there's this idea of individual requisition change that might impact the. It's going to create an impact to the business that is bigger than any individual change. A nice thing that I tried to infuse whether it was on spreadsheets or more automated now with headcount 365 is what is the timing of that change? If the timing of that change is happening during the offer versus during, you know, I just got this headcount and I want to just do a little reshuffling of my numbers at the beginning of just getting my plan, then those are two, you're saying two different things about that hiring manager. And this is what I'm talking about, about data coming specifically from the headcount plan, because if you know, have good head count hygiene and you have like a unique ID for every head that's in your business, a chair or a position or a finance ID, whatever it is, and you can track the change that individual requisition, you now have information that you couldn't pull from anywhere else because that might've changed before it went into the ATS. It might've lived in the finance system, but they don't really track levels. So that to me is like one of the core things that come strictly from headcount. What other changes when you do your month over month because a few episodes ago for those who didn't watch Chris kind of showed not only his course on how to manage headcount but showed a month over month tracker that he uses that includes a burndown chart which I'll flash on the screen now. It includes a burndown chart to just show your progress but you know when you're looking at this month over month that you put together, what are you trying to extract from the changes? Like what are you looking for when you see that burn down chart flatten out or roles get added etc etc? What are you looking at?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think in that case, you're looking for anomalies, right? You're trying to figure out did something different happen to what we expected? And that's why the audit trail, the month over month view is really important because last month we said, okay, based on what we know now, we're projecting by the end of next month, this is how much head count we're going to have. And if you have about that head count, then things are fine. If it's wildly off, then you can start to ask questions. But I think where it's really helpful is when you're really tied into the finance team, then you can also say, okay, well, we hit our head count goals. were at the expected total number. how does that actually relate to the overall headcount cost? And what are you seeing in the P&L? And then they can actually pull the data together and say, well, we actually budgeted for this amount, but we found that we're over. So actually having that ability to your point to go back and then look at, okay, what changed with the requisitions? Did we approve a requisition for a junior role? And then that was up level to a senior role. Did we actually bypass the roles completely and hire a bunch of contractors that maybe don't go on the headcount list because we're not defining them as FTE, but they do hit the books. And so that's actually gonna add an increase to the overall headcount costs. And it's those nuances that I think really compound and make a difference over the course of a fiscal year. And so that's where finance are really, really interested in it. But if you don't have that data to start with and you can rule out all of the stuff and say, well, no, we hit our hiring goals. The attrition was as expected. the org structure is as designed, you can kind of rule that out immediately and not have to then build that whole org chart up yourself. You can then go and figure out where are these extra costs coming from and very quickly you can narrow it down. generally you'll see something like a rec was approved when it shouldn't have been approved or there was a stay bonus given to an individual who was high priority and none of these things are bad. It's just if you don't track them, that's when you get headcount going wildly out of control. And in that case, when you're a headcount cost constrained environment as a lot of companies are right now. If you do make these decisions to up level a role or issue a stay bonus or an override pay increase for a key individual, then you can actually say, well, if we're adding costs there, where can we take costs for our budget for the rest of the year out of it by maybe delaying some roles, delaying hiring, and maybe thinking about how we're going to kind of structure the team moving forward. And I think having that real time discussion monthly rather than twice a year when the board says you're well over your head count and now you have to actually do a whole project on how you're going to restructure the organization to hit the goal. I think it's really key and it gives you a more sustainability as an organization over time.
Eric Guidice Yeah, the kind of categories, I'll call it five or six categories. We'll count live. But the most important thing I think people could take away from a headcount data set are these different categories of data. So the first is kind of the plan change rates, like what happens to the plan. The second is HR risk. So you thought the org was going to look one way, and this is what it actually looks like. The next is recruiting production, which is what could the recruiting team produce versus what did they actually produce in what order and what priority, in what speed. The next is the finance budget. So what did we think we were going to spend versus what did we actually spend? And the last is of hiring manager effectiveness. So you look at the rate of changes from hiring managers and whether or not what they had planned to come through actually did happen. And you could look at kind of different parts of the business and you could take from the headcount data set the variance. So what did we think was gonna happen? What actually happened? And then kind of dive into what is the source of that change? What was the impact of that change? Whether it was on budget, on recruiting, on HR. And then you could start to plan for how these things might impact a future workforce plan. So this is kind of like one of the more difficult sales points, think it's whenever I'm sell the software, people are like, I need a single source of truth and I