Headcount Execution and Finance
Podcast Overview
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Eric Guidice: Head Count Experts, episode 13. Quick reintroduction, my name's Eric. I'm the founder of Head Count 365. I'm joined by my co-host, Chris Mannion, practitioner of some of the best head count learning courses in the game. And also, if you're into solving head count problems at your business today, he'll come in hands-on, solve it with you, for you, by either teaching you or doing it with you in-house and leaving behind some of the best methodologies, tools, et cetera, in the game. So if you're into software, Head Count 365 if you're into consulting, meander if you're into both, we'll come and do it as a squad. But we run head count experts which is continuing the recruiting capacity conversation and we're all about practically applying recruiting capacity and against your hiring demand in this episode. So did I get the intro right? How did I do?
Chris Mannion: No, that sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. If you want, if you want software, Headcount 365, if you want someone to come and do the job where you want to learn how to do it, come and see us at Meander. We have a new talent academy. Otherwise I think from the content that we produce, I think people are going to get a lot of value from hopefully all of the lessons that we walk through.
Eric Guidice: Yes. And Headcount 365, this podcast, some of Chris's work has been born from doing the headcount work inside of companies. So I used to work at Uber, at Birdscooters, at Clutter, Chris at Wayfair, and a number of different consulting engagements across VC and businesses between a hundred and five thousand employees. So there's a lot of different experience that we're coming in with. It's not just us, you know, founders coming with ideas that we had in business school. This is a real-life experience. So just a quick introduction of what we're doing today. So the last two episodes we were all about how to determine recruiting capacity at a macro level and looking at your business, how to then determine and distribute capacity at more of a line level. That idea and then today it's like, alright, how do we bring it all together and as a business apply it so that this kind of theory of recruiting capacity and the little's law of how much recs a recruiter should hold all comes into practice and that it feels good as you execute your plan. So we're about almost all the way through February. Everyone should have, you know, your January 1st hiring plan should be almost finished by now, which means you're responsible for not only producing all the hires for this year, but you're kind of building the plan. You're going to do your first QBR, which we'll cover a lot more next month. But you'll do all this work. But let's talk a little bit about what happens now? So you have your capacity plan, you have all the data that we talked about in the last, what's the first step in getting things practically applied in a role?
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think, you know, we're probably going to add this in March. I think by March, you're really starting to see how that plan that you made in December or January is really starting to play out. And so we did all the capacity model in work. So I think hopefully the listeners, if they forward sequentially, they'll have that capacity plan in place. They'll know how much recruiting capacity they need to deliver against the business goals. Now, the question is, can we actually deliver and what has changed since then? And so I like to think about this as like a supply and demand problem. So you think, you know, how much supply of talent are we going to bring into the business and what is the demand from the business to capture that supply? And you kind of have, you have to match both variables. If you have too much supply, not enough demand, you have unhappy candidates. If it's the other way around, you have unhappy hiring managers. So the kind of sweet spot is where they meet in the middle, where you have just enough capacity to make sure that all of the hiring that you need that's prioritized happens when you want it to happen. And that's really where I think we wanted to focus today is how do you actually match the forecast and the capacity, not just once a year when you're trying to figure out what happened, but actually on a rolling monthly basis to figure out, what happened in the last month? What's going to happen next month? How should we update our plans? Does that actually change the baseline assumptions that we made when we built our initial capacity model? And then how do we actually communicate this back to the business? So we'll go into the QBR process in a few episodes. But this is the precursor to the QBR. So what is happening in TA?
Eric Guidice: Yeah, the QBR is like a retrospective. So if you don't have a good idea of what your baseline or your target was, reporting on target and goal or actuals and target is a lot more difficult.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, and I think this is important because in every other part of the business, you're going to have this role in monthly forecast that's going to be adjusted based on how the business is performing. The sales team will have one, the marketing team will have one, the operations and supply chain team, if you have one, will kind of have this. Finance almost definitely will have this. So in HR, sometimes we're a little behind because we wait for information to come from the other departments. So actually the argument here is actually spinning this up yourself and having this real time view is going to give you more ammunition when you go into the conversations with those stakeholders and actually allow you to better map what's happening in real time to what the business is asking for. So that when you do have those kind of quick elevator conversations where the CMO says, hey, why don't I have my new director of marketing? We just posted the role last week. You can actually update them in real time and you kind of have the data to hand, which is how they communicate.
