July 06, 2022
5 Best Practices for Headcount Planning
Preparing for fall recruiting, especially headcount planning, can be stressful for University Recruiting teams in part due to requisition timelines. Many University Recruiting teams receive their requisition needs for positions that will be filled during the school year at the start of the academic year. In fact, for the 2022-2023 school year, 49% of University Recruiting teams reported that they would get their requisition needs in July or August 2022. 12% said they would receive their requisition needs at multiple times throughout the year.
Unfortunately, this places additional pressure on University Recruiting teams– something we should be seeking to avoid in light of the high levels of stress and burnout recruiting teams are currently facing. 1 in 3 recruiters say they feel so stressed that it affects their productivity at least once a week.
That’s why we’re sharing five best practices to help you streamline your headcount planning process and ease your stress ahead of the fall recruiting cycle.
Strategies for Headcount Planning:
- Proactively engage with internal stakeholders. Educate stakeholders, especially hiring managers and business units on the importance of proactive headcount planning prior to the Fall semester.
- Utilize past data by identifying hiring numbers from the past year and using them to form a foundation for your planning process.
- Consider the impact of your firm’s overall business goals and macroeconomic trends. Ensure that you understand future entry-level hiring needs and specific business unit needs to estimate if there will be a change in hiring volume from the previous year and if so, what direction that change might be in. For example, in May 2022, 66% of companies said they anticipated a greater University Recruiting hiring volume in Fall 2022 compared to the previous year.
- Get feedback. Make sure to get feedback on your projected numbers from the relevant departments and business units.
- Set a deadline to get requisition numbers in by X and stick to it!
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