would like to know the budget and I want to know what my org chart is, right? Like these are why people buy it today. To varying degrees of success, I'm able to show people like how your future workforce plan is impacted so that, you know, last year you thought you were going to hire 100 and you hired 150. Now next year you could get a little bit closer to that 150 target without staffing your recruiting team to 100 or planning for hiring managers to interview 100 people when it's 150. So there's just a lot of information that I think comes through and categorically it helps every team so long as that data is correct, everyone understands the data and you're really tracking the variance from what you thought was gonna happen to what actually did happen. And I'm sure there's a whole host of metrics within there that I could probably spend hours on, but that's generally what I look at when I think about headcount data as its own source of information.
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think kind of building on that. there's the, there's like two ways that I talk at it. There's the backwards, like accounting, this is what happened. And having all that data is really important because you have to explain to finance, to the business, to the CEO sometimes why you are the way you are overall with headcount. But I think it's also good to look forward and say, okay, we know that things are going to change, but what is the process for change? And how do we think about when we have this headcount plan in place, if we do need to change a rec or we do need to change goals, who is actually responsible for doing that? And how do we ensure that that stays updated? And so I think having that discussion internally is really key. There's like five areas that I've identified in the kind of prep that I think are really important to take a look at. I'd be curious to see if you agree or if there's any more that I've kind of missed out. But there's the kind of record creation actually who is responsible for adding to the head count list and making sure that the HRIS is talking to the spreadsheet. think whoever's running HR ops is responsible for that even if they're not manually inputting it. There's a change approval CHRO is going to make sure that if something's going to change then they're in the loop and ensuring that they kind of approve that that change is going to happen. There's the conflict resolution. Okay, if the head count data and the FP&A data don't match up, who's responsible? I think the CFO probably cares about that the most and can probably drive the right engagement in order to get behind that. There's finance publication. Does the headcount cost actually track directly to the general ledger for the finance team when they're reporting out to the board? And at what stage is that actually going to report it? What's the cutoff date given that we know that headcount is a dynamic metric, but we know we're going to change it over time. And then finally, goes into control of like, how do we stay on top of the headcount data and make sure that we always have the latest version for decisions and whoever is running People Analytics, which is probably in mid-size organizations, the same person who's running HR operations, but kind of staying on top of that. you really have like two, three, four people who are responsible and kind of people within their teams who are kind of running. So running that back, Record Creation: HR Ops, Change Approval is the CHRO, Conflict Resolution if they don't match is the CFO, making sure that the Headcount data reflects the general ledger is the CFO, and then version control of the data itself is whoever's running People Analytics, which is probably the HR Ops person. Agree or disagree on that list?
Eric Guidice I think before even going into that, one of the big benefits of having a process in headcount in the first place is that you, whether you use spreadsheet or system, you're going to have a context of how many changes are happening. So all five of those things happen. That's just part of headcount. But I think the most interesting thing that I saw, even as someone who is in the game, is when I made Headcount 365, we have a change log for every requisition. it's for SOCS compliance. You have to show different changes. because we did it, we were actually able to quantify per thousand requisitions, how many changes actually happened to the requisition. It's thousands of changes. And I think when you have those owners, you're like, I don't think people within companies understand how much change is actually happening because there is no record of it. So when you're going to get all five of those people bought into this process of change, the idea that there's sometimes two to 3,000 changes per thousand requisitions that are impacting the business, title change, salary change, start date change, currency conversions, there's all this stuff that's just happening. Because I think people, here's why I say people do get it. Finance teams have slush funds. I don't know if you've experienced this. you been brought into what slush fund? And this is something that's really become prevalent as I've sold headcount 365 more and more is like learning, like I'm trying to sell a software that's, you know, less than a hundred grand to a company to try to capture five, six, seven hundred grand of OPEX variance but they're like, we're okay with three hundred grand of variance and I'm trying to find the person who cares that you could get that three hundred back and it's less people than I thought. But that's what I am saying, I think people get it. I just think up until now there's just this idea of like let's just hold you know three percent of OPEX to the side and we'll be even. You know we'll tell the board that we're X, but we already know secretly there's Y. And if we have this extra money, then we just look good and that's fine. So I think like, you know, yes, there's an owner, but at the same time, I think that owner's already wise to the idea that variance happens and has this other process. think like that's what we're attempting to disrupt. And you see people do with like things like expense management. They're like, get down to a four digit number of variance and be like, we spent all this money on this software so we could capture this. And I'm like, there's 750 in that. So there's like a million dollars in OpEx variance from Headcount. Do you guys want to do that? So anyway, I think they're wise to it. I think you're right though with the four owners. But I think it's more collaborative in terms of like a committee, right? I think the business kind of says what is acceptable. And what's weird about it is it's not necessarily like a defined culture. think one team does something and people work around it and over the course of time as the plan change rate varies year to year, there's this natural evolution about how a company like resolves these issues. But I don't think that there's like, you know, I'd be hard pressed to find a company that has like very defined owners where they're actually held accountable to it. They might just be like committee champions. You know, it's like PTA for headcount. That's a good analogy.
