Optimizing Recruiting Capacity: RPO Strategies and the Future of Headcount Planning
Podcast Overview
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Eric Guidice: Welcome to another episode of the Headcount Experts. Today we're joined by a very special guest. Chris, is it Abbas? Abbas? I should have asked this probably before.
Chris Abass: Abass. Abass is good, yeah.
Eric Guidice: from London, that means I'm outnumbered in two ways. From the geography and the naming. So I gotta come I gotta lot to come back from. I'll see what I could do on this this podcast. But great to have you on. You lead talentful, which is one of the bigger RPOs, one of the more successful RPOs. I know every recruiter that I've seen leave the corporate world, starts their own agency. A few make it to three hundred plus employees with a global footprint and some of the best technology companies in the world. So I'm very curious on your perspective, Chris is as well. And welcome to the show.
Chris Abass: Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Eric Guidice: So so do you guys have a rivalry in the UK, London space? Are you from differing neighborhoods, differing soccer teams? Like how give me something to work with here. How do I how do I differentiate here? How do you want me to which Chris is which?
Chris Abass: I think we're actually on the same team. We're both northerners. Right? I'm from Blackpool.
Chris Mannion: really? Yeah. Yeah. Are you we used to we used to vacation every a few times a year, Blackpool Tower and the the three pairs, the promenade. Yeah, I I know it well.
Chris Abass: Yeah. Exactly. The bond is strengthening actually.
Eric Guidice: Team strengthens. Alright, well tell us how you got to the US, how you started talentful. I gave us a little bit off camera, but we've heard Chris's story, it's very impressive. Or Chris from Head Count Experts . so Mr. Abass, tell me tell us how you got here. How'd you get to where you are today? What was the path ? you know, and and kind of give us the context for for how we're gonna be speaking today.
Chris Mannion: The Northern English Chris.
Chris Abass: Yeah, absolutely. So I was actually a musician for all my life and realized I wasn't going to be a rock star and fell into recruitment as you do the next logical path from rock star to recruiter. But my, the path into kind of founding Townfall was really kind of cutting my teeth in recruiting agency where I spent many years. Then I went in-house. So I went to Shazam, the music recognition company, which was one of the most loved apps in the world, everyone I speak to about Shazam loved the product. It was used by hundreds of millions of people and it was a very engineering and product led company. So that was really great experience for me to work there, partner with the C-suite and grow that business during this kind of heyday. Then after that
Eric Guidice: Did you guys did you guys did you guys have anything in the in office you know how you name a conference room? Did you guys ever do anything with the movie? Or is that is that my American culture coming into the place here? The Shaquille O'Neal Amogini movie? I don't know if that was a threaded in.
Chris Abass: No, no, yeah, yeah. Not the movie, but we did have an amazing kind of perk where they had a stage in the office and they would have like famous artists come in and do like private concerts like once a month. And so we had some really cool folks come in and play music for the team. So that was one of the best things about working there. Now after Shazam, I went to Amazon and that was a totally different experience. Shazam was 250 people. My recruiting agency was small. Amazon is of course like massive scale. And the really impressive thing about Amazon is how they've managed to scale that business whilst keeping a very clear process structure and their leadership principles at the core of every single thing they do. So that was something that really impressed me and was very different. And again, they were a company that was very kind of customer focused and they have obviously that everything that underpins what they do is customer obsession. And Jeff Bezos is famously, John advocate of customer obsession . went to both of those companies and then the short story is notice reoccurring themes and patterns inside, you know, high growth technology businesses, mainly around the difficulty in capacity planning. A lot of these companies just do not know what's going to happen in six to 12 months. They're racing, they're building new products, they're competing in highly competitive markets, and it's very hard to predict what's going to happen. And if you look at the last five years, that lack of predictability has accelerated. We've had massive booms, we've had bursts, we've had natural disasters and COVID and all kinds of things going on. And so the use case for talent form, why we set it up is a strengthened over time, but really it was about providing a modern solution to that problem that was the anti-agency and anti-big RPO, kind of fully focused and dedicated on the tech sector. So that's where we started. We grew the business in Europe. I moved to the U S in 2020. And the business that it stands now is around 350 employees , fully bootstrapped, no investors, and around $50 million plus in revenue.
Eric Guidice: Amazing, amazing. And you have some other things as well. I see the higher community and obviously talent first in there. The higher community is probably one of the better well, I'll let you describe it before I give my commentary on it, but I I thoroughly enjoy the the talent one hundred . but give me give me an idea of how those play into the business.
