Effective headcount planning can help you optimize growth, reassess your future goals, and get a handle on your recruitment needs.
Headcount planning is much more than simply taking a count of your current employees and open positions. It’s a holistic, organizational practice that requires effort from various departments, including HR, finance, department managers, and more.
Below we’ll get into everything you need to know about headcount planning.
Headcount planning is about making sure your hiring needs are aligned with your short and long-term business plans. Sometimes referred to as headcount capacity planning or headcount budget planning, it involves various departments coming together to analyze data and assess your hiring needs moving forward.
With an effective headcount planning strategy, you’ll be able to:
The actual headcount part of the headcount planning process is fairly simple. It involves taking a count of all your current employees and estimating how many open vacancies you’ll need.
Before you can actually get there, though, you need to assess your areas of weakness, your current employees’ skill-set, and what more you might need out of your workers to reach your future goals. If your plan is to reach a new geographic market, for example, you might need to take on a few marketing hires from that region.
Your HR team, financial leaders, departmental managers, and executive members all need to collaborate to headcount effectively. If headcount planning is about aligning your long-term goals with your current workforce, then upper management needs to know what kind of skill-set their current workforce has and departmental leaders need to know where the future of the business is headed.
While headcount planning will look different for each company, there are a few best practices pretty much any organization can follow. Here are a few tips that can integrate into pretty much any headcount planning strategy.
If you don’t have a plan for your headcount forecast, you might spend resources on hires you don’t need. Headcount strategies are about planning and analyzing where your business needs to go to succeed. Without a headcount strategy, you’re essentially hiring blind.
Headcount capacity planning refers to the maximum amount of work you’re able to output with your current workforce. You can break this down by multiplying the number of employees you have by the maximum number of hours they’re able to work each week/month.
If the kind of productivity you need can’t be accomplished with your current capacity, then you need to increase your headcount capacity or take on new technologies that can make up for the gap in hours.
A headcount budget plan is about agreeing on what kind of resources you can and should allocate to your hiring needs. Based on your data and findings, some departments should be prioritized more than others in terms of their hiring budget. This requires the most planning and collaboration because a redundant hire isn’t just costly, but it will hold you back from reaching your goals.
You can simplify the headcount planning process by integrating an interactive and collaborative hiring solution, like Crosschq’s TalentWall™.
Crosschq’s TalentWall™ converts your ATS candidate pipeline into a real-time, interactive card wall. TalentWall™ will give you and everyone on your team access to:
With Crosschq’s TalentWall™, you get all your employee profile information, cost calculations, capacity planning, open jobs, and more, all in the same place. What you need to do is fill in that information with the right analysis data, metrics, headcount numbers, turnover rate, and other key insights.
Crosschq takes the guesswork out of hiring by empowering your team with everything they need to plan effectively. Not only do you have a transparent, clear, and collaborative solution to organize your needs, but you have an industry leader in 360 reference checking, talent analytics, and talent sourcing.
Create a headcount planning strategy that all your team leaders and recruiters will appreciate with Crosschq.