Using Headcount Data to Secure a Promotion
Podcast Overview
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Eric Guidice Head count experts, episode 16. This is about getting promoted. I'm Eric Guidice. This is Chris Mannion. We're the head count experts. We have two different perspectives on this process. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of what we're doing, but we both came up through individual companies and had to get promoted using our own ways of each position we're in, all the different data, all the different processes, but we both have this interaction with headcount data. Now we've diverged a little bit. I went pure software, so I run headcount 365. I've seen people get promoted using our product to do a couple of things and I have that perspective. But we'll start the episode off with what does Chris Mannion think? Where are you coming from? What are the themes of getting promoted? Who are the different people who can get promoted from headcount data and then how do you go about it? But kind of tell me a little bit about how you view promotions using headcount data and how where you came from kind of influences that.
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think I'm really excited about this one because I do think we have different perspectives there. I think my experience comes from leadership roles, really from the age of 25 leading teams in the military through to actually how do I get recruiters on my team promoted into senior manager and director level positions? And not just who I've promoted and argued the case for, but what have I seen in the calibration meetings where you essentially have to nine box a team of 400 people and try and figure out who is ahead of the curve, who's behind the curve. How do we think about that? And so I think for a lot of people, they may not have seen behind this curtain. So I'm hoping this is going to be maybe a little bit of a divergence from what we normally talk about in the theory. This is very practical. I think if you take some of these lessons that we're going to share here and apply them, hopefully that's going to help with your future promotion capabilities. But my focus is very much on individuals within my organizations and what can I do to promote the best people. I think you've seen it from a really interesting lens as you've spoken to many different stakeholders and what they really care about.
Eric Guidice Well, in the future, we're going to cover something called the Bluff Framework, bottom line upfront. Let's lead by example. What's the main takeaway you want any listener to come away with this episode? What do you want them to come away with this episode with?
Chris Mannion Yeah. So I think the main thing really is how you communicate the data that you have. There's kind of three main things that I want people to take away. One is ensuring that you know what is the cost of doing nothing? The second thing I want people to know is how are you solving something with data and then making sure that the bad thing doesn't happen again and communicating that effectively. And the third thing is what you just said, the bluff, the bottom line upfront framework. When you're communicating to an executive, how are you communicating exactly what it is they need to do and then going into the reasons why, as opposed to the traditional analyst path of communicating your methodology and the results and everything else. Start with the recommendation, then get into the why, get into the data if needed. So three things: what is the cost of doing nothing? How are we systematizing this so we don't have to keep doing manual fixes and how are we communicating this so that whoever is on the receiving end knows upfront what we're recommending.
Eric Guidice You brought up a good point at the front of the call which was there's a calibration meeting. So just a quick like how do promotions work in these well, I don't want to say larger, it's kind of across the board, but how do promotions work in different types of companies? There's like a calibration meeting. So if you only have 10 promotions for 15 people eligible, only 10 people are going to get promoted at that time. And then the calibration is everyone fighting for why and they're fighting not only for the job that you've done, but what you've done beyond your role, how you've influenced the business, how you communicate, how you systematize things and productionalize your work to make more efficiency and more results for the business. But what's your experience with the promotion process? Like what do you want people to take away about how sometimes I'll talk to people and a promotion is like I have done my job better than you expected and that deserves a promotion and there are other thoughts about that but what are yours?
Chris Mannion Yeah, so there's two main things to a promotion, right? There's performance, how you're doing in your current role, and there's potential, how well you are expected to do in a role that is beyond what you're currently doing right now, the role that you would get promoted into. And it's really as simple as those two axes. And you kind of plot people somewhere in that you can do nine box exercises. We used to do like a two by two, who's outperforming in performance, who's outperforming in potential, and then are they ready for promotion? And they are very different lenses for looking at people, because you can have someone who is an excellent performer in the role that they're in, but if they got promoted and took on additional responsibilities, covering some of the things I think we're going to talk about today, there would be a disaster and they haven't developed the skills that they need to get to the next level. And I think that's one of the most frustrating things for a lot of people because they see their performance, they see their metrics, they're outperforming their peers, but they see someone else who's maybe not as strong on the performance side get promoted ahead of them. And it can be incredibly demoralizing, but there are real reasons for that. And it's not how well you do your job right now. It's how well are you likely to do the job at the next level that's going to get you promoted really. I'm curious if that's maybe an oversimplification, but is that similar to what you've seen?
Eric Guidice Yeah, and I think I could go for multiple episodes on promotions without touching the headcount data side of things. I think for this particular podcast, my, I mean I bet my career on the idea that headcount data has information in it that companies are not using today that four or five different roles can access that information, synthesize it, and communicate it well enough to then kind of push them over the edge. So I think what you're talking about is like if you're in position A trying to get to the next level, doing your job today is kind of, even if you excel beyond what the expectations are, it doesn't mean you're ready for the next job. And I see that mostly in like the IC and a manager world is why didn't the best IC get promoted to a manager role, etc. etc. So we can go down that rabbit hole, which I'm sure people will be interested in. However, the idea of this from my perspective is let's talk about the themes of promotion. So there's doing your job which is kind of the you can't get promoted without doing your job well but there's other things that are kind of influencing what a promotion is and so when you're talking about getting ready for the next role or it would be a disaster if someone gets promoted too early what are some of the themes that you're seeing that someone has to excel at in order to jump to the next level. I know this is very broad across the leveling framework, but just general themes you are looking at for different folks in this zone.