Eric Guidice: And doing this process in Q1 is always wild because Q4 and Q1 are the crazy quarters. Q2 and Q3 are like what everyone thinks all four quarters are like. So in Q4 you're wrapping up what last year was and it's like a rush to get everything in. Everyone's pressing your capacity. They're making sacrifices on things like experience just so they can spend the last of their budget and get it all done. Q1, you're managing the carryover of what you missed in Q4 and seeing if things can still stick. You're finalizing what this year will look like and it's kind of like those two quarters are a chaotic time for all companies. Of the hundreds of companies that I've seen, whether it was through consulting or as an internal, very few have this very polished crossover from year over year. And so you're starting from a point of a little bit of a chaotic mess. Whenever we go into a conversation like this, I always find it important to just establish what Q1 and Q4 are and then look at Q2 and Q3 separately as kind of like, what is status quo and then Q1 and Q4 are like, what happens during high stress times and what are you really capable of? So this is a little bit of kind of cheat code to setting up the way that you manage expectations. So on top of the work, we're going to talk a little bit about how to map your capacity demand in this episode. We're going to talk about how to proactively adjust the business demand or the responsibilities of the team to account for those variances that you're able to like proactively manage. We're going to talk about prioritization and how to use like the business's desire to do something as a way to like manage your work. And then we're going to talk about a way to change things and what's the process you build for change so that you can move from kind of like this reactive management of the plan to proactive management, right? That's what we're going to cover in this episode. But on top of like each of those five topics, it's also a little bit about how do you manage the, I don't want to say vibe, that's like too it's like not corporate, not professional, right? So like how do you manage the environment with which you're doing this work is like this context that Q1 you have all these extra data points. So what I always encourage people as we go through these five things is it's not like I told you so or what did you expect me to do when it's this crazy. It's about recognizing the factors of crazy and incorporating them into your model so that you have a better idea of what's predictable in the future. So we'll get into that but those five things, right? Like, let's kick it off with snapshot mapping. On Unicor Town, I'll flash it up on the screen, we do have a capacity demand snapshot, so you just load your headcount plan in and it will show you your capacity versus demand in kind of like a snapshot with like rough numbers. This is something that's not like a long term, you do it every once in a while, but what's your, when you do snapshot mapping, what's your, what are you looking for? What's important to you? How do you use this in the business so that people understand like, you know, what's possible from the recruiting side of things and what can finance expect from that recruiting performance?
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think the key point there is what are you comparing the snapshot against? And I think this is one of the dangers with the quarterly system. And if you're comparing quarter over quarter, then you're not really accounting for the seasonality and the variance that would potentially come from that. So you could look at, in my experience, Q4 and Q1 were the two quietest quarters. So you get to this point and you're at March, the recruiting team haven't been causing as many wrecks as they had on average in the last year. And so all of a sudden questions get asked, do you actually need the recruiting capacity that you said you needed when we planned the full year capacity plan a few months ago? Because so far, that capacity has not been met. But if you then start to compare year over year and comparing by quarter, you're not just saying what happened in Q1 of 2026 compared to 2025. You're saying what will happen in Q2 of 2026 versus Q2 of 2025. And the thing that I always saw happen was you would get to the end of Q1, bonuses would be paid out and the performance review process would have been completed. And so now you have voluntary attrition as people get their bonuses and then leave to go and do other roles. And you have involuntary as people that were on an improvement plan and then get managed out of the organization. So all of sudden you have this kind of double whammy effect of kind of outflow, which if you're looking year over year, you see this actually happens every year. And so you can start to account for that. And then Q3, you actually have the same thing because now other organizations that have gone through that same process where they've lost talent in Q2, kicked off new hiring processes and now they're hiring people in Q3 and they're probably hiring some of your best performers. And so you have this kind of variability over the year where Q4 and Q1, you get this kind of full sense of security of, actually not much is changing. Maybe we can pull down our capacity because that's going to save us some costs. But Q2 and Q3 then start to ramp up and all of sudden we're behind and it takes the rest of the year to kind of close that out. So I think as you're taking those snapshots, the entry point is going to be the key data point to get right. And I really argue compare year over year and then don't just look at the quarter that was, look at the quarter that's coming and that's going to allow you to better argue for the capacity that you need in order to run an effective hiring process.
