Headcount Management & Tracking: Key Lessons from Scaling Companies
To our Talent Community,
At Growth by Design Talent, we partner with growing companies to build recruiting foundations that scale. One of the trickiest parts of that foundation is headcount planning and management.
Over the past several months, we spoke in-depth with several fast-growing companies (ranging from 100 to 8,000+ employees) to learn how they track and manage headcount across Recruiting, People, Finance, and the business. We asked about ownership, tools, systems, and operational challenges. While everyone has their own method, there are a few standout best practices.
If you’re looking to audit or improve your headcount management and tracking process, read on for a few key lessons and best practices we learned.
If Everyone Owns It, No One Does.
Headcount management often feels like a game of hot potato. In theory, everyone works together across teams, but not everyone knows who’s driving. One way to mitigate this is to make it very clear across the organization who owns this responsibility.
So, who should own and manage it?
Some teams had a centralized Finance, HR or Recruiting lead who managed the plan and any changes made to it. This drove consistency across all parties, from ensuring everyone followed the same process to knowing who and when was involved in decision making.
Others adopted a “trio” model, where each business unit owned its own plan in partnership with a “trio” of leaders from People/HRBP, Finance, and Recruiting. While this approach allows for flexibility and local ownership, it creates several risks: business leaders are several steps removed from hiring details and decisions (especially challenging for larger functions), processes are inconsistent across teams, and there can be a disjointed flow of information.
What works: High-performing companies treat headcount as a living, cross-functional product with a clearly-designated owner responsible for maintaining the plan and ensuring consistent communication across teams. It’s our belief that since two of the three key groups (HR, Finance, Recruiting) live in the People organization, ownership should live there, with a dedicated role to keep teams aligned and foster a strong relationship with Finance. To keep ownership strong and aligned as the company evolves:
Conduct ownership reviews to confirm the right people remain accountable as roles and structures shift. Regularly re-visit the roles and responsibilities, whether you go the Trio route or assign a single owner. As companies shift and evolve, you may see ownership change, too.
Ensure cross-functional representation, with Recruiting included in financial planning and Finance engaged in hiring discussions, to promote shared accountability and reduce silos.
Create a centralized place for communication and SLAs. Some teams liked leveraging a private Slack channel with all relevant stakeholders.
Create a System of Record
Just like assigning an owner, having a single source of truth is key. Every company we spoke with used different tools. Some ran lean with Google Sheets, while others used planning tools and platforms like Caro or Pigment to consolidate data across systems like the ATS, HRIS, and financial planning tools like Anaplan.
But it’s not about which tool you use, it’s whether that tool (or spreadsheet) gives you reliable headcount data.
Real-world approaches
At larger companies, tools like Caro served as the system of record, integrating directly with Workday and Greenhouse (for example) to eliminate manual updates, cut approval time, and maintain consistency. One team leverages Caro’s approval workflows to manage all headcount requests directly in the platform. They also set up integrations that automatically push approved roles to Workday and Greenhouse, eliminating the need for manual job creation.
Other large companies used their Financial Planning tool like Adaptive Insights or Anaplan to facilitate Headcount and Workforce Planning and enable job creation into the ATS with integrations.
Smaller companies often got scrappy by building robust spreadsheets with Apps Script, change logs, and syncing capabilities with the ATS and HRIS data. They may also rely heavily on position/opening management within the ATS to track open and filled positions with robust approval processes.
What works (regardless of tooling)
Create a single source of truth.
Set a Unique ID for each headcount and use this to track positions across planning, approval, and hiring systems (HRIS, ATS), ensuring data integrity. Make sure Finance and HR adopt these IDs too!
Define a role release strategy. Decide when and how roles are opened. Prioritize based on recruiting team capacity, business impact, and time-to-fill benchmarks. (Smaller companies may not stick to a role release strategy, so build in flexibility for “accelerated” hiring in case the business grows larger than expected.)
Share the plan widely for visibility, but prevent spin-offs across different teams or departments. Multiple versions kill alignment.
Other smart practices
Use PID prefixes to identify rollover roles. One company changes the first letter of every position ID annually, making it easy to spot which roles are new versus carried over from last year’s plan.
Track distinct start dates to catch misalignment. Business-planned, recruiter-forecasted, and finance budget start dates each reflect different expectations. Seeing them side by side surfaces disconnects early so you can catch problems before a quarterly review, for instance.
Define “Start date” vs “Hire date” vs “budgeted start date”, etc. before you begin planning. Ensure all parties including finance and the business are aligned on the definitions.
Workday users noted that “Hire Date” is what recruiting would conventionally call the “start date.” See if there are other definitions that need to be clarified.
