Episode 1: Preparing for Q4 Headcount Planning
Podcast Overview
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Eric Guidice: Season one, episode one of Headcount Experts. I'm with Chris Mannion. Did I pronounce that right? I'm Eric Guidice. People ask me about my last name all the time—my dad says “Jadeese,” my mom says “Gadeese.” Who cares? We're the Headcount Experts. We're going to bring you eight episodes that span the entirety of closing out 2025 and setting up 2026. If it hits, we’ll do more next year.
This first episode is all about prepping for headcount season. We’re recording this on October 9th, so most folks are finishing up their 2025 hiring plan and getting ready for 2026. The nice thing about this podcast is that we’ve both done this internally before solving the problem externally. So tell me a little bit about your background—what makes you a headcount expert?
Chris Mannion: Great question. I have to go back seven years to when I first moved into the talent space. My background isn’t along the HR or analytics path. I studied aerospace engineering, served in the military, and did counter-piracy and counter-terrorism work in the Middle East. That work was about putting the right things in the right place at the right time, which led me into supply chain after I left the military.
But in 2018, I was complaining about how hard it was to hire for my team. Someone told me to go run a recruiting team and see how hard it actually is. I thought I’d fix it in two weeks—classic MBA thinking—but we all know how that story ends. I started leading our campus recruiting team, trying to build a best-in-class program. The key was hiring the best people early—the best candidates get snapped up in the fall.
Now we’re talking about Q4 planning cycles. The 2026 planning cycle starts now, but if you’re in campus recruiting, you should already be closing candidates. That led me to figure out how to estimate how many hires we’d need to make and how to project forward using supply chain concepts. By doing that, we built a great program, and my role expanded into recruitment analytics. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the space. If you get it right, you up-level the team and the organization. If you get it wrong, you end up with layoffs, employer brand hits, and all the chaos we’ve seen over the last few years.
Eric Guidice: Every background in TA is nontraditional—there’s no degree in recruiting. I took a more traditional path as an individual contributor recruiter. I worked at startups like Sterling Backcheck, then at TravelClick, Uber, Bird, and Clutter. I packaged up those learnings into Unicorn Talent, which is now a community where everything I’ve learned is free. There’s no school for recruiting, so go learn from others’ mistakes.
You, though—you’ve worked at Wayfair, have an engineering background, and are far more technical. That’s what makes this podcast great. You could probably build the race car; I’ve been the race car driver for years. I may not know every technical detail, but I know the best way around the track.
That’s still true today with Headcount365. I have a fantastic engineering team that helps bring these concepts to life, so what you’re doing in the executive room has data to back it up. That’s one of the main struggles for modern TA leaders. Sales leaders have Salesforce or HubSpot. Customer support has Zendesk. They know every metric. Recruiters, until recently, had spreadsheets—until you and I came along.
We’ll get into that later, since we’re both now providers in the headcount space. What’s interesting about this podcast is that there’s something for everyone. I’ll speak for myself: to become an expert, I had to suck first. I had to learn through pain what didn’t work to figure out what does.
If you’re a beginner, we’ll share what to avoid and the basics to get you there. If you’re intermediate and already hold a senior role, we’ll share best practices that scale beyond one company. And if you’re advanced—if you’re driving innovation—we want to collaborate. There’s a landing page where you can ask questions or request to join the podcast.
When you combine all the data from different systems into one headcount dataset, you unlock new analytics to predict the future, drive accountability, and improve decisions. There’s something for everyone here, and whether we’re the best hosts or not, we’ll find out. The difference is we’ve done the job before, which is unique.
What was your first Q4 like?
Chris Mannion: Going into Q4 the first time, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was fortunate to be part of a strong team. You hit on a key point—HR needs the right data to have a seat at the table during planning. Otherwise, you get thrown a pile of reqs after the plan is done and realize you need to fill 500 roles in a month with capacity for 50.
That was my learning curve. It was scary. We had 700 full-time roles and 800 interns to fill. You’re thinking two years ahead—how many interns do we need now to convert full-time hires later?
In campus recruiting, you already have candidates closed before planning begins. So if you need 200 entry-level hires and already closed 100, that shapes the rest of the year. It drove some heated debates with other recruiting leaders about who should own different channels. I was learning on the fly, pretending I knew what I was doing—but I didn’t.
In hindsight, I wish I’d asked more questions of the experienced TA leaders around me instead of showing up with my own spreadsheet. Everyone had their own data and assumptions, none of which tied to finance. The business was planning in a silo. Getting all stakeholders together with a collaborative mindset would’ve helped.