Eric Guidice: Yeah, but before I started Headcount 365, the reason I started it essentially was this capacity demand snapshot, I would save a workbook every time period as a way like, you know, we saw on your head count tracker last week, the burndown chart, but the next kind of deep dive that I would get asked in the executive meeting is like, how are we pacing month over month? How are we pacing quarter over quarter as it relates to like what the planned was at the beginning. So you you're managing two things as a if you know in real speak as a TA leader you're managing what is the actual outcome but you're also managing your the perception of department performance in that executive meeting and so I've never been when I was internal. Maybe things have changed. I've never been in an executive meeting where, you know, a external influence over hiring that blocked hiring was like recognized by the person who caused it. So it's like, oh, I changed everything that I asked of you or I added a hundred backfills or whatever. That must be why you missed plan. It's always recruiting. You're kind of on defense. So these snapshots were like the low fidelity way of me saying, here's what you expected of me month one. Here's what I produce. here's the next snapshot, here's the next snapshot. So you're building these kind of ways to take a temperature in every interaction of what's expected and not and you're mapping the ability of your team to kind of meet that demand but the QBR or that business review or your performance review, whatever it is, is going to take a look at the history and the context within and that to me what was missing in spreadsheets was the idea that okay, we started with X, we're now at Y. What is all the context of how that change came to be? And was I even set up for success? How many of the requisitions were even possible to be filled? Or what is my true financial impact of doing my job well or not doing my job well? And it not only now helps our talent leaders kind of balance the relationship between capacity and demand, but also capacity and return on investment. So we're gonna, you you have a great intern program, we have a great recruiting experience program and you trash it so that you hire the salespeople on time, you now know that here's what you lost by killing a program, here's what you gained in sales revenue and you can now have that conversation with like the context. And so to me the snapshotting is the exercise that everyone should do. I don't think it happens enough in the industry but everyone should at least have at a periodic time, here's what we all understand is the situation and that's what a snapshot is to me. Am I missing anything?
Chris Mannion: No, I think that's right. Having that kind of... I really push for it monthly because you can start to see trends and you can start to marry up your expectations versus actuals. And you kind of get that early signal then. And then it means that you don't get put on the back foot when you have those exec meetings and fingers get pointed at recruiting because recruiting didn't deliver what was expected when in actuality they did deliver what was expected, but what was expected then changed before that kind of product was delivered and it would have been delivered on time. I think that's the kind of like key takeaway here is like having the data upfront in this snapshot is going to be key because it's going to give you more credibility to actually push back with data when when those kind of questions come up.
Eric Guidice: Right, and when you have the snapshot, what you're looking at is the relationship between what you can do and what's being asked and you can now move. This is the beginning of the shift from reactive to proactive. So when you're in a meeting and recruiting didn't meet the demand, you are now reacting to a thing that's already happened. You've missed a start date. You didn't have a hire. When you have a snapshot, a forward-looking snapshot of what's to come, you now can say, it looks like in a future month we have more demand than what our capacity can produce. And for some reason, like manufacturing or any other supply chain style field, there's a recognized constraint. We need 30 widgets to produce XYZ and we only have 28 widgets. You got to make up the difference. And in recruiting, you don't get that same luxury for some reason. Maybe it's a little less tangible. But being able to see the gap in the future means you can make a plan for it in the future. And this is kind of the first step of reputation management is getting everyone to agree on what capacity is, so you have to be accurate, and then what you do about it in the future. So using this snapshot to shift your future management, and to me that's three things. You can add a recruiter, you can fund a recruiter, or add someone on the recruiting team and spend the money there. You can repurpose someone who already works at the business or you can move start dates around and you can align you know if you have an overage in June and a deficit in July you can just shift some start dates around. So those are the ways that you can do it and then making a plan with the business on what you actually choose is totally separate. But what are you looking for in your headcount tracker, your burndown model? What are you looking to do with your managers and how do you get them to buy into this plan and agree to this idea that sacrifices to be made if there's enough capacity.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think having that forward-looking projection in a very easy to digest way, and I think we maybe covered it on one of our other episodes, but the kind of like snapshot of what does this actually look like and who are you sending it to, so that they understand some of the constraints. And I think it's that kind of monthly snapshot of, it's almost like an accounting of the head count. Like, where were you at the end of the previous month? How many new hires did you have? How much attrition did you have? Where did you land at the end of the month? And then how did that map to expectations or to goals? And you might have an expectation to grow or to reduce overall headcount, but kind of having that kind of clear flow, you can then start to like dissect, you know, by function and by team, where are we seeing unexpected challenges in, you higher attrition or lower hiring rates? And then as a TA leader, you can then take a step back and see how does the kind of like headcount map compared to