How Talent Acquisition Teams Should Approach Hiring Plans

An annual hiring plan is a critical component of the talent acquisition process that you need to get right at scale. Getting your hiring plan wrong can seriously derail the growth trajectory of your company because you will be losing out on top talent to your competition.

A hiring plan should factor in how many positions you need to fill for the upcoming year, time to fill, recruiter capacity, number of growth positions, number of backfill positions, current market conditions, anticipated market conditions, data from your talent acquisition function, executive buy-in, and more.

It is not an easy task, and getting this wrong can directly impact your ability to deliver great experiences and outcomes to clients and employees.

When Should a Hiring Plan Be in Place?

We often see hiring plans put together in December that forecast headcount being filled in January. That is not realistic if you are also starting to recruit in January because many placements will have a 60-day time to fill in a competitive market. You will likely be playing catch-up all year and have management upset with a perceived lack of results, which leads to a constant frustration with talent acquisition.

Hiring plans are very important to get right at scale and need to factor in a realistic time to fill. Falling behind with your hiring plan can impact growth and the ability of your company to reach its potential.

Given the competitiveness in the market, your preliminary hiring plan should be in place by the end of Q3 and should be iterated on in the early stages of Q4.

Without the hiring plan in place, you cannot get your talent acquisition budget approved. Companies that are not increasing their budget by at least 15 to 25 percent are going to be poorly positioned to achieve hiring outcomes given competitive market conditions.

Build the Right Recruiting Technology Stack

Talent acquisition teams also need to consider their technology stack. In order to effectively scale, you need a technology infrastructure to support your talent acquisition function. Relying on manual processes will not get it done.

The questions your team should be answering: Are you leveraging AI sourcing tools to expand your candidate pipeline? Are you using LinkedIn Recruiter or equivalent platforms to identify passive talent? Is your applicant tracking system configured to give you clean data on time to fill, source of hire, and pipeline velocity? Are you working with an RPO partner who can add recruiting capacity without a permanent headcount commitment?

The companies that invest in recruiting technology early build a compounding advantage. Each quarter, their data gets better, their forecasts get tighter, and their recruiters spend less time on manual work and more time on the conversations that close candidates.

Hiring Goals

A strong hiring plan starts with a clear picture of your hiring goals. Although no forecast is perfect, the goal is to have as clear of a roadmap as possible. Things to consider when building your hiring plan:

• How many positions do you have to fill?
• What are the roles?
• How many are tier-one roles — critical hires for your specific situation?
• How many are tier-two roles?
• What departments need the headcount?
• How many recruiters are on staff?
• How long will it take to fill each role?

This is where the actual planning starts, and it does not have to be perfect. You need to build flexibility and adaptability into both your hiring plan and the mindset of the talent acquisition team because there are always unknowns that emerge. The hiring plan is a living document, not a fixed contract.

Time to Fill

When building your hiring plan, accurate time-to-fill forecasts are critical. We have an entire guide dedicated to the subject. Please see Time-to-Fill Best Practices for Recruiters and Talent Acquisition Teams.

How Many Openings Should Be Assigned to a Recruiter?

An industry best practice is that a recruiter should be working on between seven and eight positions at a time. This assumes they are doing the full cycle for those positions: searching for the candidate, sourcing them, interviewing them, and managing the relationship with the hiring managers and the candidates.

It is possible that the recruiter can add tier-two positions to their plate. For tier-two positions, the recruiter might not need to focus on them all the time. It is up to the talent acquisition team to prioritize this, but to achieve the best outcomes for your recruiters, it is wise not to overload them and make sure they have enough time to do everything they need.

Keep in mind that you may need to take roles off a recruiter’s plate. If a recruiter is working on an executive leadership role — for example VP of Technology or VP of Product — there is a good chance that could take up to 50 percent of their time. The reality might be they are only working on that singular role 50 percent of the time, and maybe three other positions for the other 50 percent. That is only four roles.

With capacity planning per recruiter, when we say seven to eight openings at a time, that is an average. There will be situations where this flexes up or down based on role complexity.

Planning for Backfill Hires

More than 50 percent of the hiring plans we have reviewed for growth-stage clients did not factor in backfill hiring. When you are capacity planning, you need to consider potential backfills. Companies seem to overlook this and do not factor in potential backfills when forecasting.

You have to know the attrition of your team, what turnover looks like, and what that is in terms of a percentage of your overall headcount to better assist with forecasting. For example, on a quarterly basis, you might need to build in eight backfill roles of additional capacity for your recruiting team. This is in addition to the growth headcount that you are projecting.

Start with as clear of a picture as you can. These goals tend to change as you go through the year — that is expected and part of why the plan needs to be a living document.

When Internal Capacity Is Not Enough

Even the best hiring plan will expose a gap if you do not have enough recruiting capacity to execute it. If your team is stretched across too many requisitions, the plan breaks regardless of how well it was built.

This is where companies start evaluating whether to add internal headcount or bring in an embedded recruiting partner who can scale with the hiring plan without requiring a permanent headcount commitment.

How SecureVision Can Help

SecureVision partners with companies throughout this process, whether that means participating in the initial planning or helping execute against the plan with embedded recruiting support. For more information on how SecureVision can support your hiring plan, contact us.