Set Expectations Early and Revisit Often
A shared understanding of how a headcount plan is used and maintained is critical. That includes everything from permissions and communication to approvals, hiring timelines, and more. Setting clear expectations early helps every team (Recruiting, Finance, and the business) understand how the plan translates into day-to-day execution, accountability, and hiring outcomes. Some of the most successful teams we spoke with set clear expectations in three areas:
Recruiting Capacity: Set expectations around how many hires the recruiting team can realistically deliver in a given quarter. Share these metrics to add color into headcount planning discussions:
Team capacity (i.e. number of roles per recruiter at any given moment and how many offers a recruiter can deliver in a given period)
Estimated time-to-fill (TTF)
Time-to-start (TTS)
For example, if it takes 12 weeks to fill a role and ~4 additional weeks from acceptance to start, that role needs to be opened at least 16 weeks before the desired start date. If a role is niche and will take longer to fill, you can build additional buffer to build pipeline. (If you need a more comprehensive tool to help you plan out your recruiting capacity, we created Recruiting Plan to solve this problem. Reach out to us if you’d like to request access.)
Planning Cut-Offs & Role Readiness: Sometimes a role will be approved but a team isn’t ready internally to start recruiting for a number of reasons. Maybe the job description isn’t quite refined yet, or there is a hire that needs to be made ahead of this one. Make it clear that:
Only roles opened by a certain cut-off date are included in that quarter’s hiring goals. A role isn’t part of the plan until it’s both approved and open.
If the headcount target exceeds the recruiting team’s current capacity, you’ll need to factor in the time required to hire and ramp additional recruiters. Otherwise, timelines and delivery will slip.
Impact of Changes on Recruiting Execution: Not all headcount changes are equal! Some have a major effect on recruiting timelines, while others can be absorbed with minimal disruption. For example, moving a role from one country to another will require an entirely new pipeline of applicants, or more budget than initially planned.
Consider defining the types of changes to the hiring plan, the level of approval each requires, and their potential impact on recruiting timelines. One team introduced a two-tier system to help educate stakeholders on how different kinds of headcount changes affect hiring delivery:
Tier 1: High-impact changes (like adding new headcount or upleveling a role from IC to Manager) → Require early approval
Tier 2: Low-impact adjustments (small role scope changes) → Can be handled more flexibly, no formal approval needed. No budget, start date, or org design impact.
When you clearly communicate how timing, approvals, and changes affect execution, you create fewer surprises and more predictable hiring outcomes.
Don’t Let Backfills Become a Black Hole
Backfills came up in every conversation. Across many companies, backfills were often inconsistently defined, poorly tracked, or casually approved, making it hard for recruiting to plan capacity or forecast accurately.
What works: Treat backfills as the perfect moment to ask: do we really need this role? Is a 1:1 replacement needed or is there a better way to use the budget? Create a process for how backfills are handled. Questions to consider: Are they auto-approved? Do they require a justification? Do you want to repurpose the backfill for a different role? Are they part of the same process as net-new headcount?
The more clarity you have, the smoother the intake.
Define a “Backfill” vs. a “Repurposed Backfill” and ensure the company is aligned. Make sure this is notated in the HC plan or in the ATS on the requisition.
Create a tight partnership with HR to gain insight into when attrition is going to take place so you can strategize on timing.
If your company has performance reviews, this can be a great time for recruiting and HR partners to meet and understand attrition risks and talent pipelines that may be needed.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re a 100-person startup or an 8,000-person enterprise, the foundations of effective headcount management don’t change, but the stakes grow. The strongest companies we spoke with invested in operationalizing the headcount plan. Recruiting turns headcount into hires, but only if there’s visibility, alignment, and structure behind the plan.
When your headcount process is well-defined and well-communicated, you achieve your hiring goals and you help the whole business scale in a smarter way.
—
Adam, Mike, & Jill with special thanks to Michelle Chang and former GBDer Holly Dyche for their contributions to this month’s newsletter
🚀 Client Spotlight
Calling all Technical Recruiters! We’re excited to help WisdomAI place their first in-house recruiter as they prepare for scale. In this role, you’ll work hand in hand with the co-founders to help double the size of the company over the next year. As you grow Wisdom’s engineering team, you’ll witness your hires tackle cutting-edge AI, NLP, and Infrastructure challenges which have largely been unsolved. This role is in-office out of San Mateo, CA (4-5 days/week).
WisdomAI is building an agentic AI platform which enables self-service data analytics over structured and unstructured enterprise data. They have raised $23M in funding led by Coatue Ventures, with participation from Madrona, GTM Capital, The Anthology Fund, Databricks and a number of prominent angel investors and advisors.
If you or someone you know is in the Bay Area and interested in learning more, please reach out to applications@gbdtalent.com.
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🎧 Podcast Highlight: Behind the Growth
Behind the Growth delivers the mentorship conversations that usually stay behind closed doors, plus practical wisdom from leaders who’ve built the talent functions we admire.
Episode 1 features Chris Dobbins, who was an Air Force intelligence officer before running recruiting ops at Twitter, Uber, and DoorDash. His advice? “Make your next move every move” and pick the uncomfortable option that forces you to grow. He also shares the productivity systems that kept him grounded in high-stakes environments.