the capacity map so that we can actually see how we actually are assigning capacity in the right areas. And then what is the root cause of why that gap has happened. And that's what I kind of like to see. Everyone, every leader I've worked with just likes that kind of simple one pager kind of Excel based table that they can look at and instantly know what's going on because it looks exactly like an accounting statement or a kind of a sales report or a kind of a marketing plan. And you can kind of very easily get by in there. But I think what's really helpful there is you kind of have this what happened in the month that was, but also you're starting to predict that forward and say more what will then happen by the end of the quarter and then by the end of the fiscal year. if we do nothing different. And that's where the narrative comes in. it's kind of the combination of that table of here's what's happened, here's what's going to happen, here's what we predict will happen by the end of the planning period. And then underneath, know, three bullet points of like, these are the top three concerns that we have. And it's easily digestible. That goes up to, know, often that when I've done these kinds of reports, they'll go up to the CEO and their executive committee, and then they'll make a decision. It's kind of for me to recommend or to to provide insight and for them to actually decide how they're to resolve that problem. Not for me to then push the CFO to stop reprioritizing his roles, but to actually have the CEO realize the impact that that's having on the overall headcount plan.
Eric Guidice: Yeah, you know what I like of your tool that you showed last week is the interview hours calculator for the hiring manager. I think it's a very simple concept for people to understand like what is capacity and get a certain level of buy-in from the team. I also think that, you know, the ability for you to as a TA leader like resource a hiring manager as a temp recruiter in some permissionable way into your systems. In Headcount 365 we allow you to assign capacity to different people for recruiting but that may require you to have them able to review applications in the ATS or whatever but the idea that you can then get buy-in by proving a gap is you know how we would get the hiring team to give us their additional resources if they're not going to either give us budget to hire on a TA team or you know want to come out of their budget for a temp recruiter. Another thing is, one of the main problems to solve in headcount is the idea of aligning the TA leader or the business to the financial goal of like, what is the actual gap? Right? So like, just like you and I know that the headcount demand or the hiring plan itself is pretty dynamic. So is the budget, right? The business as it grows, gets more revenue, signs customers, loses customers, gets funding, you know, priorities change within the financial space. There's slush funds of dollars that might be used for headcount sometimes or for something else. There's legal. So there's all this stuff that maybe dynamically changes the financial environment. So there's this other idea of like, if we're tracking to a target based on headcount, how are we getting the information from the finance team? So I think this is a good kind of pause in this snapshot of capacity demand and just highlight the idea that a really good relationship with your finance team about what it is the should measure up to is equally as important as building in the recruiting side of things. So like there have been times as a TA leader where I'm like, if we don't hire this, this is all the goals we're gonna meet. And it's like, the goals changed. So we don't actually, we don't need those. Those headcounts still exist but we don't necessarily, it's not as urgent as you had previously thought which is a good segue into the prioritization conversation. If you have too much demand for your capacity or the financial goals changed, your business needs to come together and do some prioritization stuff. So from your experience, what are the best practices about using a prioritization framework within a headcount planning process? using the snapshots.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think the kind of key place to start, we discussed before is the constraint. Like what is the kind of core constraint in your ability to hire? Is it the amount of funding that you're going to allocate to the recruiting team and that therefore defines the maximum capacity that that team is going to have? Is it the overall headcount cost to the organization? So it doesn't matter how many people you hire, you have to stay within a certain range month over month. so then there's trade-offs in that you can't hire someone until someone leaves the organization or is managed out or you do a dynamic resource allocation across the business. And so I think really understanding that constraint first is going to be key. And at that point, you can start to manage around that. the capacity question becomes quite interesting when you have a priority list of a hundred potential recs that you're going to hire over the year, you have the capacity to go back to Lill's law, whether you kind of agree or not that that's the right way to do it. But if it takes two months to higher and you have capacity to to manage to hire 10 rolls per month then you shouldn't really prioritize more than 20 wrecks at a time and because otherwise you're kind of over prioritized and maybe over allocating wrecks across across the team so let's assume that you take that approach. So out of those 100 recs, you've got your capacity for 20 that you can manage in a given time, which are the 20 that are going to be most critical to the business to sequence earlier on in the cycle. And so then you can go through that list of 100 and you can even start like top level, okay, with the executive team, what is the right distribution of these roles? We have 30 in sales, we have 20 in engineering, we have 30 in operations. These are all the recs that we have. What is the actual sequencing you want to do from the organization? How many recs are you going to give of that 20 to each of those functions? And then once you have that broken out, you have the prioritized list of your finance recs and sales recs and marketing recs. And then with the marketing leaders, you can then say, okay, you have three recs that you can prioritize right now. And we're not going to start working on a new rec until one of those has