5 Tips For Using a Headcount Planning Template Effectively

Using a headcount planning template can help you develop a headcount strategy, understand where your best hires are coming from, identify current and future needs, and organize information for all stakeholders to access.

There are five main areas where a headcount planning template can help guide you in building your workforce and improving collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters. Learning how to leverage your data effectively across these five areas will improve the accuracy of your headcount forecasting and tracking and improve speed to hire, cost of hire, and Quality of Hire.

1. Weekly Recruiter Summary

Your weekly recruiter summary lets you see at-a-glance the quick breakdown of each recruiter and their stats, as well as how they compare to each other in regard to recruiter performance.

• Requisition analysis: Total requisitions, openings, and applicants

• Awaiting review: Total unreviewed, unreviewed employee referrals, and % unreviewed

• Weekly activity: New applicants, and moved to screening, interviewing, or closing

• Recruiter hires: Past week, current year, and annual time to hire and cost to hire

This shows how each recruiter is contributing to the goal of getting the organization to the required headcount.

2. Open Requisitions By Recruiter

Go granular and dig deep into each recruiter’s pipeline. View job title, department, and hiring manager at-a-glance, and review start date, days open, and number of applicants interviewed. In addition to reviewing the status and weekly activities, check on:

• Current funnel status: In review, screening, interview, closing, or hired

• Average days in each stage: Time spent in review, screening, interview, or offer  

• Totals: For recruiter, hiring manager, tech screens, on-sites, and offers

• Requisition conversions: Screenings, phone interviews, onsite interviews, and offer-to-hire ratios

This breaks down each recruiter’s hiring funnel to highlight any existing inefficiencies and miscommunications between hiring manager and recruiter resulting in bottlenecks or sharp, unanticipated drop-off at any stage.

3. Open Requisitions By Business Unit

Review hiring status by department, further broken down by role, across the same tracking metrics and stages used for open requisitions by the recruiter.

This gives department heads the specific information they need regarding their own headcount status without having to dig through all of the data. It’s a good way to support collaborative hiring as well, as department heads can draw team members into the process.

4. Calculator

A critical component of the yearly headcount planner, this provides a straightforward breakdown of the numbers, including but not limited to:

• Total number of individual contributors and managers

• Salary data

• Expected annual churn

• Number of staff to replace yearly

• Cost to replace

• Time to replace

This provides important data regarding anticipated labor costs and delivers better accuracy in headcount planning.

5. Source of Hire

Finally, Source of Hire is a crucial piece of the headcount planning puzzle. Where are your most prolific and profitable sources of new employees? Unpack your:

• Internal sources

• External sources

• Referral hires

• Job board hires

• Social media hires

• Recruiter sources

• Promotion data

• Other sources

This helps organizations to focus on hiring sources that provide the most qualified applicants and new employees who deliver when it comes to Quality of Hire.

Being able to use a headcount planning template effectively leads to a better understanding of what is driving hiring processes and where your organization’s strengths and weaknesses are when it comes to recruitment.  

Get started with headcount planning today by downloading this free and fully customizable headcount planning template developed by the Crosschq team.

For more information on how Crosschq can help your organization predict and plan for recruitment needs while improving retention and quality of hire, contact our talent intelligence team for a free demonstration of our entire suite of products today.