In Episode 2, we hear from Brendan Browne, whose journey began in agency recruiting and took him to leading talent at LinkedIn. Learn his lessons on how great recruiters “blow candidates’ minds” with real stories, why asking for help should be a daily practice, and how to approach difficult conversations.
Subscribe now on Apple and Spotify.
🚀 September Leadership Moves in the Market:
Ellen Nordahl, former Head of Global Head of Recruiting at Chainalysis, joined Onebrief as their Head of Talent Acquisition.
Kabi Gishuru, former Director of Strategic Programs, Talent Acquisition at Netflix, joined GoFundMe as Head of Global Talent Acquisition.
Mariah Nagy, former Chief People Officer at Weights & Biases, joined Clickhouse as VP, People.
Jenae Replogle, former Head of Global R&D Talent Acquisition (Senior Director) at Carta, joined Headway as Director, Talent Acquisition EPDD.
Camila Thomsen, former Executive Leadership Recruiting | Software Engineering at Meta, joined Aurora as Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition | AI and ML.
Dan Hynes, former Partner at Atomica, joined Helsing as VP People.
Martin Corniffe, former Head of Engineering Recruitment at Palantir Technologies, joined Fluidstack as Talent.
Chad M., former Vice President, Talent Acquisition & Strategy at VAST, joined Radiant as VP of Talent.
Jeff Lu, former Head of Talent at Motorway, joined Nothing as Director, Global Talent Acquisition.
Nicole Rich, former Head of People & Talent at Cortex, joined Cadence as Head of Talent, Cadence Solutions.
Robert Gonzalez, former Head of Talent Acquisition / Founding Recruiter at Pebble, joined 1X as Talent Acquisition Leader / Full-Cycle Recruiter.
Josh Graber, former VP of Talent Acquisition at Files.com, joined Tabs as VP of Talent.
Michelle McDonald, former Executive Search at Facebook, joined OpenAI as Strategic Initiatives & Executive Recruiting.
Stephanie Kiraly, former Head of Talent at peoplepath.io, joined Fanatics as a Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition.
Meghan Langill, former Senior Director, Recruiting at Imply, joined Arketa as Head of Talent.
Libby Juelsgaard, former Chief People Officer at Mural, joined Function Health as SVP, People.
Bailey Douglass, former VP of People at EvenUp, joined Fleetworks as People + Other Internal Stuff.
Emily Gransky, former VP, Talent Acquisition at Raven, joined Formation Bio as VP, Talent.
Kiana Davari, former VP of People at Sorare, joined Taktile as VP People.
Chris Middlemass, former Lead Recruiter / Head of Talent Acquisition at Sleeper, joined Groq as Talent Acquisition Partner, G&A/Marketing.
Bridget Cincotta, former Principal Human Resources Business Partner at Eventbrite, joined Coinbase as Product Delivery Lead - People Tech.
Stefanie Gardella, former Lead Recruiter, Tech & Engineering at Square/Cash App, joined Credit Genie’s Talent team.
Adam Ichikawa, former Lead, Technical & Leadership Recruiting at Affirm, joined Hightouch as Senior Technical Talent.
Andrea Courtie, former Director - Talent Acquisition at Rivian, joined Stripe as Leadership Researcher consultant.
Laura Stapleton, former VP of People at Engine, joined Foley as VP of People.
Brian Schneider, former Head of People Operations at Credit Karma, joined Hadrian’s People Operations team.
Alli Bertani, former Technical Recruiting Manager - Product, Design, Engineering, Marketing at Zip, joined Abridge’s Technical Recruiting team.
Did we miss your career change? Let us know: hello@gbdtalent.com
📖 What We’re Reading & Listening To
6 Ways to Engineer Talent Density: A Founder’s Guide - Michelle Delcambre, Felicis
Handbook for New Employees - Valve
The State of AI 2025 - Bessemer Venture Partners
Expanding economic opportunity with AI - Fidji Simo, OpenAI
State of People Strategy 2026 Report - Lattice
Former Google HR Head Reveals the Truth behind Google’s hiring success! - TruthWorks podcast
HR Reimagined: Agentic AI for HR 2025 - Deloitte
Anthropic Economic Index: Understanding AI’s effects on the economy
Research: How top performers stand out in the age of AI - John Willford, Dropbox
📚 Playbooks
Your Guide to Evaluating and Selecting an ATS: A guide with helpful process frameworks, and evaluation templates to help you make an informed decision about selecting the ATS that is the best fit for your company.
Navigating an IPO: A guide to help you navigate your team through the IPO process. It includes tools and tactics to prepare your team, proactively communicate to pending candidates, and evolve your recruiting operations to support the shift in business.
Credit for the preview/thumbnail image: Markus Krisetya on Unsplash