been filled. So which are the three recs you want to prioritize? You kind of give them the list, you give them that constraint and the onus is on them to define which ones are most critical to the business. think where it usually falls apart is then the question comes, well, what happens if someone leaves? Do we reprioritize that rec as a kind of must-fill? I've seen different approaches. I've seen approaches where you kind of instantly put a backfill at the top of the queue, but then that's going to bump everyone else down and maybe mean that you don't actually get to that three rec example. Now you have four recs to work. Maybe that fourth rec doesn't really get the level of attention that it should. And so the question is, do you then flex recruiting capacity if that's the case? But I having all those assumptions made upfront, starting with the constraints, breaking everything down, and then giving the leaders the tools to make those decisions, and then kind of working with them and keeping them updated on how things are progressing, I think is how I've seen it work most effectively. And without that plan in place, I think it can kind of fall apart pretty quickly, which is one of the reasons why I like Little's law, because it's kind of a defined number that you can actually throw out and it's based on kind of science. And maybe you actually have a kind of different perspective and you have more of a recload by recruiter, is similar approach, but it's kind of a different application. But think having that constraint upfront is gonna give you that kind of pathway to have that communication to that business leader.
Eric Guidice: I'm coming around on Little's Law as you use it for prioritization. I'll say that. When you use Little's Law for total recs per recruiter and you tell someone if they have a two-month time to fill and a three-month capacity, they should only have six recs, I don't know how many TA leaders give their recruiters six openings to work on, but if you're telling me they have six recs to prioritize, it becomes a little bit more what real life feels like. as we dive into each company's specific prioritization framework. I think there's this overarching best practices that make it actually work that I kind of want to touch on because it starts with the executive understanding of the context that you've set. So little's law is just our example that you and I go back and forth on. But the idea that there's credibility in what you've defined capacity or recload to be, if you don't have that first, no one is going to take any of the prioritization framework. that you have as credible and it will be a tremendously detrimental kind of blemish on your leadership record if you're putting constraints around people on a capacity or prioritization restriction that they don't even believe is real. So I think in order to produce something that is of credibility, you need to come with historical data, you need to have a capacity forecast, you need to have a snapshot of what the future looks like, you need an established framework for how you define the levels of priority and what it actually means and I can get into that as well as a way for people to kind of manipulate the capacity or supplement it without having to rely on this constraint. I think people will feel tremendously helpless if they have X amount of recs. They have goals, right? You're a sales leader. You have a goal that's on this open head count, but you only get one rec prioritized and I now have to choose. It's like, well, if I can't, what do I do if I can't do anything about it? So, you know, from my end, the whole point of talking about recruiting three episodes on this topic is the importance of how coming up with that information will then help you alleviate these kind of leadership issues down the road by building a credibility in the numbers that you have. But before I dive into prioritization, like my specific framework, I built it into headcount, but does that resonate? Like I don't know how many of those rooms you've been in where you try to put a constraint up and then the whole credibility of your thought process comes into question, but that's the first place I go when I hear about constraints.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think it's challenging because if you don't understand the... the recruiting process in the right depth. We actually cover this in the kind Dunning-Kruger example of like knowing a little bit about something makes you feel like an expert, but the more you know, the less of an expert you feel. So I actually think this is kind of critical when you're setting a constraint. You have to have the reason why those constraints exist. And it's like, if you're trying to do 20 different things at once, you're not really going to do any of them well. If you try and do five things at once, you've got more likelihood of actually like achieving the goals. And that's really the the English version of Little's Law. But think once you can describe why you're setting these constraints, it's less about, what we're trying to do is we're trying to push. the kind of TA team from being the kind of ticket taker who then gets blamed for everything to being the driver of good decisions and a collaborator on how to actually make an effective hiring process. And so if you can both agree upfront, this may be the hard part that you're kind of pointing out, you can both agree there is a constraint. We can't prioritize a hundred recs and hire all hundred at once. We have to prioritize 20. Then the question becomes, well, creatively, how can we actually maybe flex that 20 rec limit or how can we solve this problem where you have three reps that you can prioritize, but you actually need five critical hires this quarter? How do we bump up the capacity to get you those extra two hires? And maybe it's a contract recruiter. Maybe it's someone on the marketing team is seconded to recruit and to act as a sourcer for two months. There's like all these creative ideas, but they're grounded in data, which is based on the constraint. And as long you agree that the constraint exists, I think you can start being creative and sit together facing the problem. not sit across the table facing each other, trying to get each other to understand your point of view. And that's kind what I like about that approach. Definitely not without its challenges, but if you have the data, I think you can actually push back as long as the business leaders are actually data driven as well.