Chris Mannion I think the way I like to think of it is who's going to feel the pain if this is wrong? And in a board meeting, if the headcount data is wrong, the CHRO is going to get it from the board. If the headcount cost is wrong, then that's where I think the challenge comes in because the CFO is probably going to look at CHRO, they're going to look back. And then HR Ops Lead is probably the one who's going to feel the pain from that discussion regardless. I think it's who's responsible, who's going to feel the pain, and then who's actually going to be motivated to build that committee. The operations of this don't happen at the C-level. They happen much lower where the people who are actually working in the spreadsheet and figuring out why the delta is there are able to actually solve that without that mess and chaos going up to the board. I think having the executive sponsors, maybe a different way of phrasing it, but I think the owner of this metric is the CHRO or is the CFO and the people that actually run it are someone in FP&A, someone in HR ops, someone on TA, because they're the people that have the day-to-day ability to make things move. But also they're the ones who would also feel the pain when it's wrong, because if they over hire, then the TA team has to then kind of explain themselves. So actually having that clean data set is going to be important to them.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I think for scale ups the board meeting is like you're not hiring fast enough or you're spending too much on the budget that we gave you and that could be cash or equity. For more mature companies you're looking at I would say attrition rates or production rates and you're trying to figure out like how to unlock but the idea that someone that that's the buffer that I think is kind of built into executive operations today that you know. I'm trying to chip into as far as like, wouldn't it be nicer if you were accurate, if you could spend that money depending on how tight the wallet is. Like if every dollar matters, it becomes more of a need. But if you're like, we're kind of cash rich. it doesn't, you you kind of get used to that, you get used to that process. But I think it's a good, you know, kind of transition into we, the talentful head count and workforce planning report came out. I'll I don't know if I could show it, but I'll put the advertisement for you to go download it. They ask you to sign up. So as a unicorn talent, give me your info before you download my stuff. Respect for the game. So I will put the link to go get it yourself. But generally, what are your takeaways from that report? Like, it's always good to see other communities bringing this stuff to the forefront and doing the surveys, et cetera. But anything that stood out to you, anything that was of interest?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think it actually reinforced a lot of the things we've been talking about for the last six months, which is really nice to see. Sometimes I feel like we have our perspective and it's interesting to see that perspective echoed elsewhere. I think there are five things that I think stood out to me. One is the talk about moving from annual planning to monthly planning. Two is ownership of the Headcount plan seems to still be a problem. That's no surprise. Three is that most teams are actually mid-transformation right now. So we're actually going through actually how do we get to a more structured process. Four is tech is really where a lot of the kind of changes are happening. That industry has always been the one that's changing the most. then five, what I'm excited about is quality of hire or time to productivity is the key metric that senior leaders are tracking. I've been raked over the coals on LinkedIn with my posts about quality of hire. So it's kind of reinforcing to see that actually the leadership team care about quality of hire, even if within TA and people we can't define it accurately, I think it's still an important metric. So there are my five key takeaways and I'm excited to dig into those with you.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I, you know, I think, I'm curious to know, I actually haven't followed, I read them, but I didn't see what the aftermath of it was. It's like a generally accepted term. People get what it is, is what makes it a very difficult metric because it's like, how good is the person that I hired? I think for analytics folks, it's difficult to kind of bring that together. Making it a metric kind of takes away the things that are difficult. And I actually wrote something similar on LinkedIn this past week called the talent, like what is a talent engineer? And this is kind of like almost directionally where I'm taking the headcount product as well is like to produce a quality of hire metric, you need information and sensitive information from many different places that you don't have access to. So you see people do things like it's popular because you're trying to value your work to an executive. So an executive is like, if you're trying to move away from being an order taker of I hire five people because you told me to hire five people and you want to say the five people that I hired based on my network and my screening ability have actually added value, you want to be able to do that. But to make it a metric, you have to say tenure or speed to productivity measured by sales might be like quota attainment or whatever. But you might also want to know if