Making real-time headcount planning easy with APM
Headcount – something that many Finance teams spend more time on than they may care to admit.
Headcount and compensation are easy to model and calculate in theory, but they can be extremely difficult in practice. Why is this the case?
Hiring is a decentralized process that involves hiring managers, recruiters, and many others that are otherwise not very involved with budgeting.
Hiring is cross-functional, requiring close collaboration across HR, recruiting, hiring teams, accounting, finance, and leadership.
Hiring, like sales and operations, happens in real-time. Every minute of every day there are hiring activities, and speed matters when trying to land the best candidates.
Here’s a breakdown of how we approach headcount planning with Agentic Performance Management.
· Real-time data collection: we cover not only quarterly budgets, employee rosters, and open positions, but capture hiring requests as soon as a hiring need is identified. Hiring managers can easily submit incremental or backfill requests in their planning app, giving instant visibility to leadership and Finance when hiring needs arise, and providing a clear starting data point. These requests can automatically be pushed to recruiting via API once approved.
· Connected systems: Fabric weaves together data from finance, payroll, recruiting, and accounting systems that would otherwise be disparate. With everything from finance assumptions for modeling, existing employee data to keep the baseline accurate, open requisition data to inform the forecast, and payroll accounting all in one place. Cross-functional reporting can be produced to prevent situations where recruiters or hiring managers need to become part-time financial analysts.
· Connected processes: we not only connect data, but people and processes as well, adding convenient approval guardrails via email or chat where needed and ensuring that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined such that recruiters and hiring managers don’t need to be part-time financial analysts.
Headcount planning is a great example of a challenging performance management area that becomes much easier when using a more open and end-to-end approach to break down functional and technical siloes.
If you’re curious to hear more about headcount planning with APM, we’d love to connect!