Chris Abass: Yeah, absolutely. I always try and keep, because of the experience at Amazon and Shazam, try and keep this underlying philosophy of how we run the business, how we make decisions. And at Tavernfall, it's around inventing the future of recruiting for our clients. So always being on the front foot and looking at what the upcoming trends are in our industry and just generally across the market. And one of the things that we really believed in is that as AI proliferates through the industry and through markets in general, the effectiveness of outreach is going to diminish. And that's because everyone can send mass spam that's highly personalized and very hard. It's going to be very hard to differentiate yourself with outbound. So what's the next phase of, I guess, looking at how you build relationships with prospects, how you engage, how you keep your finger in the market, a finger on the pulse of the market and how you get closer to your customers. And we believe that that is community. And so we made a bet in 2023, how can we kind of take that step. Me and Phil actually met, my co-founder, we met in this community 15 years ago. And so we knew the community really well, we knew its history, and there was an opportunity to acquire the community. So we did that in 2023. And we've built that as the kind of underlying way that we engage our current customers and give them access to peer-to-peer networking. And we also get to meet new customers and build a relationship with new customers, as well as providing a lot of value to them as they grow their careers and figuring out how to navigate this world. So that's the kind of one side. And then we believe in this barbell strategy. So, you know, the future is going to be heavily barbell. There's going to be deeply personalized and relationship driven on one end , all the stuff that you can only do as a human being. And then on the other side, it's going to be highly technical, AI driven, lots of automation. So we actually hired the CTO of Shazam that was my stakeholder, a guy called Charles Henrich. We hired him in 2022 to be our CTO. So he was VP of engineering at Google, Yahoo. He's got an incredible resume as a technologist. He came to the business to build the underlying technical infrastructure on how we run down for and turn it into kind of an AI first, tech first RPO. And so there are the kind of two ends of the business that we have . have the people in the middle, we have the community and we have the technology.
Eric Guidice: I think it's gonna be interesting how the agency world will actually come back around to the getting in front of people and doing the people things with the technology. I think it's gonna be a very interesting swing back to I got that was like my foray into recruiting back in the early 2000s was the agency side and the amount of in-person that actually mattered then kind of died off with LinkedIn and then now I think is coming back. I think at the end of the episode I got a couple of hot takes. We do a little hot takes segment where we'll show you some LinkedIn posts that you can react to about what's going on in the culture. But I'm curious so it's for me, it's a delight to have two sides of the capacity planning on the same call. So if you don't know Chris Manion comes from well I'll let you tell it a supply chain background and then from you on the you know running one of the bigger RPOs that we've had the opportunity to talk to you're constantly guiding your customers about how to manage this Capacity and there's two sides, right? Capacity of the business, like what is the business actually gonna do? What is the forecast of the business? And then what is the recruiting forecast to then meet that? And how does that interact with an RPO or an agency? How do you make those decisions, etc ? but Chris, why don't you give a little high level of your kind of supply chain background and and you know your approach to capacity planning, and then let's kind of dive into some of you know how how should companies be looking at a headcount plan? How should they looking at the scenario models in an FPNA tool to then come up with a recruiting strategy that allows hires on time, revenue on time, whether it's in-house, RPO, or some combination of the two? But that's that's where I'd love to go with this.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think it's it's really interesting. I I think there's there's probably a lot of crossover in maybe the way that two Chris's on the call approach, capacity planning and it it's more of like how a how kind of a business team would do SNOP planning. It's you know looking ahead, how's the business gonna grow or decline over time? What are the gonna be impacts that are gonna drive that? And then feeding back from that into into what headcount you need. And I think Chris's barbell analogy is is a really strong one. I actually got into a lot of trouble on LinkedIn like three or four years ago for talking about this and saying, you know, recruiting recruit roles in the future are not gonna be recruiters. You're gonna have of like s essentially systems engineers or talent engineers, I think we're calling them now . who are running these these like systems or like portfolios of tools and you're gonna have higher highly relational based, almost internal consultants that are actually advising the hiring managers and helping them to make good decisions. And my my point then was like you pick a lane and then invest in that for the next few years because that's where we're gonna go. And I'm I'm actually curious to to hear from Chris's perspective how that is impacting his own capacity planning for his team. So it it it it's interesting because he has he has like two main stakeholders is he has these external like customers who he's advising this is how you should plan your capacity for your headcount over time. But also he's got to look internally and say, well, how many recruiters do we need? If we if we are building our own AI kind of recruiting tools and also have all these off-the-shelf tools available to us, that's going to impact the number of recruiters we need. But his company has grown over time. So I think the argument around AI is taking all of our jobs is is you know pr pretty pretty void right now . so I'm actually really curious to to dig into that a little bit, Chris, and actually just see if that kind of forward look in projection matches how you're looking at things or if there's like a tweak that you do where you're actually looking at things a little bit differently given how kind of how how close you are to this, both on the customer and the internal side.
