2025 Planning Preparation

Chances are your team is in the midst of your planning for next year. We attended the first-ever RecOps conference last week, and headcount and capacity planning were the top of many people’s minds. One of our founding partners, Mike Joyner, sat down for this Time to Hire podcast episode around this time last year to share his thoughts and tips on how to navigate planning. We’re going into 2025 with optimism, based on all of the signals - stock market runs, funding cycles, start of rate cut cycle, and teams that have returned to hiring on their recruiting teams. That said, many leaders in our community have shared that it’s difficult to build a talent strategy when the company is still sorting out its overall strategic plan.?

Our advice is to not wait for the company’s strategic plan to be finalized, because a) it may never come or b) it might not happen until well into the new year. So what can you be doing now to prepare for these planning conversations??

1. Get a sense of the entire ecosystem of decisions that are being considered. Zoom out of recruiting to understand what’s going on with partner teams - connect with your friends in HR, compensation, and workplace to understand if significant changes are coming for performance management, compensation approach, and offer/remote/hybrid strategies. These all have recruiting implications such as, impacts to attrition and potential needs for backfill hiring.
2. Do the analysis to understand what your team can deliver - look at historical hiring rates and get benchmarks from peers. Work with your team to do scenario planning for different outcomes. For example, if attrition increases from 15% to 20%, how much more capacity will you need to support that? Look to see how much your hiring plan has deviated from initial planning decisions to get an estimation for % risk in the plan. These scenarios will help you determine what amount of resourcing flexibility you will want to advocate for in your capability model. If the plan spikes up by 20%, does finance have reserves built into the recruiting OPEX budget to bring on contractors in these instances? Benchmarks can be helpful to frame recommendations and put your team’s performance in context. Our 2023 and H1 2024 benchmarking summaries include a range of metrics for you to reference including recruiter productivity expectations, req loads, recruiting team sizing, etc. If you’re on an in-house recruiting team and interested in anonymized details of our operating metrics benchmarking data, submit your results here and we’ll share back the details.
3. Check-in on the health of your team - make sure you and your recruiting leadership team have a pulse on their recruiters and any risks to consider (leave coverage, fully vested dates, attrition, internal movement, etc.). Based on your analysis on productivity, consider what external partners or contractors in your network you may want to keep warm or proactively signed (but not onboarded) in the case you need to activate any resources.
4. Look for opportunities for process improvements - work with your team to identify areas that you can be driving more efficiency and quality, and incorporate that into your roadmap. Analyze your process against hiring outcomes to see if you have any unnecessary steps that can be consolidated or removed or tasks that can be automated.
5. Take inventory of technology investments - don’t get caught by surprise on renewals into the new year. Often contract renewals come with price increases (eh hum, LinkedIn). Ensure tools are being utilized and where there is duplicative functionality, look for opportunities to consolidate.

The sprint finish at the end of the year is always difficult. You need to keep the team motivated to finish the year strong with hiring while also preparing for the new year. Don’t forget to celebrate the progress that has been made and create space to express gratitude and acknowledge the journey you’re on. It’s also an important time for personal reflection and what career goals you have for the new year.?

?? October leadership moves in the market:

• Max Butler, former Head of Recruiting Operations at CaptivateIQ, has joined the Recruiting Operations team at Ashby
• Matt Capaci, former Managing Director of Talent Acquisition at SVB (Silicon Valley Bank), joined Intellum as the Head of Talent.???
• Ashley Rasmussen, former Head of People at NexHealth, joined Federato as their new Head of Talent.
• Seiji Kawanabe, former Sr. Director, Executive Recruiting at Coinbase has joined World Labs to lead their Talent function
• Michelle (Steyer) Carr has joined Sierra's talent team. She was formerly leading Head of Business and Product Recruiting at Block
• Jose Guardado and Rockman Ha have joined the Talent team at The General Partnership
• Taylor Roa, previous Head of People & Talent at Axion Ray, has joined January as their new Head of People & Talent
• Mark Horton, former Head of Talent at SpaceX, has joined Magic as their Head of People
• Nichole Pitzen is the new Head of Talent at Generate. She was previously VP, People & Places at Springboard.?
• Megan Read, former Sr. Technical Recruiting Manager at Meta, has joined Anduril Industries as an Executive Recruiter
• Troy Steece, has joined Targa Resources as a Sr. TA Manager. He was previously a University Recruiting Manager at BPM LLP.?
• Rick Jones has been promoted to Head of TA at OpenAI. He was previously a Research Recruiting Manager at OpenAi.?
• Allison Ewing, former Recruiter at Applied Intuition, has joined Ewing as Senior Technical Recruiter.?
• Kevin Liu, former Director of TA at Roblox, has joined Human Capital as their new VP of Talent.
• Brie Bastidas, former Director of Technical Recruiting at Scale AI, has joined Render as their new Head of Talent.