Bringing recruiter capacity insights for strategic headcount planning

Dannielle Romoleroux

Product Marketing

Posted on

June 21, 2023

Articles

Understanding your team’s capacity as it relates to meeting goals is necessary for every department, and Talent Acquisition is no different. The hires TA makes or doesn’t make have critical business implications.

Whether your organization is in a hiring frenzy or simply recruiting for backfills, having clarity into what your team can handle is essential to running an efficient and strategic recruiting department.

Since its inception, TA Leaders have used Talent Compass to capacity plan and manage headcount goals. Carmen Coleman at Envoy shares how:

Gem [Talent Compass] essentially tells me how many hours of work we’ll have to put in to suffice a new headcount. Based on historical conversion rates for that role, I know how many outreaches my team will have to make, how many phone screens, how many onsites, how many offers extended to get an offer-accept. As soon as you have that data, you know whether you’re under-resourced or not. So if I need to go to leadership and say, I need more sourcers if we’re really going to hire this many people, Gem has already made the argument for me.

We’ve taken it a step further with our newest Talent Compass enhancement, Capacity Planner. With real-time ATS updates, scenario modeling, and historical recruiter output, Capacity Planner helps TA become trusted partners by delivering talent to the business on time and under budget.

Strengthen your partnership with Finance

Finance has revenue in mind and requires TA to explain how it plans to deliver the headcount to hit it. Unfortunately, many TA leaders struggle to come prepared with data that support these conversations. With Capacity Planner, talent leaders can justify the resources they need and establish realistic hiring targets in a language that Finance can understand.

Capacity planning is important for our operations team. It answers the following questions; what are our resources? What can we actually accomplish with them? Business priorities shift over time and we have to be able to respond. Having a really quick way to look at our capacity and how we are planning for it is really powerful. Gem has all the data that leads to those assumptions.

Anonymous, TA Leader at global manufacturing company

Create a flexible plan without the extra work

It’s time you had a plan that can flex to the sudden changes in your organization. Everything from a turnover to hiring a new recruiter will impact your plan, and Capacity Planner allows you to scenario plan for potential unexpected changes before they happen. Proactive visibility into what the plan will look like when a change happens helps you anticipate where to reallocate resources.

When you’re staring at a blank sheet or working from one that someone else created, it’s hard to really understand your recruiter capacity breakdown and how it might change depending on different circumstances. With [Capacity Planner], you have the brain space to do this strategic work and can test your assumptions to get a more accurate view.

Shannon Lovelace-White, Manager, Talent Operations and Enablement at Human Interest

Set the right expectations with business partners

Without insight into TA's current workload and bandwidth, it's no surprise that some business partners may think recruiters can simply tack on more open headcount without any trade-offs! By level-setting expectations and making the capacity limitations clear, TA can establish a mutual understanding of what’s possible and what isn’t backed by accurate data on recruiter capacity.

Balance workload equally across your team

According to SHRM’s State of the Workplace report, 70% of HR professionals believe they are working over capacity and 47% of employees have little energy to participate in nonwork activities. Recruiter burnout is a real problem. Gem can help make workload distribution more even. Capacity Planner tracks which recruiters are working on specific roles, identifies who can take on additional responsibilities, and rearranges the team to ensure equitable workload distribution.

As companies grow, spreadsheets quickly become difficult to organize and manage effectively. The beauty of having the Capacity Planner is that it allows us to consolidate our tools and trust Gem as the source of truth for all things sourcing, reporting, and planning. It's intuitive and accessible to users who may not be spreadsheet-savvy, and alleviates any fear they may have of breaking things. Connor Carion, Senior Talent Operations Manager at Webflow

‍What’s Next

See Capacity Planner in action at our upcoming webinar on July 19th at 10AM PT, register here.

As we continue to invest in this product, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re new to Gem or interested in Talent Compass get in touch with a team member to learn more.

Contact your customer success manager today if you’re a Gem customer and want to learn more about getting started with Talent Compass!