Eric Guidice: This is why I like your... This is why like the interview framework that you built for hiring managers, because it's very easy to not see somebody's job and then be like, just do more. And then you have this interview hours calculator. like, you could write code or you could interview engineers. I could interview your people or I could do these other interviews. Like, there's a limit and it's, you know. There's just a certain aspect of realness that you have to communicate in when you do the prioritization framework. there's a couple of small pieces of advisory that I give about prioritization, and I'll just list them out. One, the high priority role should be a percentage of your total capacity. If everything's a priority, nothing is. And so I always advise that you have some sort of limitation on what is the highest priority recs. Two, you should have a source of truth across the business. Every executive knows that this singular list is what is high priority because you will have the whispers of this is high priority added to the list anyway from someone to a direct recruiter. And because of the reporting relationship of an executive to a recruiter, they might not feel comfortable in pushing back. So you need a system of source of truth. Three, have a commitment that a highest priority makes. So in some cases, that's resource allocation. Highest priority gets sourcing, highest priority gets an agency. Or have a commit to the highest priority being filled on a certain date or filled within a time period that reflects the true time to fill of that record. So those are the minimum best practices of instituting a prioritization framework so that everyone's doing it in that same way. And then this will segue into our next kind of topic about building a system for changes, which is the number one thing that impacts your recruiting capacity over time. anything I missed on the prioritization side, any other best practice you would put in there and say, if you're going to run a prioritization framework, here's what you should do.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think the guardrails that you highlighted are kind of pretty key. know, it's like, if this, then that. So if you say this rule is now top priority. then which role becomes low priority? And it's empowering the recruiters to feel comfortable having those conversations because there is this source of truth. And I think that's where strong TA leadership is gonna be really key because they've then gotta go back and push the business on, well, we gave you three high priority recs. You said that you have five that are high priority. We actually need to de-prioritize two to make sure we can deliver. Which two do you wanna de-prioritize? And I think that the... Those conversations can get quite tricky, but if you have the process in place early on in the guardrails, I it becomes a little easier.
Eric Guidice: I think for... On paper, capacity versus demand in aggregate might get you more recruiters. I think if you have a good prioritization framework, that is grounds to get recruiter staffing dollars faster because the priority usually means something. There might be a certain revenue or production or we need this to hit a prioritization method that the business establishes in order to create something as a priority. to overrun your high priority capacity, that might be more grounds to get a recruiter over just general capacity demand, especially for those in February who are dealing with heavily front-loaded hiring plans right now, which I know is another symptom of annual headcount planning. But I think for any system that you use, one of the biggest things that you'll have to do is build the system for how things change. And this includes prioritization, right? So in Headcount 365, you can create an approval if something moves priority. And it could just be the talent leader, you just give them a little slack, little email like, hey, this one just moved in. And then it goes onto a screen of like, hey, here's all of them and you manage it just like that. But for all of your changes, not just priority, you need a way to say like previously approved headcount changes, how do those get then factored into my snapshot model? backfills, attrition, roles closing, how does that happen? Reforecast, how does that happen? So you need a, you know, if you're building these snapshots, you aren't going to incur change, you need to build a process for those changes. What have you seen, you what do you teach people to do as it relates to managing change to a headcount plan and what do you think are some ways that TA and finance can collaborate on, you know, system for the changes that the hiring teams or budget owners would create for headcount.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think we kind of covered this in a few of the courses I've done, but there's essentially a five-step process. And we've actually covered the first three steps in this conversation. So you start with that snapshot, that monthly headcount plan. So that's step one. Step two, the prioritization. Like which roles are actually prioritized? What is that master list that everyone's going to refer back to? Step three is actually proactive adjustment, which is kind of where we've kind of touched on. it's, given the priority list and given the capacity, how can we actually shift things around to make sure that the capacity that we are expecting actually meets the demand of the business. That's, do you shift start dates a little bit later? Do you pull certain things earlier? How do you sequence things in order to deliver against the business goals so that it's not just like a fixed capacity plan? I think the kind of final two steps, which we haven't really touched on yet is like, step four is actually how do you think about the types of changes that