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think the main one is the scope of the role. And we know that as you get promoted, the scope increases. Now generally as an IC, you're going to increase scope based on the amount of work that you do. And at some point you're going to increase scope beyond your core role, your core function that you're supporting. And there's an expectation there that you should be thinking about what am I doing that impacts other people and how can I make life better for others. Ultimately a manager wants you to solve as many problems as you can because it's less work for them to do then. So the more that you're expanding your scope outside of your core role, the more potential you have operating at a higher level and the more likely you are to be promoted is kind of the oversimplification of how I think about it. Kind of going back to those three things that I led with upfront, kind of what is the cost of inaction? So you might really be nailing your higher metrics as a recruiter and you're crushing roles and that's great. And you're going to score higher in the performance for the metrics you're measured against. But if someone in your team is struggling and you're not helping to pull them up along with you, then while you're overperforming in your core role, you're not really thinking beyond that role. And so by not supporting the others, the actual overall recruiting business as a whole is not as strong as it potentially could be. And that's where the systematization of what you're doing could be really helpful. So let's say you found a really good way to reach out to a certain type of candidate and there are three other recruiters on your team who are contacting the same candidate. Are you actually compiling a pack with different data points of advice for reaching out to that candidate? Like what messages are resonating? Are you sharing profiles amongst the team? Are you taking a leadership position and actually pulling everyone else along with you? Or are you just focusing solely on your roles and by doing that, you're outperforming your peers, but you're not actually pulling the whole team up. And so I think that they're the kind of main things I would think about there and really at the more junior level. I think as you get more senior, the executive stakeholder presence becomes a little bit more critical. Like how are you actually communicating what's happening to the executives and how can I improve that communication by adopting more of a bluff framework where you're taking advantage of the limited time they have to get the recommendations that you're putting forward approved so that you can actually implement them. And everything's got to be built off this foundation of know your job well, you're overperforming in your job, but you're also starting to expand your scope beyond that and pulling other people along with you. Taking on projects that are outside of your core scope that is going to improve things for other people is kind of a really good way to demonstrate that you're contributing in a way that you're thinking about the bigger picture. So I think there's kind of a lot tied in there. And I think one of the dangers that I've heard in the past is that you have to do a second project in order to get promoted. And so a few people do the project in order to get promoted, and quite often that fails. Whereas if you're doing a project because it's going to make the business stronger and you've seen how your work ties into something that's a little bit broader, and no one's actually asked you to do it, you just essentially lean in there. That's the thing that's going to get you promoted. So it's not focusing on the promotion itself. It's actually focusing on the impact of the work that you're doing and how you can potentially expand that.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I think so. A few things. One, on Unicorn I have a recruiting career ladder. I also have a compensation and leveling framework that kind of applies to generalized competency. So if you want to take a look, this was a comp framework that I developed with a couple of the major comp houses and actually rolled out to some degree when I was a recruiting leader. It shows you the progression both on the IC and the manager track of how role scopes increase as you take on more and more responsibility in each individual track. So I'll flash it up on the screen now and if you're interested, it's a free download. You can use it at your company today and it's just an interesting perspective to see what are the different competencies people look at as people progress through a compensation framework, a leveling framework, and then if you download the recruiting career ladder, then you'll see kind of these more subjective qualities that have been used in the past by my companies or others to identify high performers or high potentials in the recruiting space. As a function of headcount though, I think there's information, so if you are trying to get a promotion as five different profiles: a director of FP&A, HRBPs, recruiting operations, recruiting leaders, and revenue teams. So if you're one of these five teams, you're doing things both in role and beyond scope to get promoted, there's things in the headcount data you can use to better communicate the reasons for why things are or aren't happening to move from a reactionary environment to a predictive environment to align what you're doing cross-functionally so to be able to communicate the impact or requirements of your team across multiple different business units. You'll be able to provide context on why things happened and measurable solutions from that context. By doing this, you're able to have two main outputs. You'll be able to help your leader or functional team be better at whatever it is that they're doing, and you'll be able to simplify the information for external consumption. So every executive on a team has something to do. They don't really care about what you got going on. So if you can make them care, that is a huge indicator as to whether or not that person will, in that same calibration meeting we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, give you the thumbs up. And so from a promotions perspective, thematically, we want to talk about the different headcount data that can help you do things that are important to your team. So I don't know if I'm missing a certain thing there, if that kind of resonates with you, but I'd love to talk in order. Let's just start with the FP&A team, what can get them promoted from headcount data.