they're a culture fit. good luck on figuring what that means or whether or not they are on a nine box of high potential or if they've participated in a volunteer program. So there's all this data that, no surprise, I'm sure AI is going to figure its way out, but the talent engineer or the engineer that is now going to have access to put together a metric like this, one, think the metric is just going to be whatever a company wants it to be based on what the end story that the executives want to tell and what data you have access to. So I think now that AI is able to take in these large data sets and kind of pattern match, you might be able to tell a lot more than trying to parse together these disparate systems of ATS, HRIS, performance management, contractor management, whatever it is, right? And I think you're not going to see it go away. It's just one of those, you get no reward as a person trying to explain what it is or how to measure it or why it's important because it's the subjectivity of how you put it together relative to what your company is trying to achieve and everyone's got a voice on LinkedIn or so good on you for making the attempt. I've stayed away from it for a myriad of reasons but it's no surprise that it's popular because that's what execs want to see. there was like a run led by this, like the Zapier team. think they just put out a new podcast to the head of TA from Zapier. But they were like really pushing the concept of talent density. It's like same thing, right? Like how good is it? And you know, it'll come to fruition, but I don't think we're ever going to see a standardized quality of hire metric, but I'm unsurprised that it's in there. So that's my take. don't know if that's anything more than ramblings of a career TA person, how'd you get hit? What happened to you?
Chris Mannion Yeah, so it stems from something I did when back at Wayfair, I was responsible for rolling out the OKRs, objectives and key results for the organization. So one of the objectives was the kind of quality of the TA function as a whole. Like, how do we measure the quality of what we do as a function? And there's kind of the big one is, are we actually helping the organization to hire the right people? And the way I thought about it was, if we have, you have time, you have cost and you have quality. think there are three metrics. were other things as well we threw in there, but a good OKR, you have to pick three results that you're going to track. so we, know, time to hire, cost to hire, like everyone agrees with that. Quality of hire was something that, at least in our organization, wasn't as controversial. But when I pushed it out to LinkedIn, the recruiters would have a quality of hire metric attached to their productivity scores. We've got a lot of pushback. And I think the argument is the recruiters can't actually control what happens post-hire. They can't even necessarily influence the hiring decision. And I think I come from a slightly different angle. I have this hypothesis that over time, recruiters are actually going to be more consultants. They're not, to your point, they're not order takers. The best recruiters are actually advisors and consultants that sit on the shoulder of the hiring manager and make sure they make the best hiring decisions. You can't always control what happens, but you can influence in a way that would improve. And my point is not to necessarily set quality of higher goals for every recruiter individually, but as an organization, we can look at, know, of the people we hire, what is their score at a 90 day review and how many of those people are still here at 12 months. Like do very simple metrics and kind of create an aggregate score of those two things and then see over time are we making better hiring decisions. And from there you can see if there are certain functions that are not making good hiring decisions, you can actually start to trace back and figure out why is that happening? Is it because the hiring managers are making snap decisions on going to offer? Is it because we're not actually sourcing the right people? Where is the problem? But kind of going back to where we started the conversation with the data, if there's no owner of the data, then change doesn't happen. And my argument is that the team that could have the most influence on this because they look across the whole organization is talent acquisition. And I recognize it's probably a controversial point. I get a lot of pushback on that, but I'm still a big believer in actually having one owner. And if the TA team is going to be supporting the business in the best possible way, then they should have control or influence over the quality of the product that they're providing, which is ultimately the hiring service. So that's my soapbox piece. I haven't changed anything in like seven years, but I...
Eric Guidice I look, I agree. Here's my real life take. This is a hot take. I don't think anyone in the broad scheme of like what a company is doing cares about it enough for it to actually move from theory to actuality. Here's why I say that. If someone doesn't work out, right? The reason you could have done your job perfect as a TA person but been constrained by something like the manager, because I've done this a million times as an external search person, is like, I want these five qualifications that equal 150k, your budget's 120k. So you're making some type of compromise on the person based on the budget. Or second, you intake a set of competencies that you nailed during the interview, but the job changes. you could draw correlate. The data is there to say, I made this intake session. We had these competencies on the scorecard. You hit this certain amount. During the job, the competencies were different as per your job description that's entered in the HRIS. You could do all of this. This is where I think, if AI gets it right, then you can look at all this information. You can start to draw these large-scale inferences from it. But for most companies, the volume that they hire for the impact that the difference actually is, is like, well, we already have an accepted attrition rate. So unless your attrition rate's like crazy, which I just talked to a prospect this week where their attrition rate was 50 percent this year, maybe they need a little analysis. But for most companies, they've already built