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The core purpose of headcount management is to forecast and manage how worker headcount will meet current short and long-term business objectives. Within companies, effective headcount management requires cross-functional participation. It’s commonly spearheaded by the Finance, Planning, and Analysis (FP&A) team requesting inputs from company leadership. It is maintained, however, by HR or Recruiting departments.  If it is handled by Recruiting, then Recruiting Operations is often the one keeping everything running smoothly. 

So, what exactly can you do as a Recruiting Operations practitioner to enable best practices for effective headcount management? While each organization differs, three common best practices for effective headcount management include implementing strong data hygiene, approval chains, and consistent processes. 

Manage the Data

As a Recruiting Operations practitioner, it will be your responsibility to maintain the headcount management data regularly. You can implement controls that reduce manual maintenance of the data upkeep while ensuring accuracy, completeness, and consistency by taking a systematic approach. 

Below are key practices you can implement at your company:

• Assign each headcount a unique identifier

• Your company’s headcount data will contain identical job titles, departments, and planned start dates, so implementing a way to differentiate one role from another will allow you to easily keep track of how certain open headcount is filled. You can decide what you want to name this identifier (i.e. Position ID or Headcount ID) and its unique logic, just be sure to align with your team on its purpose and how it will be maintained. Some common unique identifier examples are below.

• Implement an approval chain when opening jobs

• Before your recruiters begin working on filling a role, ensure you have a systemized approval chain in your Application Tracking System (ATS). This approval chain serves as a risk control and will allow you to check headcount data (Position IDs, job descriptions, job title, salary ranges, etc) accurately and consistently.  It’s best to have approval chains with at least 3 cross-functional members as each approver will likely look for different items. Common approval chain members include HR Business Partners (HRBPs)/Head of Talent, Business Unit Lead/Chief of Staff, and a Finance Lead. 

• Input your headcount management data consistently in the ATS

• Approved open headcount from your Finance team will typically live in a spreadsheet. However, don’t let that deter you from how you can optimize the usage of your ATS to serve as the source of truth when tracking open headcount. Your ATS can serve as a medium to host open headcount data. This will require creating the necessary data infrastructure to ensure you can keep track within the system itself. Some common quick data infrastructure builds can include:

• Custom fields (for salary/equity ranges),

• Single select fields (for job levels, priority hiring),

• Date fields (for planned start dates). 

As you keep this data in your ATS, you can easily create and run reports that will help you keep track of recruiting metrics.

Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize 

Not only is data integrity integral for effective headcount management, but championing hiring prioritization is too. The number of roles to fill in a hiring plan for organizations changes frequently depending on company performance making hiring workers at the right time crucial. A practical way to help make sure recruiters are focused is by matching each open headcount with a hiring priority ranking (highest, medium, low or P0, P1, P2). 

As you incorporate a hiring prioritization policy at your company, be sure to enable the below practices:

• Define your hiring priority rankings

• Before you begin ranking each open headcount, define what each ranking means clearly and set expectations about who is responsible for the ranking. For example, how is a P0 hire different from a P1 hire versus a P2? Each organization will have different definitions, but some common levers that differentiate rankings are: 

• How critical the role is to the survival of the business (Is the role revenue generating?)

• The job level of the role (Will the role be a VP, Director, or Manager level?)

• The career track (Will this role serve as a people manager building out an entire team or will they be an individual contributor?)

• Align with cross-functional partners 

• As you rank each open headcount with a priority ensure your cross-functional partners such as senior leadership, hiring managers, and HRBPs are aligned. Without their alignment, it will be difficult to launch any effective and strategic hiring initiatives for the Recruiting team. Controls that can be put into place to ensure alignment on hiring priorities can include having HRBPs and hiring managers initially inputting the priority rankings for each open headcount and then having senior leadership approve these requests on a specific cadence (monthly/quarterly). It is best to not have the rankings change on a weekly basis without a written exception process as it can take time to start finding the right candidates.  This is a good place to leverage previous hiring data to level set expectations.  Additionally, the approval to the exemption should always be written as this will allow you to successfully document and audit changes. 

• Train your recruiters

• With each priority ranking, ensure your recruiters understand the expectations for a P0, P1, P2 role.  It’s important to keep in mind a consistent hiring experience regardless of role, but the expectations of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) should look different when focusing on a high-priority role versus a low-priority role. You do not want to burn out your recruiters by requiring them to juggle a massive requisition load without direction. Make sure that your documentation is easy to read by having it in a chart or table in your Recruiting playbook or internal wiki page. Additionally, work with your recruiting leadership team to understand if part of how they will track recruiter performance will involve the recruiter’s adherence to the SLAs.

Sync & Collaborate

Just as prioritization is important for effective headcount management, meeting regularly with cross-functional partners is too. Effective headcount management is a team effort not solely run by one group. With this collaborative spirit in mind, you, as the Recruiting Operations practitioner, can establish a regular monthly cadence to sync with your Finance and HRBP teams. Each team will be busy with their daily responsibilities, but this monthly sync can serve as a way to review how hiring is tracking towards Finance’s projections and if any adjustments need to be made to those forecasts.  As the Recruiting team continues to fill roles, you can scale back your meetings as needed.  

Below are some practical tips on building the rigor behind recurring syncs:

• Invite your FP&A and HRBPs to recurring syncs with a set agenda

• For these meetings, have a planned agenda and encourage attendees to add topics. Keeping one rolling agenda document attached to your meeting invite allows attendees to easily access previous meeting notes and refresh themselves on prior decisions and action items. Common agenda topics can include updates on open headcount by department, changes to hiring budgets, and troubleshooting any process challenges.

• Create a group communication channel or message for asynchronous collaboration 

• There will be months when it will be too busy to meet all at the same time. Use asynchronous communication mediums to provide headcount management updates. These mediums can include Slack channels, group messages, or a detailed email  sent to cross-functional team members. It’s important to keep the communication consistent and to build rapport. Additionally, determine what channel should be used when official changes need to be documented.

Filling the hiring plans of companies may seem challenging, but with a set of best practices, you can avoid chaos and have structure. Data integrity can optimize the usage of headcount data within your ATS and serve as an anchor to accurately depict your recruiting team’s performance.  Championing hiring prioritization will let your Recruiting team work smarter versus work harder. Setting the cadence of recurring syncs with your Finance and HRBP team builds visibility and trust as your team acquires the next best talent for the organization. Utilizing these best practices will enhance your recruiting impact at your organization.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and they do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company. Assumptions made in the analysis are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author. Since we are critically-thinking human beings, these views are always subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time. Please do not hold them in perpetuity.