If you want to hire 100 people in January, you need to start recruiting in October. That means hiring recruiters months before that to ramp up. Once you explain that to business leaders—who are smart but not recruiting experts—they start to get it.
Eric Guidice: You just hit two big points: context and capacity. In campus recruiting, the process is predictable because you have consistent candidates and conversion rates. But when planners from big companies move to startups, they assume the same conversion rates or brand equity—and it doesn’t work.
AI also changes the top of the funnel—it’s noisier now. You have to assume more process-intensive filtering.
You mentioned something that we integrated into Headcount365: understanding how long it takes to hire and backfill. What we haven’t built yet—but should—is tracking available interviewers. At Uber, I was hiring 10 to 20 senior roles a month, which was insane. The business needed 10 hires but had 40 hours of work to run a city and conduct interviews. Even with perfect conversion rates, there wasn’t enough time—each interview took seven hours of work.
Recruiting looks simple: supply, conversion, and time. But the nuance is in context—what you’re filling and the hidden inputs across HR, finance, recruiting, hiring managers, and candidates. There’s noise everywhere: press cycles, fundraising, culture.
For new workforce planners, start broad, then refine. Don’t assume past conversion rates from other companies apply. Distribute accountability to hiring managers and business leaders so recruiting isn’t the scapegoat.
And manage early. As people close 2025, they’re already setting 2026 plans. If budgets aren’t approved until January, you’ll have hiring managers blaming recruiting when the issue is planning.
Chris Mannion: Exactly. And before I move on—capacity isn’t just about recruiters. Think about interviewers and logistics. It’s like landing planes: depending on how many arrive, the immigration line might be ten minutes or three hours. Same with hiring—if all demand hits at once, your funnel clogs.
Companies are moving interviews back in person due to AI and fake candidates. That introduces new constraints—meeting rooms, office space. In Q4, when you also have budget meetings and vendor visits, real estate becomes scarce. If recruiters block off all the rooms, you frustrate employees.
Speed solves a lot of problems, but only with the right checks and balances. Exceed capacity anywhere, and you hit bottlenecks.
Eric Guidice: Exactly. The business asks, and recruiting provides. There’s always tension between what’s requested and what’s possible. Recruiting is a service function. Setting baselines for production versus demand is Recruiting 101. As you get more experienced, you’ll understand which inputs impact those outcomes and how to flag them early. Promotions often happen when you can explain and anticipate these dynamics instead of reacting to problems.
I love your airport analogy—it’s perfect. Forty backfills at once is completely different from forty roles spread across a year.
What should recruiting leaders be doing now, in Q4, to set up for next year?
Chris Mannion: In our Q4 QBR with the CEO and exec team, we’d prepare recruiting metrics—capacity, time-to-hire, attrition, quality. Even if goals aren’t final, you can show what’s needed to sustain growth. That moves you from ticket processor to strategic partner.
Executives will ask: how are you improving time-to-hire? What’s the quality of hire? Attrition? Cost per hire? What are you automating or outsourcing? You need these metrics before that meeting.
The best approach is coming in with a data-backed recommendation, not just saying, “We can’t do it.” Make it a negotiation. To have a seat at the table, you need the data. If you can’t break it down by funnel, department, or level, you can’t adjust expectations or set commitments.
Eric Guidice: Exactly. Without data, you don’t have a voice in business decisions. My advice for TA leaders—establish credibility in saying no. If you don’t have data, you’re relying on trust and perception. When you tell the business the plan isn’t achievable, it has to make sense in their language.
You build credibility by being specific. “We couldn’t fill 50 roles last quarter” isn’t enough—what kind of roles were they? Senior, niche, hard-to-fill? That context matters. The more precise your data, the more credible your “no.”
It’s not just about refusal—it’s about being taken seriously when you adjust forecasts or request resources. When you understand the business cost of not hiring, you can justify investment in recruiters, interviewers, or tools.
That’s the level of rigor finance or sales operates with. Recruiting should be no different.
Chris Mannion: Totally. Don’t be surprised in the planning meeting. Know the business and its drivers. Sit in all-hands, meet with business leaders, understand their goals. Then when the CEO says, “We’re opening an office in Germany,” you’re ready with a plan.
Start early. If your planning cycle kicks off in December, start this week. Build scenarios—even if you create ten and only two are used, you’ll walk in prepared.
When I first got into recruiting, I was heads down in my own silo. Meeting weekly with recruiting peers, business partners, and stakeholders changed everything. Suddenly we were presenting a unified plan to executives instead of arguing against theirs.
