Planning the headcount of your talent-acquisition department

You have hiring goals. You have a budget. You even know how many people are likely to comprise your talent acquisition department.

But how will that headcount break down by subset of talent acquisition, such as recruiting operations, sourcing, branding, coordinators, and so on? 

We asked Shanil Kaderali for tips on headcount planning. Formerly with Wellpoint, Cisco, Sprinklr, and others, he’s now the talent acquisition and operations leader at MBK Real Estate Companies, based in southern California. 

So you have five people or 50 or 100 or 20 or 200 people in your recruiting department. How do you divvy that up? How many sourcers. recruiters, or coordinators or branding folks or other jobs? Is there any tip that you could give us as to how you figure out how many people might do what in a recruiting or TA department? 

As a TA ops leader and having been a TA leader in the past, you're looking at the value of talent acquisition for your organization. You're looking at it from a cost and budget-management perspective. You're looking at it from a quality-of-hire perspective. And you're looking at it from the perspective of candidate experience. And in today's world, technology and innovation are evolving so quickly, you need to incorporate that in your model. 

Obviously, some organizations have larger headcounts in terms of their hiring needs, and some have a lesser number. The organization I'm part of right now is actually a subsidiary of Mitsui and Company, a very large Japanese industrial conglomerate, $86 billion company, 50,000 employees. And MBK is one of the divisions of it. 

We hire about 2,500 a year. That's high-volume recruiting. That's not tech. And most of my world and experiences come from the tech side. I'm going to kind of straddle between both in terms of answering the question. 

If you're either new to recruiting or you're a recruiting leader, and you need to break out headcount, you need to look at the number of recruiters you need. You look at the type of reqs you're being given. So, let's say, for example, there are going to be 100 reqs that need to be filled. What type of roles are they? What levels are they? 

You can work backward and determine your head count and what your model is going to look like. So, for example, in certain tech roles – software engineers, AI, machine learning, data – you're looking at roughly four to six hires a month per recruiter based on today's current infrastructure, meaning the right applicant tracking system, having the right tools. All of that has to be incorporated into the model. 

OK. Let’s keep drilling down on this idea that it might depend on what tools and technology you have.

If you're looking at 100 reqs, you back-end a formula based on what your goals are going to be per recruiter. I would estimate between four and six reqs per recruiter. 

However, I am a very strong advocate and evangelist for technology and innovation. And I look at tools like Gem, Noon AI, Paradox, which are going to be incorporated and embedded into your process and part of that entire recruiting infrastructure, and I believe with some of these tools, you can handle five to seven hires per month. 

So with AI, you will need a smaller staff. With less technology, you're going to have to add more staff. Now, from a model perspective, [you’re looking at] one recruiter to .5 or .3 sourcers to a .25 coordinator. For example, if you have strong sourcing needs, a 3:1 or a 2:1 ratio, depending on the volume you have and depending the level of complexity of your roles, is a good way of looking at a recruiter-to-sourcer model. Typically, I've always had a 3-4:1 ratio with a recruiter and coordinators. 

You're going to be working with your head of HR and your head of finance. You're going to know what your budget is and how you're going to make those [staffing] determinations. You have to have a strong technology and systems component to your model. 

So let's say you need to hire 100 people within the next six months. You're looking at about 12 recruiters, you're looking at about three to four coordinators. You need at least one strong operations person to help with whatever ATS you're using. Workday Recruiting is quite common for larger organizations. For mid-sized companies, you'll see Greenhouse, Lever, Jobvite. And then you're looking at some really cool AI tools that are out there. I like Noon AI. I think it’s a very strong solution. I piloted it at Trellix. And we found with that pilot that we were going to be reducing at least two coordinators and one recruiter. 

Your point is that AI will have an impact.

From a headcount perspective, AI is going to impact your overall hiring model and the numbers. It's going to reduce the number of recruiters and coordinators you need because it'll constantly evolve and you can augment the team that you currently have.

And then there are things that aren’t as directly tied to the number of reqs, like people who market, brand, and handle the career site, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and more. 

One thing I mentioned before was the candidate experience. To have a branding component, either you outsource, you partner with your marketing, or you get the budget and you work with a vendor. 

A lot of organizations do have an employment-branding specialist. It is challenging to quantify but anyone in marketing will tell you the value of marketing. You have to be able to share the value of employment branding. When you're a small startup, branding is important, but you're not going to have the luxury of hiring a branding expert or a head of branding. You're going to have to incorporate that with your existing team. 

And then you have a complete team.

You define your mathematical formula to determine the number of recruiters and coordinators that you need. Sourcing is a luxury depending on the industry you're part of. But that's a factor that you're going to look at your delivery model. 

You have your delivery model of your recruiters and your coordinators, and then you have to look at your operational model with technology, innovation, and then the candidate experience and branding. That is the overall infrastructure or model I would recommend for any organization.