Chris Abass: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right . think that your LinkedIn post was spot on . think that the way we're thinking about it is the predictions might be right, but some roles may be replaced. But what will happen is new roles will replace those and backfill them. What we're seeing is exactly what you said. You're going to need very kind of tech native analytical systems minded people who can manage and orchestrate tools, So that, whether that's agents or it's using Claude code or whatever it might be, and can replace workflows to make themselves more effective and make teams more effective. Now, I'm sure you guys have used AI, extensively, you know, it is very hard to get a workflow fully replaced, autonomously working without a lot of maintenance, right? Firstly, you're going to have to make sure all the data input into that workflow is clean. It's accurate. It's updated properly, which is a nightmare to do at scale because that's a behavioral shift in your company. And it's a action that everyone has to take like clockwork, which is really difficult . and then, you know, AI hallucinates. So it will stop pulling from the wrong place . will mistake what it should be pulling. It will, it will visualize it differently than what you need it to. It will just change its mind overnight. And then you have to have someone who's constantly maintaining those pipelines and the integrity of the systems that you're building. So what we're seeing is, know, there's going to be this need for these AI native people. We're calling them, you know, solutions engineers in our business. A lot of companies are calling them forward deployed engineers. They're calling them AI engineers, you know, whatever they might be calling them. And we're trying to think about what the future of a recruiter's role will look like. And I think it's exactly as you said, there's if you think from first principles. I don't know, let's say 50% of the role of a recruiter at least was historically admin-based, repetitive . was, I get a brief, which is essentially just a criteria of skills and a wish list of nice-to-haves, must-haves, et cetera. And you also understand the company's culture, which if a company's culture is really thoughtful, you should be able to define it. It shouldn't be, I'll just wait until I see the right person or I'll know when I speak to the person. That's the worst kind of culture because it's hard to define. So you should be able to define your culture in some sense. You should be able to define the skills that you need. Then what you do is you go out and you search for someone through LinkedIn or other various methods. You're scanning through many pages. You're selecting the best people. That is currently or has been human judgment . that's at best like 90% accurate. Then they reach out to the people, try and personalize a message with the objective to get someone on a call. So almost everything pre-call can be automated from a first principle standpoint. And if you've managed recruiters before, you know that getting recruiters to do admin is an absolute nightmare. For my whole recruiting career, managing hundreds of recruiters, I've had to really drive home how important admin is, how important all of this stuff is for recruiters. Now they get the chance to not do this, to actually outsource this to AI. So I'm actually quite surprised at the pushback a lot of teams are getting in terms of recruiters feeling kind of fear or not wanting to replace their role with or aspects of their role with AI . because for my whole entire career, they've never wanted to do this stuff anyway. Right? So there's this kind of juxtaposition there, but I think ultimately a lot of the role can be automated. And as you said, I think we're going to have a different skillset, which is much more relationship focused. It's about providing a kind of concierge, white glove experience, two candidates, two hiring managers that is similar to when you go to a Michelin star restaurant or you go to a five star resort. I think that's going to be what we have to do because if everyone's got access and the kind of sourcing and finding and attracting candidates is commoditized, then how do you compete? And I think it's really about the experience that you provide. And so I feel the recruiter is going to become more and more sales like, you're going to have to be a master in kind of engaging someone through the process, you know, making sure that you're negotiating properly. You're being very thoughtful with how you structure someone's compensation and think about what they need and how to get them across the line, how to compete against other offers that are coming into the business, how to provide this really kind of bespoke and personalized experience. I mean, that's going to be the job of a recruiter on the candidate side. And then on the hiring manager side, being much more consultative in your approach, how you're mapping the market, how you're looking at kind of souring compensation information, how you're looking at the different skill sets in your organization and what you need to hire and looking ahead rather than being reactive. I think that's going to be the job of the consultant on the hiring manager side. I'm not sure whether those are two different roles at the moment, but I think that, you know, that's definitely where things are going.
Eric Guidice: I think it's gonna be an interesting and I wanna dive into kind of the headcount aspect of it as well, but like when you think about a job changing like that when it's a production role, you might change the number that you need. And to Chris's point, right, your your customers have a headcount plan that require an RPO for supplemental resource or just as a part of their ongoing strategy. And then the RPO is planning its own headcount plan based on the production and ramp time. So you have this kind of like dual headcount plan where you might have you know for every hundred customers that you have that have one to five roles you then have a number of recruiters you need to service those roles and given the seasonality or how things trend up and down you're gonna need to carry float . so I think you know starting from the company side, right, what are you seeing in headcount plans today from your From your customers. So from from my aspect, I see headcount plans differently because of the headcount through 65 software. We have a capacity demand forecast built into it, and we can sense like when roles are hitting. So in previous lives, as at Uber or wherever I was before, the plan was annual. Where now it's like a little bit more ad hoc. We need this right now, or there's something happening, so we're gonna lay off right now. And so what I'm seeing is a little bit more reactionary demand which is impacting like someone might determine they need something 60 days out and it takes 90 days to fill the role. So if you're the RPO trying to fill that role faster than it's even possible to be filled, you can't hire someone based on that demand. So I guess my first question is like, what are you seeing in your customer headcount plans today? Are you seeing you know increase or decrease in the demand of heads? Are you seeing different seasonality, a change in the roles? Like, what is your macro recruiternomics take on your customer headcount plans?
Chris Abass: Yeah, so how we're seeing it is it's a tale of two cities really is we've got the kind of high growth hyperscalers that are raising a lot of money in the AI space that are growing at astronomical levels. Now, I think they're in a advantageous spot because they've not got a lot of debt in the company. They're able to build the company for this new world almost as they're growing. So they're not having to go back and look at their old structure and redefine it and think about, we strip out middle management? Do we do this? Because they're building it through this innovation that's happening. So it gives them an advantage. Then you have the larger enterprises that are thousands of people, maybe 10,000 plus, that have been around for decades. Now there's a huge shift that's happening and it's rapid every month. You know, Anthropic comes out with a new model or a new feature that can disrupt a whole industry. And so I think these companies are really going through a full scale transformation. They're looking at their org structure, they're putting a pause on hiring or they're saying making layoffs because they're restructuring their whole company for this new world. And that's a much more painful process because you're going to have roles that just don't exist in the future. You're going to have new roles that You don't even know that you need yet or a very new roles that you're having to think about how they work in your organization. And so what we're seeing is this, is this hyperscaler cohort, is, you know, they're competing, they're in AI, they're raising tons of money. They're going to win their market and they're not slowing down. They're just. But on the gas. And then we have these large enterprise, which could be making layoffs in one area and then growing rapidly in another, because they're focusing on a new skill set. So I think that That's what I'm seeing in the market. And then if you look on a kind of higher level view, there's a lot of research coming out from Citadel and others, which are showing, know, jobs in software engineering are increasing, know, month on month, and they have been all year. And even kind of the lowest, the kind of high volume, kind of lower skilled jobs in call centers and customer service, they're starting to grow again, right? So this idea that AI is replacing all jobs, I don't think is actually coming out in the data. And in fact, we're seeing the opposite. So it's gonna be a really interesting kind of rest of the year. But I think that overall I see the picture is gonna be growth for most companies.
