Effective capacity planning for talent acquisition teams: Balancing resources, demand, and growth

When hiring is a moving target, talent acquisition teams need to focus on what they can plan for, rather than what they can’t. Namely, embedding agility, adaptability, and efficiency into the foundations of your talent processes and strategy.

Call it getting your ducks in a row: You’ll need to analyze your talent acquisition data for trends, identify any process bottlenecks, evaluate internal capacity gaps, and build cross-functional partnerships to streamline processes across the organization.

Talent acquisition teams run on data. But to get a sense of the future, you need to know where you’ve been, and what patterns and trends you can spot that are likely to come back around. 

Drill down into the metrics that are most meaningful for your organization, such as:

• Time-to-hire
• Time-to-fill
• Cost-per-hire
• Quality of hire
• Candidate experience
• Candidate diversity
• Hiring phase segmentation

Where possible, integrate these with other metrics across the broader business, such as employee engagement, time-to-ramp, attrition and retention, and performance. Then, identify your successes and pain points that paint you a picture on talent acquisition’s state of play. For example, has cost-per-hire shot up in one of your markets? Is time-to-hire dragging for engineers? Is attrition starting to rise due to stagnant salaries? How long does it take us to hire a VP?

All of this gives you critical data that will help you set realistic expectations on hiring needs for the rest of the business and plan capacity more effectively from within.

People always come and go — but the great resignation blindsided even the most well-prepared of talent acquisition teams. And as the labor market starts to warm up, it’s likely to bring a fresh wave of quits as employees look for bigger paychecks elsewhere. 

When things feel hazy, planning for these realistic (and some worst-case) scenarios will mean you’re better able to adapt for whatever’s coming your way.

First, map out your mission-critical roles across the organization. These roles are the ones that keep the lights on — they might build your product, drive revenue, or run core operations. Then, identify other key roles that may have longer timelines for recruitment, such as department or senior leaders.

Using your talent acquisition data, consider which segments of your employee population might decide they want out first. How will you account for the attrition? Will you work to backfill roles or not — and if so, which roles are a priority? How long will it take to hire an employee for the role?

Time to turn your gaze inwards at your processes and efficiency. At a broader level, you need to identify what kind of talent acquisition function does the business need in this moment. 

Understand your team structure, and who does what, and where team members’ strengths lie. Map tasks and resource allocation to the end-to-end talent acquisition process. If you’re using external contractors or agencies, map these too, and identify how these fit within your day-to-day operations. 

Use data from your hiring process to identify key pain points and bottlenecks that are impacting hiring or other business outcomes. Consider what goals and priorities are coming up for the broader organization, and tie these into talent acquisition priorities. For example, if applications to recent roles have been down, allocate resources to building your employer value proposition and candidate attraction strategy. 

Consider what you’ll need to plug any gaps in your team: Is it more talent team headcount? Budget? Training or upskilling to increase overall team agility? Knowing your key challenges and risk factors will mean you know where you need to allocate more resources — and what to ask for.

You can’t plan for the unknown alone. Efficient talent acquisition takes the input of the whole organization, and building cross-functional partnerships with key departments will help establish talent needs, streamline processes, and build a more effective long-term strategy.

From an operations side, increasing alignment with aligned departments including HR, L&D, and DEIB specialists will help identify mutual priorities and goals that pertain to people processes. For example, working with your DEIB team may highlight that workforce representation in a particular segment is low — and this is likely to have an impact on revenue as you prepare to enter a new market. Or maybe partnering with HR identifies significant delays in time-to-ramp, hampering employees’ ability to deliver value sooner.

Beyond aligned functions, work with department leaders across the organization to identify their key talent needs and pain points in talent attraction or retention. How can talent acquisition support on these challenges — whether it’s building better talent pooling or creating targeted candidate attraction strategies?

Consider the organization’s broader strategy and priorities:

• How is your product or service developing in the next few years? 
• Is your organization looking to expand into new markets, or go for an IPO?
• What are your organization’s key strategic objectives and mission?
• Are there any potential unaddressed skills gaps that could hinder competitive advantage?

All of these could drive talent strategy in a number of different directions, helping you build a plan that feels more responsive — and adaptable — to your organization’s specific outlook.

Senior leaders like hard numbers. They want to know how many employees you can hire, by when, and what it’ll cost. But with a lack of forward sight on what’s coming, it can make this calculation a little more challenging.

Bringing in data on talent acquisition’s business impact is critical here, as it sells the story of why something is or isn’t within your reach. Instead of saying 300 hires in a month is unrealistic, present data that compares your team size, budget, and candidate attraction rates with your current time-to-hire.

Break this down into data that tells the story of why, such as candidate scarcity, the complexity of the role, and the competitive landscape. Framing your story within the data shifts the narrative from uncertainty to objective, measurable outcomes, making for clearer decision-making and prioritization.

Matching talent acquisition team size to hiring output is a moving target right now. But putting proactive strategies and leading with data will help teams mitigate this uncertainty and keep their heads above water. At a fundamental level, this hinges on a clear understanding of current business priorities and team bottlenecks. Forging cross-functional partnerships across the organization is also key so that talent teams have forward sight into workforce management patterns and trends, and understand where skills or talents gaps may be lurking.

But if the going’s still tough, scaling capacity with external providers can help teams better balance resources and hiring needs without the extra internal headcount. Talentful is an embedded, flexible RPO model that helps talent teams scale their capacity up or down with a transparent monthly subscription model. No hidden fees — just our expert team embedded into your team to lend their support when you need it most.