Workforce planning

A hiring plan is an org design decision spread over twelve months and a large financial commitment made in small pieces. It deserves the scrutiny of both.

Plan capability, not headcount

Headcount is an input. Start from what the organization must be able to do that it currently cannot, then work out what closes the gap — hiring, developing existing people, contracting, or not doing the work.

The shape follows from people:org-design; this is about sequencing and quantity over time, funded against finance:budgeting-and-forecasting on fully loaded cost rather than salary. Salary is typically well under the true cost, and plans built on it are wrong by a wide and consistent margin.

Sequence matters more than total

Twelve hires in a year is not one number; it is twelve dated decisions with dependencies.

• Hire the people who make other hires productive first. A manager, a lead, or the person who can onboard the next five. Hiring five juniors before the person who will develop them wastes most of the investment.
• Respect absorption capacity. An organization can only integrate so many people at once before onboarding quality falls and existing output drops. Growth past that rate makes things slower for a quarter, reliably.
• Front-load long-lead roles. Scarce skills take months to find. Plotting them at the same lead time as abundant ones is how plans silently slip.

Attrition is a planning input

Some attrition is expected and healthy; the planning error is treating it as noise. Model it by segment — teams, levels and tenure bands differ substantially — and plan backfill lead time from the resignation date, not the leaving date.

Watch regretted attrition specifically, and by manager. Aggregate attrition looks fine while one team is bleeding people, and the aggregate is what gets reported.

Scenarios, including down

Plan the base case, the growth case and the contraction case. Knowing in advance what you would stop doing, and which commitments are hard to reverse, is what makes a downturn a decision rather than a scramble.

Offers, notice periods and some contractor arrangements are commitments before anyone starts. Know which parts of the plan can still be unwound and by when.

Never

• Build a plan on salary rather than fully loaded cost.
• Hire faster than the organization can absorb and expect output to rise.
• Treat attrition as a residual instead of a modeled input.
• Report aggregate attrition without looking at it by team and by manager.