Eric Guidice: It's interesting with the the job changes. So I come from the Uber environment, right? Uber was competing with Lyft, it was a price war to the bottom, and then once it was won, then they raised the price again. So it used to cost three dollars to go to the airport, now it's thirty-five dollars, right? And to see jobs come back As a relationship to token spend, like we interviewed a CFO not too long ago who was just like, you know, I don't even care. I'm not even hiring, I'm just spending on tokens. I don't care what it is because the return's so high . you know, for and my own experience with software engineering on my team is like it it just changes the job a little bit to be more architectural rather than writing. The code's the easy part. That's you know, not necessarily the you know, the hard stuff. So you still have to have the thought and the construction and the context to not only Compensate for the hallucinations, but also to like make it a cohesive story. So once pricing comes up, right, all these companies are operating at like a loss for what, and then it'll come to a business decision, right? So the same way a business is making a capacity decision on do I hire an internal recruiter and carry the burden of their employment and whether or not they're gonna have enough over the course of an unknown forecast, or can I contract out an RPO? Companies are gonna be making those decisions with AI as far as like Should I add to like once the price of tokens come up, am I adding a person or am I adding tokens? What's what what's easier? What's what's a business decision? I think we're gonna see that you know, across the way. I have I've
Chris Mannion: I think there's an another factor there as well that I think kind of relates to to that. I was I was thinking as Chris was talking. So one of the benefits of of the RPO is the team is already ramped. So we talk a lot about capacity and it's not just time to hire, it's actually time to build the recruitment capacity before you actually can can start the hiring process. And so in this this like world where there's spiky demand, you almost have these these kind of questions around okay, do do we do we supplement with tokens? Do we hire a person? And if so, do we do we need an in-house team Versus an external team. And some of the things that I've been hearing with larger companies is whereas the small ones are kind of growing and they have maybe an uncertain growth path, the large ones have this uncertain demand because they're not growing, but they do want to stay steady state. And so there's this like dynamic resource allocation of actually when someone leaves, we may repurpose that role elsewhere, we might not have the right skill set within our in-house recruiting team. So I'm actually curious, kind of related to that, Chris, how you're seeing the demand you do like startups, scale-ups and support. Like how are you seeing the demand vary across there for RPO versus in-house ? and is that telling us anything about kind of how different companies are thinking about this challenge?
Chris Abass: Yeah, great question . think that ever since 20, ever since COVID and you know, we had that tech recession in 22, 23, where there was just this mass layoffs of recruiters . think that companies are starting to think about their business and where their core expertise and focus lies. And then outsourcing non-core functions, right? Because A company only has a certain amount of bandwidth and energy and focus. And if I'm trying to build humanoid robots, do I really want to spend my energy building and building a recruiting organization and a high-performance recruiting organization? Or do I buy that expertise and bring that in? So I think we're seeing a lot of that is these companies are looking at where they get the most leverage for their investment . and they're making much more commercial decisions. I think that in the past, it was very much up to the talent leader and many talent leaders, maybe they're in that role for the first time, they want to build a big team so they can say they've built a big team. And I think that now they're having a much more commercial view on how they do these things. It's like, I spend X, if I spend $1, do I get free back here? That's the kind of thought process they're having. So we're seeing the need for flexibility, as you said, things are changing all the time. Companies don't want to make these mass layoffs again. It's bad for PR, it's bad for culture. They also want to build the capability, so buy the capability rather than build it. And they can do that much faster by using someone like Townfall. There is a quality and a speed and a kind of cost element to that as well. So when you're bringing in a vendor like you know, an RPO, there's aspects that you're not paying for. For example, you're not giving RSUs, you're not giving equity, all those things that for these companies is highly valuable. So there's a kind of cost equation as well. And if you're trying to hire the best in AI talent, you should go to the company that is working with the best AI companies in the world, right? Because they know what the market looks like. They have the bird's eye view of what's going on. The really interesting thing though is we're seeing non-traditional technology businesses building AI capability. And I think what we're going to see now is every company starts building AI capability. Right? So you're going to be looking at manufacturing, you're going to be looking at retail, you're going to be looking at pharmaceutical, all these different industries are going to start hiring AI engineers, machine learning engineers, forward deployed engineers. We're speaking to a bunch of accountancies at the moment and finance consultancies that are looking to build forward deployed teams. Right. So because we built our specialism in this sector for the last 10 years, working with some of the best AI companies in the world, they want to just outsource that. They don't have the capability internally. We've got a recruiting team that hires hundreds of CPAs every year. We don't even know what a forward deployed engineer is or how to find them. So there's that aspect to kind of building in. that bringing in that capability. So yeah, I think that wave is going to continue . think every, the reason why we decided to be tech focused is we just believe that every company was going to be a tech company at some point. And I think the same is true. Every company is going to have AI and be an AI company because you can't avoid it. It's going to be the baseline for every company is utilizing AI. Whether it's to increase productivity, to reduce costs, whatever you want to focus on . is gonna be a crucial part of your business and you're gonna need the right talent to get you there.