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think that the focus on headcount data is going to be critical here because there's so many things that you could be doing. There's like projects and improvements and all these kind of things that you could do. But the exec who's going to be in the room approving the promotion only really cares about so what. So what you improved the candidate screening rate, so what for an FP&A you improved the accuracy of the forecast. And what it actually means is that the headcount cost is more predictable and the matching of the supply and demand of the headcount in the business is more in line with the overall goals of the business. And headcount is ultimately the metric. There's revenue and there's cost. Those are the two big things that are important to the business. The majority of cost in most businesses is headcount and the majority of revenue is generated by sales reps. And so I think these five roles that you've created are pretty key because the sales leader is the one who's going to be generating the most of the revenue. The other roles are the ones who are going to be influencing the headcount cost the most. If you can match those two things together, you're going to maximize success of the business. So I think that's like the first thing to bear in mind. If we assume that our goal is to improve the quality of our headcount forecasts and our headcount management, then all these things that tie back to headcount should in theory be supported by senior leadership. So when we think about FP&A, I think improving the accuracy of the forecast is going to be really key because then you can make cleaner decisions on how many heads you need at a given point in time. And it kind of feeds into everything. So if that forecast is more accurate, you don't get to a point midway through the year where you're burning twice as much on headcount as you should, and you have to have a huge layoff, you have to maybe restructure the teams, you have to freeze hiring for a while and although those are really important financial decisions, what's often forgotten about is the knock-on implications to the overall employee brand and the employer brand. So as you're trying to attract new talent, if you just had a layoff, it's much less likely to attract the best people. If you're trying to retain key people and you just had a layoff, the internal employees that remain kind of have this kind of guilt where they have just watched half of their team go through a riff. And so there's less incentive for them to consider staying. So there's kind of all these factors that really come primarily from this FP&A process. So if you're able to message why your forecasts are improving the overall performance of the business from a headcount perspective as an FP&A leader, then that's going to position you well as thinking about the big picture, which is essentially what you need to do as you're getting promoted. And that's the lens of how I would think about that when we're working with FP&A teams. Curious, you've probably spoken to a lot more FP&A leaders than me. Does that resonate?
Eric Guidice Yeah, I think like, you're right. The FP&A person controls cost and FP&A leaders who get promoted do two things with that. They have a predictable cost model and everyone feels good about it. And one of the things that I noticed, this was even before headcount 365, is I would go and as a consultant try to align the headcount process for different teams and there were two types of finance methodologies. One was that the finance team and the recruiting team were in sync about what it takes to meet the headcount demand and they had a plan and a cost and a budget and they were predictable about that budget so that they were in sync about what could happen. So if demand exceeded capacity there was an honest conversation about what a recruiting team needed to meet the demand because there was a predictable impact on revenue. Then there were other teams where the finance team kind of was like, yeah, you can have whatever you want and we just control costs without necessarily taking responsibility for the recruiting capacity. So like the finance person didn't want to be the bad guy and say no, no, no, but they knew by restricting capacity for the recruiting team they would then have this savings. And so it's just stylistically those were two major things that we had to navigate. It took us a few learnings to figure out the finance team actually doesn't want to be this transparent and it's for a number of reasons. I believe it all has to do with the headcount data is so unpredictable that at the end of the day, if the finance team overspends and has to hit that riff, no one's getting promoted that day. That's just a bad time. So if they can control it, there's these two styles of doing it. So part of the reason why I made headcount 365 is so that we could democratize this data and make sure that everyone knows we are hitting this headcount goal. There will be a revenue impact, this is the cost impact, etc. So those two styles are kind of what drives an FP&A team's business. The things that I see specifically FP&A leaders get promoted over is a more accurate model, whether that's OPEX, Revenue, or any other, I see less what we call slush fund dollars. So if you're a recruiter and you go over on an offer and it's not in budget that either has to come from another role or maybe there's this other budget held to the side to account for overage that the finance team hides. So if there's less of that OPEX held to the side, it's more dollars you can invest anywhere else. And the last key theme in an FP&A promotion is accountability for outcomes. So if something didn't happen, it's not a blame game. It's not theory. It's not anecdotal. It's this was the input. This was the output. And this is the reason for that output and then a of course recommendation for change. And so when you do these things as an FP&A person, you're more liked, you are more accurate, and this allows you to kind of have a position in the company that naturally expands your scope because you are a predictable, accurate modeler rather than somebody kind of playing cost defense for the team. And so you know I know for sure at Wayfair or any other company that you've consulted or worked for, when you say a budget on the headcount plan that's not the budget that happens at the end of the year so that variance is kind of like a key piece. How do you see that play out in terms of the FP&A recruiting relationship?
Chris Mannion Yeah, it's actually very similar to what I saw in aerospace engineering. Finally, it's just kind of like two factors. One is being able to accurately predict the future. And so you say, I think this thing is going to happen. And three months later, you say, I said this was going to happen, and this is what happened. And it was correct. That's a big thumbs up because you're able to actually take data and make and infer recommendations and forecast the future, which is almost like magic for a lot of people. The second thing is when things go wrong and often they do. And I think that the focus on not doing the blame game is really important there. If something goes wrong and you don't take ownership, even though you're involved, even if it is nothing to do with you, but it impacts your metrics. I think by actually taking ownership of the resolution and then effectively communicating what went wrong, why it went wrong, what you did to resolve it and what you've done to stop it from happening again. If you nail those four things, that's going to put you in a much stronger position and put you in a good light for a future leadership role. I think leaders don't shirk responsibility. They take ownership of problems, but they make sure that problems don't happen again and again and again because they put processes into place to fix them. That's kind of going back to the big three things that I talked about upfront, but how do you systematize a process that went wrong such that it doesn't go wrong again in the future?