in that there's 10 percent attrition. you're going to have a nine box that has bottom 10 or bottom 20 percent. It's like the difference that this actually does is significant. However, is it worth the cost of producing the information? Whether it's like how you know before AI interview notes, good luck getting all the feedback in the system or you know before AI, good luck getting the information about the HR job description lined up with the job description of your job librarian. It's like, what does a level mean and what are the competencies? You have to feed all this data in and then get it. And so for an individual TA person or a people analytics person, gotta like, you gotta have buy-in, you have to have like the magic scenario where like everyone cares, you personally have buy-in, your data is correct, and then you could draw these inferences that are gonna make a meaningful impact that everyone like cares to listen. So it's like, I'm not discounting. Again, this is why I don't write on the topic. I'm not going on. Although, you know, I'll make a blog post out of this thing. Good luck if I keep this in. But the idea that you're gonna have people that thing happen and then people care and then it make a difference is. That's for AI. And at that point, they're probably gonna be evaluating other robots. I don't know. Anyway, I think back to the talentful stuff, I do agree that the quality of hire is gonna be a thing. Someone's gonna have to figure it out. I know Ashby's making an attempt. I see different articles from different practitioners. I'd be curious to know how they work. Like, I'd be curious to know if you went to the top five people talking quality of hire and you went to their executive, you'd like, hey, how's the quality of hire thing going? And they'd be like, hey, here's what it did for me. I'd be surprised if that was an outcome. But I'm curious, that's a task for another life.
Chris Mannion Well, I will argue when we implemented that, quality of hire went up. So we tracked it, we reported it to the CEO and the exec team and quality of hire went up. And that was because people started to care about it. It was a unique culture where the TA team had a very close connection with the business. We had that kind of mutual respect. it's a lot of the things that we're arguing about on this podcast is actually the seat at the table, bringing data, having productive conversations, not kind of being at the whims of whatever the business wants to do. And so I think I came into talent with that kind of perspective. That was my training ground. And before that I was in the business and in the military. So I probably have a different background and perspective from a lot of people. But where I've seen this work well, you decrease first year attrition, you improve 90 day hiring performance. And what that means is that ultimately the TA team has less to do, because they're not rehiring people over and over again. And so they can become more effective over time. that's, I don't want to over talk about quality of hire because it's a polarized topic.
Eric Guidice It's where the conversation went. I like this episode because it's the most freestyle that we've been. You know, we try to come with topics that correlate to like where folks are in the year so that it's generally relevant. So hoping that this, we'll see what it does. But I like having these more freestyle conversations sometimes just because it gets us out of a shell of like we have this thing that we're talking about versus, you know, we're just kind of commentary on what are the goings on? But a company like Wayfair, there are these, for folks coming from the larger companies that have infrastructure and are looking for kind of like post-scale optimization to try to extract every dollar for shareholders, this is a, I think the main idea you and I are trying to communicate is like, there's a decent amount of money to be had, decent amount of value to be had if you look at the headcount data and you look at the recruiting data and the FP&A plan and you try to bring this into a story that you could really drive like a lot of productivity once you start to scale it. Less interviews for hiring managers, less recruiters because you have less attrition, better quality, better top of funnel because people are happy to be there. There's a lot of different things that all then correlate to less OPEX, less slush fund, less and it does add up to significant dollars especially on a base of you know five ten thousand people and so I think a success in my world if I could say I influenced the headcount space in a positive way it's taking what works at ten thousand and if you wouldn't have started until you were nine thousand or maybe eight thousand now you're starting to see it kind of cascade down you take these principles that work at places that have the time and energy to invest in this type of stuff and you could bring it to a scale up, you're creating value, you're making a person who is leading a team at those smaller companies a little bit more effective and hopefully it enhances their career or adds a little bit more value to the space from our direction, which is ultimately, that's ultimately the goal here. I came from TA and not a lot of people are, I would say they don't hold TA to the same standard as maybe some other departments and I want to change that because there's a lot of value that we could add. That's another best episode ever and we're kind of close to time as well. I don't know what this blog post is going to look at. I'm going have to see how we do it, but we covered a lot of things. I'll put a link to the Talentful report in the description. I'll put some links to some of the specific metrics that I've kind of pulled from the headcount data set. Next week we're going to be talking about how to organize some of this data and use it to communicate at regular intervals, whether it's a weekly update, a monthly email, a quarterly business review, a board meeting. So now that you have your recruits, you spent three weeks doing recruiting capacity and setting up the plan and now we know a little bit of the data that comes from it, let's start to talk about how you organize this data and give it back to your business. So stay tuned for another, probably best episode ever next week, but for now, signing off with the headcount experts.