Eric Guidice: What's the what's the sell against an RPO? I I've done the RPO stuff, I've hired RPOs on myself, so I have my own answer of like the break-even point, et cetera. But if you had to sell against it, like what what makes an RPO not a fit for somebody and you know when they're looking at a headcount plan for an upcoming year or the rest of the year, like how do you say now you should do that internally or maybe an agency's better? Like what's what's your what's your logic as someone on that side of the business who's been doing it so long?
Chris Abass: Yeah, so I'm a big believer . the way our model works is we embed teams inside organizations. Our folks will be part of that team for a period of time. Now, in almost every case, we are augmenting an existing TA team. Right. And my recommendation to TA leaders is you should have your own team. Right. Like there should be a foundational layer of in-house permanent recruitment. And That layer should be able to deal with the guaranteed headcount that you're going to, that headcount demand for let's say 12 to 24 months, including attrition, right? So you can manage that. Now what you need for the kind of the agility and the spikes and the troughs in headcount is a partner that you can rely on that can integrate into your team. And so that's where we come in is that we're there for that uncertainty for the spikes of growth . for international expansion for these use cases that are outside the kind of base level demand. So that's what I would recommend. To your point about what's the pushback, think the biggest pushback is we want internal people because they understand the business better, right? They're part of the organization. They can become part of the team. They really get to the grip, to the heart of what's going on in the business and they can represent the company better. And there's a sense of control as well. Like the leader can control what's going on with that team. They have more insight into that team. So, so on and so forth. So I think that that's probably the biggest pushback when it comes to an RPO. So that sense of control and kind of ownership that the permanent team might have. I think there's some really, maybe not to get into now, but I think there's some really exciting use cases when it comes to AI . that actually can overcome a lot of that historical challenge. But that's, say, the biggest pushback. I don't know what you would say, but that's what we see.
Eric Guidice: I mean I think there's There's a if it's a one-off role, if it's a brand new role of the organization, if you don't have a team, I have this kind of philosophy that so before I started headcount, I had this consulting firm called Unicorn where we would go roll out the foundation so that a company who just received investment had the scale right out of the get-go. So I take basically the playbook from Uber Bird or wherever I was before and put it in. Compent leveling framework, headcount plan, yada yada yada. The headcount plan was the most popular thing, thus a software. But the other thing that I did was I would put in the recruiting pitch, which means candidates take jobs for two reasons, right? It's a better thing for me now, or it's a better thing for my future. Or both, right? So three reasons. But the if you didn't have an answer, why is it a better manager, better salary, better location, whatever, or equity payout in the future, promotion capability? If you didn't answer those two questions, it's very difficult for any recruiter to be successful, let alone an external one who's balancing multiple. Multiple companies at the same time, and so that was kind of a requirement. If you're gonna use supplemental agencies and you didn't have a good intake session interview rubric, you didn't have a good recruiting pitch that answered those two questions, very difficult to go out and then train someone who is not necessarily inside your company, albeit as as much as they are, right? That foundation is kind of critical. So I think general alignment there, and I also have a budget idea of what break-even is for a given recruiter. If they're doing more than 32 roles a year, then you should probably. Go in house if you can sustain that over the course of a period of time. So those are like what I had come up with back in the day, but that was you know pre AI, it's 2019. That's like old thinking. So it's just that's a very interesting question to me, as far as like, you know, how do how does a how you know talent is a service to the business. The business says we want to hit this number, and that that could be a pipe dream, right? We've done that at Ubers, like we want to launch these cities, like we want to launch France in 30 . thirty days, like takes them ninety days to quit. How do you wanna do that? Right. So we're talent gets a a pipe dream sometimes and then the talent leader's just like, all right, I Okay, I have a team and every hiring manager thinks they're a P0, and they really have to balance it. It's become fascinating to me now, especially with with the AI stuff, kind of like changing the way productivity happens and whether or not productivity is a human. Yada yada yada . but it's just that to me is like there's so many resources, and I think TA leaders are getting smashed with like all the different ways of an external recruiting source can help. Trust is probably the biggest thing that I would say is the seller . which is why it's it's been super impressive to see a firm like yours grow to the extent that it has. It's an indication of trust. There's some sort of lasting permeating relationship that allows people to not only come back but also refer to others and you kind of become a meaningful member of the community, which I come from like New York agency days back in what was I two thousand and six, two thousand and seven. I left for a reason . so anyway, that's my that's my take here. How much time do we have? It's at 7.42 in the morning here in Los Angeles. We try to save the last few minutes for the LinkedIn reaction section. It's Wednesday, the 27th, so we're a little earlier in the week. I don't have as much of a repertoire built up, but we got a couple of good ones. I'd love to share my screen and kind of show you what what it is that we're doing. So these are live reactions for the Chris's curated by Eric.