are coming? Are they business led changes? What assumptions change from when you initially built the capacity model? And then to your point, how do you then update the capacity? model to then request more capacity because you can quickly see the impact on the priority list of not filling those roles that are going to be revenue driving or product related or critical to the business in some way. And so that's how you kind of get that budget. And the fifth one is really that kind of review before you start the process again the following month or the following quarter of what does then the trend look like? And we looked at the burn down chart in the kind of last episode, but assume that we stay on this trend and we've updated our assumptions for demand, we've updated our assumptions for capacity, how does that trend line flow over the course of the year? Do we actually meet our headcount goals? Do we actually deliver on the hiring capacity? Or do we need to do something drastic and actually go back to our assumptions again and kind go around the loop? And that can happen very quickly.
Eric Guidice: Alright, say that again, say it again real fast. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. What is it?
Chris Mannion: So one, snapshot mapping. This is your monthly forecast and overview. Step two is your prioritization queue. How do you go through the priority list to make sure that you have capacity mapped to the highest priority tasks? Step three is proactive adjustment. Once you actually have that prioritization list, how do you sequence the recs to make sure that the right people are at the right time and that you're prioritizing appropriately? Step four is how do you then adjust for changes, mostly business led changes. So if something changes in the plan or revenue changes, how are you then adjusting the capacity plan and the forecast for that? Then step five is then mapping that all back to the burn down chart to actually see does that trend line over time meet the actual line that you want or do you have to then make adjustments again and go back through the five step loop.
Eric Guidice: And I think that's going to be really cool to cover in a future episode when we start talking about quarterly reporting, right? So like in the moment you're going to do these things to make your business decisions, but taking a pause in the future to look at how that happened and kind of like that macro economic view of like, what actually happened in capacity versus demand and what was the reason. That's a really good framework for not only operating today, but being able to report in the future so that everyone's built around this same kind of data source of truth or you know, the history of our head count is everyone believes the same story. That's cool.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I actually learned that the hard way. I've spent a lot of time going back and forth between five different spreadsheets before I realized this should actually become a loop, become a system and communicate it to everyone. And this is a process that we then follow. So I now teach that in our headcount course.
Eric Guidice: I love it. I think some important inputs for that to work is there has to be a mutual alignment between the key influences of this base set of data. So if the financial target is going to change, that needs to be communicated equally as important as if when the hiring manager communicate to change. And so if you're operating a capacity demand model without the context of the overall business goal or whatever the financial targets are, you're going to be operating from a place of what at best misalignment, but you need to be able to associate the motivation, the prioritization of what you're doing with the end stage. You can't be too gung-ho about hiring if the business stops caring about hiring or vice versa. And so having an input from the finance team about what the financial goals are, understanding the hiring manager's priorities as a business before it even comes into hiring, and then learning about the HR's changes. You're going to have comp cycles, bonus payouts, commission plans. You're going to have attrition happen. you're gonna have merit increases. There's all these different kind of like HR led influences on the capacity and demand, especially when you start to drive in internal transfers. And so by having all of that information into this singular data set so that you could walk through that five-step process, you're gonna be able to move from reacting to the business to then participating proactively in the conversation. ideally, before the plan is final, they're considering the opinion of an HRTA finance leader who manages the headcount process so that they know what's possible so they don't commit to some financial goal that then needs a reforecast again later.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, and I think that there's also an onus on as a leader, this is something you should be doing anyway. And I kind of learned this from experience of, if you're starting to see demand decrease, you know, we talked about how do you keep up with demand from the business, but if your demand starts to decrease and all of a sudden you need less recruiting capacity, there's organic ways to reduce it. Maybe you stop prioritizing backfills on your own team and you start to organically decrease the capacity of the recruiting team so that you don't come to a quarterly planning review and then realize that the team's massively overstaffed. and you have to make some difficult decisions about restructuring. I think there's kind of like a way that leaders could actually use this internally for themselves as well and make sure that they're always kind of managing to where the puck is going and not kind of just trying to hit the kind of goals from the last quarter.