Eric Guidice Right. Yeah, I think specific data that comes from the headcount plan that helps achieve these outcomes, in my experience, is the in-year versus annualized spend. So if you pay a role $365 a year and you hire them on December 31st, that's $1 this year and $365 next year. And that difference as budget owners horse trade or request new roles or try to make an offer happen that's above band, they will finagle on annualized but not consider in-year. So giving a universal calculation for everybody in a standardized way is tremendously impactful for a finance leader to manage both of these budgets. And they do it with budget IDs. So having a unified ID for any opening that permeates through the FP&A system, the recruiting system, and the HRAS system allows you to track those dollars without, you know, I change the title, I change the level, while the number or the budget object is the same. A third thing is attrition forecasting, so being able to understand attrition and attrition on revenue. So I wrote an article about this as we were solving it for one of our customers is the gap of a revenue producer's attrition and the new hire. So if for that same person making $365 a year, if they produce $720 a year in revenue and you have a three month gap of someone I traded and I need to train and hire and train a new person, you're not going to make revenue, but you're going to save OPEX. So having a true cost of attrition so that you can forecast what those dollars would be is also important. The fourth thing is capacity versus demand and the ability to have a real start date. If you do not have enough recruiters to meet demand, the OPEX isn't going to get spent, the revenue is not going to get created. For FP&A leaders who are looking at using headcount data to be more predictive, it's an accurate start date, it's an accurate salary, it's the right recruiter capacity versus demand, and having all of that data automatically port into a model that allows you to then make other calculations on top of it, whether it's fully burdened cost of employment or if you have a different scenario in your FP&A tool, all of those different inputs are going to help you build a more accurate model and then communicate all the information to the different teams. So I know I hit a little snag there with the FP&A description, but that's generally the data that I see being used by FP&A people to get promotions. Did I miss anything?
Chris Mannion No, I think that's right. I think you hit on an important point there. The cost of attrition is really key because if you're just focusing on cost control, attrition is a good thing because you're reducing headcount cost. But the big picture is if that's a revenue generating role, actually most roles in the business, you have to assume that the role is there because it's critical to the operations of the business. It's not just reducing headcount cost, it's potentially reducing revenue or customer support and then retention or the ability to launch a new product and then future revenue. Understanding that big picture and being able to communicate why the headcount cost has gone down, but that is bad for the business is going to be really important there. And that's one of the key things that FP&A needs to be able to do effectively.
Eric Guidice I think bringing it back to the communication style is if you understand the information very well. Like most companies, even before headcount 365, we would implement a very tight spreadsheet process. It was very difficult to see where things originated from. So why did a change happen and what is the impact of that change? And then how do we prevent it in the future? You know, as an FP&A person, if you're trying to explain budget variance or you're going to take a bet and take money out of the slush fund for use elsewhere, being able to articulate why and defend that decision and then it actually become true are the reasons why those FP&A folks will get that promotion. You have the information, you've applied it, you've communicated its impact upwards, and then that result has actually played out based on the accuracy of your prediction and the reliability of your data. Let's talk about the next one. HRBPs. Actually, let's flip over to revenue teams. So on the other side of cost is revenue. And so if you're a revenue leader, how do you use headcount data to get promoted? And so revenue leaders have targets that their teams have to hit quota. And headcount, if you don't have the person in place to hit that head, then you're going to have a rough time hitting that quota. You're going to have to ask your team to overperform, and that team isn't going necessarily enjoy your leadership pushing them beyond the max or you're going to have to hire quickly and get folks on board to increase that quota attainment. Well let's call it the quota attainment percentage or like how accurate is the quota that you've set, how accurate is that prediction in coming true. So headcount data you can use is recruiting capacity versus demand, it's your attrition data, and it's cross-platform scenario planning. So what I see a lot in both customers and prospects alike is that folks want to determine where should a sales team be, what is the payout, what is the commission, how effective, what are their working hours, and all this information. If you can figure out how many people you need, how fast people are leaving, and what it takes to replace them, and where you put them, you're going to have a more predictive headcount forecast that then translates to a more predictive revenue forecast. What am I missing?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I just came off an engagement with a revenue leader who was trying to solve this exact problem. They had a growth target within the business and they were trying to figure out how many sales reps do we need in order to support this? And it's not just sales reps, it's them post-sales, customer success, it's pre-sales, solution engineering, like what is the overall team that's going to support the revenue goal? And quite often they're given this revenue goal by the board, by the exec team, and then they have to go away and figure out how to deliver against that. And I think where headcount data comes in and where it's really important to understand is how does the pipeline of new sales reps contribute to that revenue and how does attrition impact that revenue as well? In a typical example, maybe you have a three-month time to hire, you didn't have a three-month ramp time to actually onboard and get the sales rep up and running just to build pipeline. And then for the next three months to operate in maybe 50% capacity. So you've got nine months there where you're only going to get a month and a half's worth of productivity out of that individual. And so if you're trying to aggressively grow your sales pipeline, you almost need to start hiring the year before in order to get everyone in and ramped quickly. And then that gap that we just talked about between the cost of attrition becomes much more critical because then if someone leaves halfway through the year and it takes nine months essentially to replace that person, then for the second half of the year, you've got zero revenue coming in, even if you hire someone and you're still accruing costs for that person that you hired. It's just you're not getting the kind of revenue benefits. And this is where understanding the headcount model, being able to forecast more accurately and understanding the value of attrition, the cost of not increasing retention bonuses or not increasing retention tooling becomes huge then because you can actually start to model the potential impacts of increasing attrition. So I think the important thing for sales reps then is how does the flow of your sales team really impact your ability to deliver the revenue and being able to forecast that in advance and going back to the board and saying, you said I need to grow revenue by 50%. You've given me a 50% increase in headcount budget, but we're starting hiring on January 1st. And so for the first half of this year, we're going to meet the same revenue for next year, which means the second half of the year, I'm actually going to need double revenue. So maybe we actually need twice as many sales reps and not 50% more. And you have the data to support that because you've done the modeling and you've done the capacity part in, and then you need to hire more recruiters because you need to build more capacity on the recruiting team, which means you almost need to have started hiring recruiters three months ago in order to onboard them and wrap them up. So there are all these kind of knock-on effects to actually delivering against a revenue target and being able to anticipate that and communicate your recommendation back to the board or back to the exec team with data to support what you need will give you that ability to get the buy-in. And then if six months into the year, you're missing revenue goals, you can actually tie it back to: I said we didn't have the capacity because it was going to take this amount of time. And so we actually have to adjust our revenue goal. And it's not that the sales leader didn't do their job, it's that we just physically didn't have the capabilities to do it because we didn't plan as effectively as we could have done. And I think the communication style is really important there because you never want to be the person to say "I told you so," but you do want to be able to support your recommendations with data and to be able to point to the problem and not be pointed out as the individual who failed to achieve the goals.