Chris Abass: This is where I get cancelled. Yeah, this is where I get cancelled.
Eric Guidice: Two Chrises. okay. No, no, no. It's not that crazy . dang, this this I'm behind a paywall on the first one, but I'm still gonna do it because it's too much to too much to share or to find a new one. I made a I th this to me is funny . but the article said the funny thing about the article is like the bold CEO got rid of HR, said his problems disappeared. That's one part of the funny. The other part of the funny is replace them with people business people people partners instead of HR. what's your take? Is this gonna be a trend that we're worried about in the future? People getting rid of HR departments. Does he have a point? If so, what is it? What do you guys think? What's what's your reaction? Chris Abbas first, but I n I could see Chris's gears turning . what do you think?
Chris Abass: Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of convenient excuses for layoffs at the moment . wherever it is, AI or it's, you know, HR or whatever else. And I think that it's a much more convenient answer to say that and say I fucked up and I did the wrong thing and hide the wrong people and don't hide too many people basically . and so as you said, mean, if HR is If you think that HR is causing all the problems, I think that you are wrong. That's probably not happening. I think that more layers can create more complexity. So you might have had the wrong org structure. You might have had the wrong roles in place to give you the outcomes that you want, but I wouldn't blame it on HR. That's just hiring the wrong people for your organization . so yeah, I think that, yeah, I just think a lot of these excuses are very convenient at the moment . and I'd love to know actually what the real reasons were.
Eric Guidice: Chris, what do you think?
Chris Mannion: I kind of liken it too. It's like if if you if you ignore the problem, it doesn't become a problem anymore. If you you blind yourself, it's like I'm driving down the road and there's too much traffic, so I'll just close my eyes and now all the traffic is gone. But that's not gonna end well. I just think it's it's very short term thinking.
Chris Abass: Yeah, I listened to a podcast with him as well. He basically said that because they're mainly remote now, a lot of their HR issues were in person because of it, like in person, you know, complaints and people being inappropriate or whatever else. So now they're remote, they don't need HR. I was like, what? I was like, okay.
Eric Guidice: Alright, let's let's cue up the next one. It's kind of a a a story that continues with the next one. I think there we go. Seven HR roles that will disappear By 2028, and he and this this is Daniel Kafer. I think I'm hope I'm pronouncing that correctly . links to all these will be in the article that's that this podcast gets published above. He's a content creator, a founder. He used to run a country for Facebook . but he's saying seven roles that will disappear by 2028, calling town acquisition the canary, which is interesting for this group, but there's also some within LD, Benefits Administration. I kind of get the The coordinators and the help desk piece, but you can see a highly reacted to article here about HR roles getting compressed with AI. What's your reaction? Do you agree with these roles that he's compressing ? would you sub in other ones or maybe talk about a different architecture change within HR? What's your take on the seven HR roles getting compressed with AI?
Chris Abass: Yeah, I have a point of view on this . mean, firstly, I think we need to start from the point that no one knows what the hell they're talking about. Right. And, and I think that all this is speculation. I mean, things are moving way too quickly . think the people even running these companies don't know what's going to happen. Right. And so I think that that's the first place. And I think that, you know, in general, think companies have an, consume unlimited resource and headcount. Right? That is always the case and it's your job as a CEO or leader to find the best possible outcome with the least possible resource. Right? And I think that that's really how to think about it. Every company is going to have a different approach to how they do that and what they think is important and the different emphasis they have on different parts of their business. So I don't think this one size fits all approach is useful. And so I think that it really depends on your business, like what the levers are, where you're to get the most determined investment. And looking at that in a very thoughtful way, in an analytical way. And yet I think that the general sense that like the more admin heavy repetitive work will be replaced, I think is the right, is probably right. But I think no one has any idea of what that will turn into and what additional work that will create. I think that that's the unknown part. But what we're seeing now is, I think there's going to be a market of abundance in my view. I think that all this work is going to increase productivity. There's going be more jobs for people. They're just going to be different. So yeah, I'm not sure these predictions are kind of fun, but I think they're kind of useless at the same time.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, I think you know, we we we're gonna see redesign of roles and I think thinking of jobs is probably an old old fashioned way of looking at it and we kind of equate one job to one person, like there's one recruiter and there's one coordinator. Whereas these are just like collection of tasks that need to be done. And a lot of those tasks are going to be automated and we're just gonna have different different roles or different like groupings of tasks. So the people are still gonna be there. And I think when when someone reads that headline, they're like, okay, well, seven people in every however many it was, fifteen are gonna get fired. That's not actually the the case, but it's it's sensational enough that a thousand people will react to it. So I think there's there's some truth there, but I don't think it's as clear cut as it as it sounds.
Chris Abass: think that's absolutely right actually . think that they're looking at stuff from the outcome you want. Like, you we need to hire, you know, 100 people every year we need to grow by 20% year on year. How are we going to do that? What are the new jobs that will allow us to do that? Marketing, we need to generate a thousand MQLs every quarter. Right, how are we going to do that? It's about the outcome and working backwards, not what I have to have. These defined roles in all these places, you know, that doesn't matter anymore. I think we should be looking at how we can achieve that goal . with in the most effective way possible. I think you're absolutely right.