Here’s one example. At Wayfair, we hired senior leaders from McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. But the talent pool was drying up—other retailers had caught on. Our demand was growing, supply shrinking. We started offering internships to high-potential consultants, knowing most wouldn’t join immediately. We invested early, nurtured those relationships, and three years later, they became senior hires.
That saved us $50–100k per hire in closing costs because we’d already built the relationship. It was a long-term investment, justified by data.
Eric Guidice: I love that. It ties to two big things: scenario planning and financial alignment. My advice to TA leaders in Q4—start with the assumption that everything is possible. You want 100 hires in January? It’s possible—you might need to acquire a company, but it’s possible.
Scenario planning lets you experiment with “what-if” models and cost implications. Recruiting is one of several services available to achieve hiring goals—internal teams, RPOs, acqui-hires, hiring-manager-led searches. When you start with “everything is possible,” you can have a productive cost conversation with finance.
Every business says “do more,” but capacity is finite. Knowing your capacity, demand, and inputs helps you present realistic options.
Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, the conversation is always the same: the business wants something, and recruiting provides it in the best way possible. That’s workforce planning.
Chris Mannion: Exactly.
Eric Guidice: The headcount data provides context on whether those scenarios are possible. It tells you the real cost—in time or dollars—so the business understands what’s required to hit goals.
That’s why we’re here. You run Meander, I run Headcount365. At first, I thought we might be competitors. Then Mike Brown told me to talk to you, and I realized we’re aligned—solving the same problem for different audiences. Listening to you talk about this stuff gets me fired up.
Chris Mannion: I’m excited to dig into more advanced topics too. Just stop me if I go too deep into ops theory—I get carried away with models.
Eric Guidice: No, that’s exactly where we’re going. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for listening. We’ve got seven more episodes coming this season, released weekly through the end of the year.
We wanted to start with credibility and context—two people who’ve done the work and are now building tools to make it better.
Chris Mannion: My closing thought—data is power. If you want a seat at the table, you need data. Hopefully we’ll help people figure out how to get it and use it.
Eric Guidice: And you need more than just data—you need the story behind it. A spreadsheet is just a snapshot. The real insight is in the history—the changes, the context, the patterns over time. That’s what we’re both building.
Thanks for tuning in. We’ve got a lot more coming this quarter.
Chris Mannion: Thanks everyone.
Eric Guidice: See you next episode.
Q4 Headcount Planning Starts Now
Every Q4 pressure to wrap up this year’s hiring plan while forecasting next year’s. For most, it’s spreadsheets, meetings, and arguments over what’s “realistic.”
In the first episode of The Headcount Experts, two operators who’ve lived this process break down what recruiting leaders should be doing right now to close 2025 strong and enter 2026 with data, alignment, and credibility.
Why You Should Listen
We’re ex-practitioners from companies like Uber & Wayfair, talking openly about what works, what scales, and what they’d do differently if we were back in your shoes.
Capacity ≠ headcount
Most TA teams plan around open reqs, not recruiter bandwidth. Chris explains why “do more with less” only works if you understand true recruiting capacity. To learn recruiting capacity from the pros, read more here: Blog: Recruiting Capacity Like a Pro
Q4 chaos is predictable
Eric breaks down why plans start to change as soon as January and how the best teams use October and November to pre-align finance, HR, and hiring managers before the flood hits. Headcount365’s YoY Workforce Tracking shows the long term relationship between hiring demand and recruiting capacity
Data earns credibility
Both agree: the only way TA leaders get taken seriously in planning is by bringing defensible data to the table, not spreadsheets of guesses. Here are 4 key data points you can add to your headcount model
3 Big Takeaways from the Q4 Planning Episode
Q4 is when TA Leaders earn their credibility.
The quality of data about past performance and its correlation to future outcomes directly impacts your influence on future plans. If a recruiting leader believes a future plan is not possible, the response should be “how can we help you” vs “why not”.
Scenario planning is your leverage.
Everything outcome is possible with infinite money, so it’s important to map the relationship between predictible recruiting production and cost. TA Leaders need to facilitate an honest conversation about the cost of recruiting
Recruiting is a service function
The business purchases recruiting from it’s internal recruiting team. They can purchase these services from externals, but may make trade offs in quality or cost. Align expectations early, quantify capacity honestly, and lead executives to the right decisions with the cost/benefit analysis provided by headcount data.
Why It Matters
As former members of the internal TA teams, Chris and Eric make the case that recruiting should lead the conversation regarding the capability of the recruiting team to meet future demand. If you’ve ever been stuck between “impossible hiring goals” and “limited recruiters,” this episode gives you the tools (and language) to change that dynamic.