Getting to a Predictive State in Hiring

Here at TalentWall, we believe that PREDICTABILITY is truly the Holy Grail of recruiting. If you are able to confidently forecast how many hires your team can make in a given time period, and what work is needed in that effort, then you’ve basically perfected your recruiting function. Of course, this assumes that the quality of said hires remains at the standard of the company, as no one wants to compromise on  quality for something like velocity or predictability. 

Pipeline/Funnel metrics enable you to back your way into understanding what work needs to be done to make a hire. Understanding the answers to questions like the below start enabling you to understand how to build your team towards predictability. 

*How many phone screens do we need to do to reliably get a hire into the pipeline?

*How many Onsites do we need to do to get a hire?

*How many sourcing outreaches do we need to do to get 1 engaged candidate?

(all of this, btw, can be done in TalentWall!)

Well, those are great data points to better predict what it takes to make a single hire. But if you want to understand what it will take to successfully deliver  an entire hiring plan, be it monthly, quarterly, or yearly, you’re going to need to understand how much the team can hire and how much you’re being asked to hire. nd that’s where TalentWall’s Capacity Planning Module comes into play.

Capacity Planning is the act of aligning a headcount/hiring plan with the actual capacity of your recruiting team. Many think of this in the simplest terms, as in how many hires one recruiter can make over X period of time. Well we view that approach as overly simplistic since it doesn’t consider the varying difficulty of filling each job. At TalentWall, we believe that not all reqs are created equal, and therefore shouldn’t be treated as such when putting together a hiring plan. That’s why we’ve created a custom scoring system to enable you to account for the varying levels between filling different roles. .

How it Works:

In TalentWall’s Capacity Planning Module, you are given a list of all of the roles your company has filled over the last 12 months. You then assign a difficulty value to each role on a scale of 1-4. It’s quick and easy to do and looks like this:

Once you have completed the scoring for your filled roles, you then get to see a bunch of data around how many points each recruiter has historically filled over a month/quarter/year, the average number of points your team closes every month/quarter/year, And how many points a recruiter should have on their plate at any given time. Once you know this data, it unlocks a TON of capabilities around predictability. 

A total game-changer happens when you  apply this same method of scoring to your future headcount plan. You’re now equipped with actual data to understand whether or not your hiring plan is even doable based on the historical capacity of your team WITH ENOUGH LEAD TIME TO MAKE THE CHANGES YOU NEED IN ORDER TO BE SUCCESSFUL! If the hiring plan is asking for 150 points next quarter, for example, but your team has never filled more than 100 points in a quarter, then you know you won’t be able to hit that goal with the team you have today. Your team isn’t simply just going to work 1.5x harder, or magic up 50 additional hires, you clearly need a bigger team. Well, you can now use this data to show the powers-that-be not only why you need more recruiters on your team, but exactly how many you need if you want to successfully fill your hiring plan on time. 

There’s a LOT of other ways to utilize this data, so if you’re interested in running a free Capacity Assessment via TalentWall, reach out today to schedule a time, even if you’re not currently a TalentWall customer. 

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