Eric Guidice I think the people supply chain, as you so graciously put it in an earlier episode, is what we're talking about here. The headcount data of your organization helps you be more predictable. I think the promotion cue here is predictability and cost control. So if you're a sales leader, especially if you're a new person, this could be actually any leader. Hopefully you've built the trust through your interview process, so then it's like: this is the budget I need and I need to go do it. But if you're going to prove a case over time, you want to be able to use year-over-year data about an individual. So this ties back to that unique ID per person. So you can tell when they were hired and what the parabola of productivity is so that you can get an average tenure and you could use that tenure to predict attrition. So as you look at the rolling forecast of how many people do I have, how many people will leave, how many people do I need to join, what's the ramp time. That data with a unique ID to track individual performance will allow you to build a profile about hiring better salespeople. It will allow you to predict attrition. It will allow you to forward attrition or hire ahead of attrition so that you can have less gap between an attrited employee and ramp time. And all this predictability and all this cost control and all this revenue predictability is really what drives the promotion and the cherry on top is your ability to communicate this information to the other stakeholders so that you can advocate for this kind of optimized people supply chain for revenue production. And so I think the last way that our team helps revenue leaders at Headcount 365 specifically is we have a live recruiting capacity versus demand forecast. We also have a prioritization framework that helps people advocate for how you utilize that capacity and so giving a revenue leader transparency into what the team is working on and where their roles are allows them to activate interviewers or pseudo recruiters on their team to help supplement that capacity during times of outweighed demand versus capacity. And so for revenue leaders, the promotion comes from hitting your targets, from predictably hitting your targets and not letting your headcount get in the way, while at the same time being able to communicate these things and the priority of these things to all of your cross-functional stakeholders without coming off as "I'm more important than you" style of communication. So FP&A on the cost side, sales leaders or revenue leaders on the revenue side kind of come together to produce the operational cadence that HRBPs, recruiting operations and recruiting leaders work in. And so as the shepherds of this data, the owners of the information across cross-functional teams, these three roles also can use headcount data to get a promotion. I know you and I have built our careers on that idea. How do you use headcount data and kind of your people slash recruiting roles to get promoted? Like, what are the themes that you're pulling out? What's the data that you use to get that promotion in the people space?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think that applies to all of those roles. I think equally it's what is happening in the headcount data. What is the root cause and how can we solve that? Going back to kind of more project-expanding scope and project-based approaches to work, like what is actually happening? Do I really understand that? Do I have the right headcount data to see? Is attrition increasing? Is time to hire increasing? Is our cost per hire increasing? Not that that's so much of an issue anymore. What does our quality of hire look like? We've seen high three-month attrition rates for new hires. Like what is actually happening in the data, like segmented by team. And if you're an HRBP, you've got to really be able to get into the weeds on the teams that you're supporting so that you can really understand that flow in that people supply chain, going back to that theory that is actually going to be impacting the ability of the business to deliver. And so if you can understand that, you can then start to break it down into contributing factors. One thing I really like to do is try and understand the quantification of the impact and actually the individual items that are driving the negative impact to the overall headcount plan. With good data, it's quite easy to do that by building pivot tables and segmented things. And actually with AI, it's even easier than when I was doing it 10 years ago with SQL. So it's quite easy to do that. But then when you have that data, you can then take it forward and look for ways to improve it. And whether you do a project, whether you get buy-in from different people, whether you lead a new initiative, being able to understand the before and after impacts of what you're doing to show: okay, this is what we did. And this is the improvement that we made. Had we not done that, this is what would have happened. Bottom line upfront, this is what it costs the business. And then this is the step-change that we've made to improve things like candidate experience by implementing faster interview times or faster screening processes. And while it's decreased time to hire, the big thing we wanted to change was candidate experience because that was improving quality of hire and quality of hire was a big factor in our three-month attrition rate because we were losing the best candidates in the process. So being able to tie everything back to the source data of: this is the problem I identified. This is what I did about it. And this is how we're going to make sure that this improvement is not just a one-time thing, but is actually impactful for a long duration. And so being able to tell that story, put that into your performance review and have your manager tell that story in a calibration meeting is hugely impactful because it shows that you're impacting the whole business and not just improving your own performance. Curiously, if that kind of resonates with what you've seen.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I think thematically, that's where I'm going. I think if you're an HRBP, you're essentially representing the HR function for a customer, whether that's a budget owner or individual hiring manager. If you're in recruiting operations, you're representing the enablement of the recruiting team. And if you're a recruiting leader, you're representing the service of recruiting to the business. And so each of these roles has to be able to do that job well and also be liked. And so the be-liked part is being able to get this information into the hands of someone who can operationalize it for a better outcome for themselves. So if you're an HRBP, you want your budget owner or your client to be aligned with recruiting prioritization, with the budget and the financial alignment so that a hypothetical change isn't over or under budget, it gets declined. You want org chart changes to be properly communicated to the HR team so that that budget owner ultimately can get what they want. And so if that person views you as the enabler of their team, then they are going to advocate for your promotion. So as an HRBP, the specific headcount data that helps you get promoted is again the in-year versus annualized from the financial perspective. It's a good view of the org chart and how different horse trading, call it, or merges and splits of requisitions or adding levels or changing titles. You want to be able to have the budget owner and the HR team on the same page about what that impact would be. And then as a function of what your overall execution is, you want to be able to liaise with the recruiting team and get that person's hires prioritized and made. And so if you have one source of headcount truth where you can see the final impact, the recruiting capacity, the org impact, you'll be able to provide a better service to that budget owner and in some cases deliver it self-service or in others just represent them in that way. You know the HRBPs I see get promoted have less back and forth for approvals, they have low time to approval, they have less budget variance, and all this comes from headcount data. And so from an HRBP's perspective, if you could produce the financial alignment, if you could produce a good proactive org management, and you can liaise with the recruiting team, you are in a position to be liked and do your job well, which then kind of will be added on to the other parts of promotion, which is: can you expand beyond your role? Can you influence others, etc.? So that's what I see from the HRBP specifically. Any input before I dive into the recruitment side of things which I know you're the expert on.