Eric Guidice: I'm curious to see how the job description itself changes. I think that thing's kind of been the same for a long time about the company and why you should work here and experience. Like I I'm I'm I'm out of the game as far as creating job descriptions, or at least on a bigger scale, like I used to be. But you know, I think there's something there. Someone's gotta figure out a better way. The description and the resume. And I think as these roles change, which I think we're all agreeing on, there's some sort of evolution that's gonna come with a new age of how we work. There's an opportunity, I think, for people to interact with what production is or what product productivity is with with this stuff in the mix. Alright, I got two more. Do I have two more or three more? I think I have two more for you. Yeah. Two more for you. This one, let me share the screen here. This one is from let's see, Michael Franco. So let's get this, let's get this one on the screen. Michael Franco has a Is that it? Nope. It's this one. There we go. Michael Franco has a he's commenting on a study by Gartner. 423 employees per HRBP. So that's the you know image that's nice for the for the podcast. But he says a a Gartner study says that it will rise within the next five years. Could be 800, could be 1200 . he says 423 sounds high, but That's what he's saying is there's an average HRBP support of 423 employees. And, you know, how does that role look? Is AI really creating a better experience? Do you need the people to do this type of stuff? So, you know, if we're looking at first whether or not a a people department exists, second, you know, what the jobs are eliminated or how they'll be reshaped, and then third, the productivity of an individual. Does that scale to an HRBP? What's your reaction? The Chris's.
Chris Abass: I mean, I think this is another kind of fallacy as well . you know, just because AI is here, now people can manage, you know, hundreds of people and do IC work at the same time. It's like, okay, right, try that. You've probably never run a company before that. You know, dealing with that many human beings is very, very complicated, right? And there is lots of unforeseen issues that come up just by nature of dealing with complex human beings. And you cannot predict that and AI is not going to solve that problem. And so I think that that's idiotic. I think it's just idiotic . think it's just stupid. Frankly, I just think it's a stupid thing to say. Imagine one person managing 400 people . mean, which are like having the responsibility of keeping 400 people happy. I mean, that would be very, very tough. So I mean, I think to to Chris's point earlier, it's looking at the outcome. Like, what do you want the HRBP for? If you want, if you're happy to have an HRBP look over 400 people, do you even need an HRBP anyway? Right, at that point, I think that it's really about looking at what you want that role for and making sure that it can be effective. But I just can't imagine anyone can be effective over that, with that span of control. But maybe I'm wrong.
Eric Guidice: You have to imagine that the employee the employee relations function changes significantly . it's gonna be hard. If you've watched the Uber documentary, you know that the HR team was busy . all right, I got what I got one more for you guys . and kind of a continuing story on this AI in the world of HR. And this one is from Melissa Rosenthal. She is She's a a founder herself but comes from the marketing world for you know large tech companies. Let's get her up on the screen and her take on AI here. I think this is it. We got it. All right. Every AI subscription is is there an image? Yeah, the time bomb just went off. AI's all-you-can-eat era just ended in real time. And what she's citing here is that companies are blowing through their AI budget. Chris and I, Chris Manion and I did an interview with a startup CEO, a 20-person company that raised $80 million, and they are spending it on AI. So I presume at scale that means a lot going to AI. And so the question here is. Is pricing gonna be an issue? How is pricing of AI going to impact headcount? What's your reaction?
Chris Abass: Yeah Chris, I don't know if you want to go first.
Chris Mannion: Yeah, sure. I mean you you you just mentioned it with the the kind of Uber lift price war, Eric. Like the the races to the bottom to get as many users on the platform and then the prices will increase like that's that's a classic business model. But I think what we're seeing at the same time is the the unit economics are getting better over time as well. And you know, at some point we don't need the latest model to do all the things. We can use the like cheaper, older model . so I I I think there's gonna be some reconciliation with that. I think we s we've spoken to to someone who someone on their team bragged that they had spend it was actually an IT meetup I went to recently one of the engineers on the team had bragged that they'd burned through millions of dollars in tokens and it was like it was like a brag that they were able to do that but I think it just shows there's no checks and balances internally within the team. So I I don't think this is a sign that all of a sudden we're gonna be paying ten thousand a month for our you know clawed minimum subscription. I think it's more likely that companies are gonna have to start clamping down on token usage so that they're not burning through their whole twenty twenty-six budget in four months . so I I think that's that that's more of a a guardrails and internal compliance issue, I think, to me, than any kind of signal that the market's gonna change. Cause I think we're still gonna see it you know dry. Yeah.
