David is a veteran human resources leader and President of IQTalent Partners, an on-demand talent acquisition and executive search firm.
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Workforce planning and recruitment resource planning might be the most important business processes for many companies, yet most business leaders do not view them as such. Human capital is quite literally capital. Without the right people in the right roles, achieving your growth and business objectives becomes considerably more difficult.
Many CEOs and CFOs continue to treat recruiting as a cost center item to be managed within the HR department, instead of treating it as a core business process. Corporate leaders may have gotten away with this attitude a few years ago, but now that we are living with the "Great Resignation," it is paramount to align your business goals with your people strategy. Quit rates, the rate at which workers are leaving their positions, spiked in September 2021, with a record number of 4.4 million resignations. October was not far behind, with 4.2 million employees leaving their jobs.
Creating a headcount plan for the coming year has become exponentially more difficult with the added variables of significant employee attrition and challenging workforce availability.
Talent leaders will need to convince executive leadership that recruiting must be treated as a business function, just like sales and manufacturing resource planning. When a company builds out a sales team, it is common practice to work backward, starting with revenue goals. Establish the company’s revenue generation and hire additional sales representatives according to those numbers. In manufacturing, planners also establish the production goals and work backward to figure the resources required to achieve those goals.
Recruiting should be viewed in much the same way: Set the headcount goals for the coming year, and then realistically calculate the productivity per recruiting resource. This will then derive the number of recruiting resources needed to achieve the business goals. When it comes to increasing capacity on the sales team, CEOs never hesitate to add positions, as they view these roles as directly impacting the bottom line. But they often resist when they need to scale the recruiting function, leaving these departments under-resourced and overworked — a tough environment for recruiters and hiring managers to find success.
The process of creating a headcount plan and corresponding recruitment resource plan is fairly straightforward. Leaders determine the new roles needed to achieve the year’s business goals, adjust for turnover and internal churn in order to generate the total number of positions that the recruiting team needs to fill. However, planners often underestimate attrition and overlook internal churn, the open roles that are filled internally, which leads to additional positions that need to be backfilled. A realistic recruitment demand plan should look like the following:
Additional Headcount + Attrition + Internal Churn = Total Headcount Demand For Recruiting
With an accurate total demand for recruiting and recruiting productivity metrics (how many roles can a recruiter manage per month), you can calculate the number of recruiting resources needed (similar to the salesforce analogy).
In today’s environment, securing quality recruiting resources is also a challenge. Expert recruiters are in high demand, and the good ones are hard to find. Consequently, talent leaders must demand a seat at the workforce planning table, and CEOs must shift from viewing recruiting as a cost center and instead see it as a business function that drives business outcomes. Hiring managers are no longer “filling a job.” Today’s professional roles require real talent and often very specific skills. These positions call for expert human capital that can be tough to locate and harder to retain.
Underestimating the value of a great recruiter while simultaneously underestimating the headcount plan is a recipe for disaster and a certain way to miss that year-end headcount and revenue goals. C-suite leaders will need to change their perspective on recruiting and talent acquisition while remaining flexible in order to win (and keep) top talent in this increasingly competitive market.
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