Chris Mannion No, I think that makes a lot of sense. It's being able to frame the HR data in the terms that the business leader understands and ensuring that they have buy-in so they understand what they need to do in order to drive the improvements that they want. It's like we're at point A, we want to get to point B. What are the steps in order to get there? How is that supported by data? And how as the HRBP, can you drive them in the right direction so that they make the best decisions possible?
Eric Guidice Yeah. Good point. I think one of the other things that I'll, this is a good segue into recruiting operations is on every, you know, two recruiters working 10 jobs each aren't working the same workload. There's a difficulty in requisitions. There's also based on location could be just, even if it's the same time to fill, a different notice period where it takes someone to quit and start a new role. Whether you're an HRBP or recruiting operations person, you're using this data to effectively communicate deltas between expectations in reality, which is another, I think, huge part of getting promoted. So, you know, if you're a budget owner and you want someone to start tomorrow, you want them to start tomorrow. You know, you just don't care. They start tomorrow. That's what I want. So being able to effectively show people why a time to fill is different or a notice period is different or articulate the capacity of a recruiting team by way of the requisition workload and or the priority, you're going to be a much more effective communicator. And you're going to have less, you know, when I was a TA leader in an exec meeting, there would always be someone like "this isn't happening for me the way I want it to," and then you look into it and it's obviously a data issue and not a recruiter issue. So I think for recruiting operations folks specifically, you are not only that context for workload, you're looking at how changes impact the team and you're trying to be predictive about this time impact and the specific headcount data you use as a recruiting operations person is the requisition workload information associated with it. It's tracking changes to a requisition so if somebody changes a requisition while a recruiter is working on it, it's going to extend the time to fill versus doing it before the plan. Also, if you change something at the offer period, you're more likely to have an HR leader be surprised like "why did we hire another director" and it's like well the urgency of the offer we had to hire them, we were going to lose this candidate, we wouldn't hit this goal, yada yada yada, right? So as a recruiting operations person, you're pulling in headcount context from the recruiting system, the budget owner, from the finance team to say what is the actual workload or the balance of this workload relative to the roles that we hired. So like last year we hired 100 roles, well they were all in, we hired an inside sales center in Phoenix whereas this year we're hiring a whole new office because we just got fundraising, we need 100 new executives. That's just two totally different things with two totally different times and workloads etc. So as a recruiting operations person, sometimes in conjunction with that HRBP, that's the headcount data you're using to try to get your own promotion is this extracted information about the context of work to then become more predictive about time or effort. Anything that you did as an analytics person that might supplement this from the headcount data.
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think without repeating some of the things we've mentioned on other podcasts, I think being able to break down the impact that the initiatives have to the headcount plan, to the capacity plan, be able to model more effectively as a recruit ops leader and be able to group together all of the contributing factors is going to be really key. That's essentially what you're doing day to day. How do you enable the team to deliver against the goals more effectively and then demonstrate the impact with data? That's where everything ties back to what we're talking about with the importance of having good headcount data and a good ability to communicate the "so what" from that data.
