Overview
The Capacity Planner helps you answer the question of how to hit your hiring goals, without overextending, or underutilizing your team. Model out recruiter capacity relative to hiring goals in a given time frame, capture the impact of hypothetical changes, and react to real-time updates in one central place.
This module is available for all Gem Admins on the Talent Compass Advanced tier.
Creating Your First Plan
Head to gem.com and log into your account. Then, select the “Capacity Planner” option.
Click “New Plan” and specify a few details to set up your plan.
- Give your plan a name.
- Select a time frame.
- Start your plan on any month of the year.
- Pick any duration for your plan — quarter, half, or yearly, depending on your needs.
- Select a rollup granularity to customize your plan view (ie: months or quarters).
- Select an organizational strategy — this is how we’ll group the jobs in your plan.
- You can plan by department, hiring manager, office, or leverage a Custom Groupings of these values to plan by “function”, “cost center”, “region”, and more.
- Then, select the actual groups you’ll plan for.
- Lastly, filter out any roles you won’t be planning for. (ex: exclude interns using Job Type, or plan only for jobs in North America using a Location filter)
- Add in your recruiting team.
- For team members that haven’t yet joined, but will during the plan time frame, add a placeholders with their name.
Note: We recommend including only capacity-carrying recruiters - anyone on the team that will own roles, and will be directly responsible for bringing in a hire.
Adding in Recruiter Capacity
For planning purposes, let us know how many hires your recruiters are equipped to make. This is their capacity to hire. (Hires being offer accepts, NOT starts.)
Add in capacity manually, leveraging historical data that lives in Gem by clicking on the Pipeline Analytics icon. This will take you to the Funnel View vs. Activity View for that recruiter, so you have the full context to make the right capacity decision. Or you could add it based on your own intuition / team benchmarks — you have full control.
Making the Hiring Plan
In the Hiring Plan table:
Add in your hiring goal(s), by department, office, hiring manager, or custom grouping.
Assign recruiters supporting each planning unit in your plan. Repeat, until all recruiters have been assigned.
Distribute each hiring goal, across the recruiters assigned to that section of the plan.
- Automatically — leveraging Gem’s auto-distribute capability. We’ll distribute the work across your assigned recruiters, up to their available capacity.
- Manually — Or, take full control of how to pace your hires, but individually assigning hires to recruiters in the cells to the right.
Learn more about Capacity Planner: Hiring and Recruiter Tables.
AddingScenarios
Add in hypothetical changes or updates to the plan via Scenarios.
- Select the Scenario type. You can choose from:
- Recruiter capacity change - Adjust capacity for individual recruiters as a % of their total bandwidth , to model things like increased capacity to hire due to promotion, decreased capacity to hire due to role complexity / difficulty, and more.
- Recruiter joined - Capture the potential impact of new team members, or contingent staff, when deciding whether or not to bring on additional team members.
- Recruiter departed - Capture team member departures, in order to re-plan.
- Headcount change - Document revised hiring goals from hiring managers, increased backfills due to attrition , and more.
- Toggle the Scenario on/off to visualize the impact on your plan.
Owning Your Hiring Narrative
Quickly reference key hiring and capacity insights to monitor progress, and own the narrative to stakeholders, including:
- Progress to goal
- Capacity vs. hires over time
- Hiring pace
- Capacity surplus / gap
- Recruiter allocation
Learn more about Capacity Planner: Insights and Charts.
Additional Resources
To learn more about managing a Capacity Planner, check out the following resources.
Gem Academy
- Create and Execute an Effective Capacity Plan: This course covers how to use Gem's Capacity Planner to develop a crystal-clear view of your team's capacity to meet hiring targets, predict future growth, and effectively navigate uncertainties through accurate scenario planning.
- Overview
- Creating Your First Plan
- Adding in Recruiter Capacity
- Making the Hiring Plan
- AddingScenarios
- Owning Your Hiring Narrative
- Additional Resources
- Gem Academy