Hidden Data Created from Tracking Headcount Variance

Headcount plans create new data from all of the change created from execution. Finance changes targets, hiring managers change team structures, and recruiting hits or misses targets. When using a system to track headcount, you're able to extract insights from this variance that helps you hit targets today, and build more accurate plans for the future. By moving away from static spreadsheets that become obsolete the moment a resignation is submitted, organizations can treat headcount as a living, breathing database that reflects the real-time state of the business.

Key Takeaways from Episode 14 of the Headcount Experts

The Four Pillars of Headcount Data Integrity

To manage headcount as a living data set, organizations must implement four specific standards:

Schema Definition: Ensuring HR, Finance, and Business leaders use identical terminology for roles, levels, and departments.
Freshness Standards: Establishing a "line in the sand" for data updates (e.g., every Friday) so stakeholders know exactly how current the information is before making decisions.
Named Ownership: Moving away from "management by committee" to specific owners—typically HR Ops or People Analytics—who are accountable for data accuracy.
Versioning and Audit Trails: Instead of overwriting data, maintaining a month-over-month view to track variances and diagnose why the plan changed.

Quantify the Value of the Headcount Plan Change Rate

The "Plan Change Rate" is a macro-metric that measures the delta between the initial plan and the year-end reality. With thousands of changes occurring per thousand requisitions, ranging from title shifts to currency conversions, tracking these nuances is critical. When companies ignore these changes, they often default to "slush funds" or accepted variances in OpEx, sometimes hiding millions of dollars in misallocated resources.

Debating Quality of Hire

Senior leadership is increasingly prioritizing quality of hire and time-to-productivity over simple hiring volume. While controversial, the podcast argues that Talent Acquisition must act as a consultant rather than an order-taker, influencing hiring decisions to decrease first-year attrition and improve long-term organizational health.

What you get from Listening to Episode 14 of Headcount Experts

Listening to this episode provides a technical understanding of the unique data generated through headcount plan variance tracking. You will learn how to quantify the "Plan Change Rate" and identify the root causes of data decay within your organization. By mastering these metrics, you gain the ability to eliminate operational "slush funds," drive accountability across hiring managers, and provide Finance with a high-fidelity forecast that standard spreadsheets cannot produce. Implementing this "living data set" framework allows you to move from being a reactive order-taker to a strategic consultant, providing the measurable business impact necessary to advance your career into senior Talent Acquisition or People Operations leadership.

Eric Guidice