Eric Guidice And what I like about your bluff method is the bottom line upfront, not bluffing. What I like about that communication style is that if something doesn't happen, like that's the main, if you look at the recruiting QBR you could download off Unicorn. The first slide is: did we hit or did we not hit? And what is the reason why? And so by using this headcount data, you can communicate very effectively to an executive who either has low patience or low desire to broadly understand the underlying factors. And you can disseminate things down to these kind of core categories. So we hit or we miss because workload was harder or less, capacity was more or less, changes were higher or lower, budgets were higher or lower at this given period. There are very definitive reasons why something was hit or missed and then on the other side of them you can have a solution that is very simple to understand. Not enough capacity, hire more capacity. Over budget, reduce amount of roles. It's like you can do these kind of cause and effect that make "number go up big" or "number go up good" executives happy with the way that you report. And then if you have all of your data in one source of truth, then you can go provide that more depth of context for that specific individual who's looking for a more broad explanation for something they're trying to do. Right. So for HRBPs, rec ops, you're going to be the context providers for a simplified communication up, which then leads me into my most hybrid role, the recruiting leader, whether you're a 200 person or 20,000 person company, you're the owner of the service of recruiting. So all of these four other roles are contributing to your ability to do things and as a recruiting leader what gets you promoted is having a predictable recruiting service and your ability to distribute accountability beyond the recruiting team. So if everyone thinks a recruiting problem is a recruiting problem, that's not a good look for you. And then lastly, getting predictive about what the service is able to do, whether it be with time or with budget for your cross-functional stakeholders. And so as a recruiting leader, the headcount data that you'll use specifically is: what is the demand of the recruiting team and how did that demand change? What changes have happened and how did the timing of those changes impact my work? What is the workload score or the quantification of the number of roles and how does that impact both based on location and difficulty, our ability to fulfill things on time. You'll also look at the budget information to align with your cross-functional stakeholders and the org information, so job level, job title, reporting structure, management to IC ratios, to keep in touch with your HR leader. So as kind of this point person of what's happening to recruiting, yes you'll use some funnel data and some experience scores to talk about the efficiency of your organization, but your C-levels and your cross-functional stakeholders want to know: is the service of recruiting predictable. And so there's a number of ways to produce that, but I'll pause there because we both shared this role. What are the things that earned you your promotions or your upward trajectory in your roles?
Chris Mannion Yeah, I think the ability to do the job well is expected. I think the ability to go beyond the scope of your role to fix problems that no one else is focused on is key. I always used to brief people: find something that's really important that nobody currently cares about and then solve that problem as it impacts your day to day, but also helps other people. So for me, that was actually getting into headcount planning. We had a headcount planning team and they were very effective, but as a campus leader, I had to forecast 15 months ahead and our current headcount forecast was three to six months ahead, just given the quarter-by-quarter cycle. So I had to build my own forecasting tool. We had a rec ops leader who was responding to the demand from the recruiting side, but given what we were doing with programmatic recruiting, we actually had a more predictable demand for how we would need coordination teams and conference rooms and phone booths and everything else that came with it. And so for the first time, I actually took the headcount plan, converted it into a request for capacity for non-recruiting resources, sent that back up to the recruiting ops leader to give me all that, then communicated back to the business leaders how much time they're going to need to invest in the things that we need them to do in order to deliver successful hires. And being able to pull on all these different stakeholders in order to drive the performance of my team, but actually lift everyone else up at the same time, meant that we had the best recruiting year ever, but we also systematized all those things so that the baseline performance of everyone else increased at the same time. And I think for me doing that within the first six months got me promoted very quickly. But I wasn't doing it to try and get promoted. I was doing it because I saw these as gaps between where the team was and where I wanted it to be. So it's kind of what we've covered really, expanding scope beyond what you need to do. It's being able to bluff, communicate "why do we need to do this?" It's because having better predictability is going to improve performance for everyone. And then how do we systematize this so that I'm not just pulling in these resources for three months, but actually creating a process that's going to impact us for years to come because it's more of a standard approach now. So it's a step-change in how we do things and not a short-term project. That was my own experience. And then that's what I coached people to do to get promoted—not to get promoted themselves, even though everyone did, but to improve the performance of their work outside of their scope, which led to them getting promoted.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I think all the people who didn't try to get promoted, they tried to solve a problem and the promotion happened after. I think specifically going for a promotion is its own strategy. Again, we could save that for a bonus, an appendix episode of the head count experts. But I think if you're lucky enough to have a Chris-level person in your headcount process, you're going to get a systematized repeatable process that allows you to make reliable predictions that can be repeatable across teams, regardless of who's owning the data once that system's in place. If you don't, it's part of the reason why I created a headcount system like Headcount 365, because it does a couple of things that are baseline for extracting this headcount data. So one, having a single source of truth across what the FP&A sheet is or what the departments in your FP&A system are relative to your HRAS relative to your ATS, allowing cross-platform tracking in real-time is going to be the source data that helps you improve fidelity, whether it's you, an analyst, or a model. And that reduces the amount of time it takes to get to the base level of information for any period of time. And one of the benefits that I tried to give folks is information over time, and no matter how good a company is at spreadsheets, last year's spreadsheet is only as good as last year's spreadsheet. It will not get retroactively updated if you reorg your departments or cost centers or people leadership. And so having a consistent formatted structured set of data over time allows you to extract year-over-year insights and reduce the amount of individual data entry errors that might happen. Those are, you know, creating a data layer for headcount in my opinion is kind of the root of how do people then use this data to get their promotion. And so if you're operating off of a spreadsheet or ad hoc rolling forecasts that are difficult to combine, take a look at Chris's course on how to organize this into everything from a recruiting capacity demand forecast to an interview hours forecast and even import this into Claude to kind of help you enhance your recruiting and headcount experience. And once you're familiar with those in that area or in that zone, the Headcount 365 system will do a lot of automations cross-platform and across plan years so that this data set gets maintained over time. And so we're both offering different ways to achieve these solutions. Chris, of course, you're developing some SHRM courses. So if you're a SHRM member and you're looking to maintain your credits, you're now offering some SHRM-approved courses or you're in process of doing so. Do you want to talk a little bit about those?