Eric Guidice: I it. Yeah, I think I really like the way that this kind of topic of capacity and demand has kind of come together over the last three episodes. think building the plan and establishing your data set and then having a way to operate with this data for the first quarter is going to get a lot of people a certain operating cadence that will help them each QBR in the future, each we forecast and for every annual headcount plan. think next week what we're going to talk about is a little bit more about the data created by the plan. as folks are doing the different snapshots and comparing the changes and looking at the variance created by the business, there's new data points that are coming out. Whether you're using a software like one of ours or you're doing it on spreadsheets, there's some extra things that you could be tracking that will inform the business about what's to come in the future, again, moving from reactive to proactive. So we're going to cover a lot about some of the new data that comes out of this tool and then continue the conversation around how do they then take that data and give it back to the business so that it's not only useful for you and your capacity model, but also for the business and they plan for what's to come next as it relates to headcount. So great episode, really happy with the way that things are shaping up. I'm going to put some links down below for the headcount tracker for Chris's tool, the unicorn snapshot, and we'll flash some stuff up on the screen where necessary. But any closing thoughts on building the capacity demand map and the operational cadence of maintaining it.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think this is the critical step, but I think where the real value is going to come is what we're covering next is like, how do you then actually relate this back to the business and kind of get what you want and become the leader that businesses come to and not just a ticket taker. And I think this is going to be really key, really excited about kind of digging into those topics.
Eric Guidice: Yeah, same. I'm excited. Okay, another best episode ever and we're right at time. Stay tuned. We're going to have some cool guests coming in and some more interesting topics around the data that comes from Headcount. Stay tuned for another episode of the Headcount Experts
Headcount Plan Execution Best Practices
In episode 13 of Headcount Experts, Eric Guidice (Founder of Headcount 365) and Chris Mannion (Meander) discuss the practical application of recruiting capacity against hiring demand. While previous episodes focused on macro-level theory, this session addresses how to execute a hiring plan effectively on a rolling monthly basis. The hosts argue that TA leaders must treat talent as a supply-and-demand problem, ensuring they have just enough capacity to meet prioritized business goals without over-allocating resources. By implementing a systematic approach to "snapshot mapping" and prioritization, TA teams can shift from being "ticket takers" who are blamed for misses to strategic drivers of business decisions
Key Takeaways from Episode 13 of Headcount Experts
Five-Step Operational Loop
Snapshot Mapping: Create a monthly forecast and overview of the current headcount state.
Prioritization Queue: Map existing capacity to the highest priority tasks.
Proactive Adjustment: Sequence requisitions to ensure the right hires happen at the right time.
Adjust for Business Changes: Update the model based on revenue shifts or plan modifications.
Trend Mapping: Use burndown charts to see if the current trajectory meets year-end goals.
The Importance of Tracking Headcount Over Time
Headcount plans change with business needs. Tracking trends over time is a necessary process to track performance when business leaders change requirements mid-cycle. This is critical context for TA Leaders who typically manage to a static recruiting capacity.
Using Little Law for Headcount Prioritization
By defining a clear prioritization, such as a limit on how many roles can be prioritized at once, TA leaders force hiring managers to make trade-offs. These trade offs could be more active participation in the hiring process relative to their day to day work, or a comfort in reprioritization
The Impact of Seasonality on Headcount Outcomes
Q4 and Q1 are often chaotic due to budget rushes and carryover hiring, whereas Q2 and Q3 typically represent "status quo" operations. Comparing performance year-over-year by quarter helps account for voluntary and involuntary attrition cycles that occur after bonus payouts
What Listeners Get from this Episode
Recruiting success is not just about filling roles; it is about managing the perception and reality of department performance through data. By moving from a reactive stance, where you only explain why a hire was missed, to a proactive one where you forecast future capacity gaps, you gain the ability to request more resources or shift start dates before a failure occurs
To achieve this, TA leaders must build a "source of truth" that aligns Finance, HR, and Hiring Managers. When everyone agrees on the capacity constraints and the prioritization framework, the TA team is no longer a bottleneck but a strategic partner that helps the business navigate its most expensive and important asset: its people