Chris Abass: Yeah, I agree . think that cost is only relative to the outcome, right? Like, and again, having this like analytical approach to how we're looking at why we're using AI is if you are using it, you're spending $100,000 a year on tokens, but the alternative would cost you 200,000 a year, then the spend is irrelevant, right? And so, but what I do think is happening is we're kind of exiting the phase of experimentation. I think that a lot of companies have kind of been okay with lack of ROI because they're figuring it out. They're experimenting. They're like testing it. And you're seeing now, think Microsoft came out and said they're getting rid of Claude Code because they were spending too much on credits. I think that you've seen, I think the COO of Uber actually came out the last few days saying that they're not seeing a return on investment on token spend as they would expect. So I think we're going to see in the coming months a much more kind of tight approach to how these companies are spending tokens and what they're getting in return. And so I think that that's a natural evolution. It's like, you know, you've got to mess around. You've got to crack a few eggs to like figure out what's going on. But that can't last forever. And so that'll be interesting to see how that shakes out . even still, I've been spoken on to on quite a lot of panels or like speaking to a lot of leaders about how they're using AI. And it still is very rare that you speak to someone that has a very watertight use case for like their return on investment, right? It's like, we're doing this really cool thing and it's like really great, but we still haven't managed to get that last mile. We still haven't managed to get it there . so hopefully we can get it there. And like it really just starts to provide leverage, but I think that the jury's out for a lot of people at the moment.
Eric Guidice: Yeah, I remember like back when social media was on the we're gonna spend money as a corporation, there was a bunch of headlines about the big companies that decided to pull their spend. I think it like auto manufacturers and so there was a big headline. I think like one of the benefits of being in my forties now is like, all right, I've been through a cycle. We're seeing it again and that's fine, but I think just it is a part of the process. Always interesting to watch . well look, I think it's tremendously interesting to hear someone with your perspective kind of give us a take on how productivity is changing within the recruiting space, within the headcount space . you know, from the eyes of of talent folks, been great to have you on the podcast and thank you for kind of like, you know, spot reacting to some of these things . but You know, I think to close out, if you're a talent leader, if you're a finance person, you're making a plan for a year, the idea that there's production available to you in multiple forms, whether it's an in-house recruiter, a person itself hired by an in-cap in-house recruiter, hired by an RPO and agency, or tokens that you're spending, there's a bigger conversation now about what are headcount plans gonna look like in the future as we continue to figure out what AI is and then you know all of this marketplace for talent coming together to produce that service for these businesses over time. And so great to have you on the podcast. Another best episode ever. And we're right at time. Thank you for joining us on another episode of the Headcount Experts. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Abass: Yeah, great spending time with you. Thanks. Awesome.
How to incorporate RPO utilization in Headcount Planning
RPOs easily scale hiring velocity. Using them effectively takes skill.
In this episode of the Headcount Experts Podcast, we address the thought process around building static in-house recruiting resources and responding to volatile corporate growth demands. Chris Abbass, co-founder of Talentful, breaks down how modern tech enterprises navigate spiky demand using a barbell strategy that balances deeply personalized human engagement with AI-driven systems.
The Main Theme: Building an RPO into a Capacity/Demand Forecast
This episode is all about how to incorporate external resources into your recruiting capacity/demand forecast. Whether you’re using headcount365’s built in Capacity/Demand functionality, or managing this manually, AI has created a fundamental lack of predictability. Organizations are routinely forced to compete in aggressive markets, build new products, and adapt to sudden market corrections, making accurate headcount management a continuous challenge.
Requirements to successfully add an RPO to your Capacity/Demand Forecast
When building your recruiting model, we talk through how to position Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) and some of the base requirements to even engaging a service like this relative to other staff augmentation. Chris & Eric even talk through why you shouldn’t use an RPO in the episode.
Base Requirements
Internal Recruiting Capacity: Organizations should maintain a permanent, baseline in-house talent acquisition team to manage guaranteed headcount demand and projected baseline attrition over a 12-to-24-month window.
A Recruiting Pitch (and other critical processes) : Companies should have a defined recruiting pitch, so embedded recruiters can easily answer the two main quesitons candidates care about when making an employment decision.
Why is this job better for me today?
Why is this job better for my future?
A process for External Contractors : Leaders embed RPO partners to absorb spiky demand and navigate unpredictable fluctuations but need a process to quickly augment the team to make on-time hires.
Featured Headcount Content Creators
Preston Fore- Fortune Magazine | Bolt CEO Says he let go of his entire HR team…
From Preston’s Article: Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow says a culture of “entitlement” forced a sweeping reset—including cutting the HR team, he says, which was “creating problems that didn’t exist.”
Daniel Käfer- Founder, Kafer Futures | 7 HR Roles Will Disappear by 2028
Accelerating AI automation is driving structural compression within human resources, serving as a critical wake-up call for CHROs to proactively re-architect their departments into strategic, data-driven functions before top-down CFO cost-cutting decides their headcount for them.
Michael Franco- Founder, Quokka Hub | The Average HRBP Supports 423 Employees (Gartner)
Average HRBP span of control climbs to 423 employees with projections reaching up to 1,200, organizations cannot simply rely on purchasing AI as a silver bullet; they must intentionally redesign workflows to prevent the human resource function from collapsing into a purely reactive state.
Melissa Rosenthal - Co-Founder, Outlever | AI is a Ticking Time Bomb (State of Brand)
Melissa details how AI providers are rapidly abandoning all-you-can-eat subscription models for usage-based billing ahead of their late-2026 IPO timelines, triggering massive compute cost spikes that have already exhausted full-year enterprise AI budgets in a matter of months.
Link to her Full Article: https://www.thestateofai.com/news/ai-subscription-price-subsidiation-ending