Chris Mannion Yeah. First course goes live April 20th. We're probably going to have a live cohort as well starting in May. I'm really excited. It's actually become a bit of a monster. I think I initially had this small scope of what I wanted to do and just kind of grouping everything together. I realized that data analytics, AI and communication are not three standalone tracks, but actually integrated, building on everything that we've discussed here. So I think this first course that we're going to launch in this new structure is so exciting. It's like: how do you build a capacity model? How do you then use AI to build and improve that capacity model? And then how do you communicate the output of that capacity model in a way that is actually going to be impactful to your stakeholders? So kind of tying everything together, but really trying to upskill HR to be the data leaders when they go to the business. So I'm really excited to get that launched. We already have a few people kind of signed up for the advanced course. So I'm just excited to get that up and running.
Eric Guidice Yeah, I'm excited to go through the full version. I've had a couple of previews. It's very easy to see how your experience and background. So for those of you who don't know, Chris is a high-level analyst with government experience in supply chain planning. Taking that information and democratizing this information for the rest of the recruiting or finance space to consume through these courses has been tremendously impactful for me individually. It's been a great learning experience. We try to bring that to you on the podcast here. And so I highly encourage you to check it out. This is not coming from, it's not an e-learning course for the purposes of trying to make a buck on e-learning. It's genuine information sharing, which continues to be impressive. And I encourage everybody to check that out. So from the brand of Chris Mannion, it's called the Meander Town Academy. We'll put some links in the description below. If you're looking for a promotion, before we even, here's my conclusion: my promotion style before anything is find somebody who's in a place where you want to be and stand next to them. So I've stood next to Chris Mannion. I think everyone should. And so hopefully this information will help everyone get promoted in their role. If you're not using headcount data to do so, either one of us are happy to help out. And stay tuned for the next episode of Headcount Experts, where we'll talk more not only about the promotion process, but about how to extract the most from this data set.
Chris Mannion Cool, sounds good, you're very kind.
Eric Guidice Alright, episode 16, that's a wrap.
Chris Mannion Alright.
Headcount Data: The Key to Your Next Promotion
For Finance, Revenue, HR & TA leaders— the key to getting your next promotion could be hidden in your headcount data.
Promotions aren't just about doing your current job well; they are about demonstrating the potential to excel at the next level. This episode explores how various stakeholders can leverage headcount data to solve high-level business problems, expand their scope, and communicate impact to executives.
The Hidden Headcount Story During Performance Reviews
Promotions are tied to results. You need people to hit results. If you’re understaffed, the probability you hit your results is lower. Telling the story about why you’re understaffed, with added context about attrition, ramp, job approvals, org changes, recruiting speed and dozens of other data points is critical foundation for earning a promotion.
If you’re tracking this movement across disparate spreadsheets, or multiple versions of the financial plan, you’re going to have a rough time explaining variance between what was expected of you+ your team vs. what you actually produced.
Expectation Deltas: Headcount plans change, but performance measurement is against the latest expectation. If you don’t know how performance expectations evolved, you’re restricted to only talking results. We don’t discount the ability to “make it happen” in any role, but tracking the changes to the expectations of performance helps better prepare for what’s to come.
Change History & Timing: A record of signoff is downside protection against “hindsight 20/20”. Knowing how things changed from one version to the next helps
Accountability for external impact on your Results: If another team has an impact on your headcount, which in turn has an impact on your results, it’s important to track this impact for 2 reasons. First, you’re able to explain variance in performance vs expectations. Second, and more important to earning a promotion, you can prevent these same issues from happening again next time around.
Methods to Apply Headcount Data to Development
The "Performance vs. Potential" Promotion Framework
Understanding the criteria used in calibration meetings is the first step toward moving up.
The Two Axes: Promotions are based on current performance and future potential.
The "Disaster" Risk: Excelling as an Individual Contributor (IC) does not automatically mean you are ready for a leadership role.
Expanding Scope: To get promoted, you must solve problems that impact others and the broader business, rather than just hitting your personal KPIs.
The BLUF Communication Method
Executive stakeholders have limited time and care most about the "so what" of any data point.
Bottom Line Up Front: Start with the recommendation and the "why" before diving into methodology or data.
Three Critical Questions: Effective communication should address the cost of doing nothing, how the data solves a recurring problem, and a clear recommendation for action.
Key Takeaways from Headcount Experts Episode 16
This episode provides a tactical roadmap for using data to "pull the whole team up" and secure a promotion. You will learn ways to identify the cost of inaction and frame your projects as systematized improvements rather than one-time fixes. By mastering the BLUF framework, you'll gain the ability to communicate with executives in a way that builds trust and highlights your readiness for increased responsibility.
Persona-Based Strategies for Career Advancement
FP&A Leaders: Promotion comes from creating a predictable cost model and reducing "slush fund" dollars. By using headcount data for accurate attrition forecasting and unified budget IDs, finance leaders move from "cost defense" to strategic modeling.
Revenue Leaders: Success is defined by hitting targets predictably. Using headcount data to align recruiter capacity with hiring demand ensures sales teams aren't understaffed, protecting the revenue forecast.
HRBPs & Recruiting Ops: These roles advance by becoming "context providers". By using data to explain why time-to-fill varies or how requisition changes impact workloads, they eliminate "surprises" for budget owners and streamline the approval process.
Recruiting Leaders: Promotions are earned by building a predictable recruiting service and distributing accountability across the business so that "recruiting problems" aren't viewed in a vacuum.
Whether you are in Finance, HR, or Recruiting, you'll walk away with specific metrics from headcount data that can be used to prove your strategic value to the organization.