Plan next year's hiring before the requisitions arrive

Step 1: count the hires, not the headcount

Net growth understates the real number. If you have 60 employees and plan to grow to 72, you aren't making 12 hires. You're making 12 plus however many people leave.

Pull last year's departures from payroll or your HR file. Suppose 9 people left out of an average of 58 staff: that's roughly 15% turnover. Applied to an average of 66 staff next year (halfway between 60 and 72), expect about 10 departures. Your hiring target is therefore:

• growth hires: 12
• replacement hires: about 10
• total: about 22 hires

That's nearly double the number most owners would say if asked. Replacement hires also arrive unannounced, so they're the ones that create panic.

Step 2: group roles into families

Different roles behave differently. Group your 22 hires into two to four families that share a pipeline. A typical split:

Each family gets its own conversion rates in the next step. Treating them as one average hides the specialist roles that will take three times as long.

Step 3: work out your stage conversion rates

For each family, reconstruct the last three to five hires. For each, count how many people reached each stage. Here's an illustrative set for the customer-facing family:

And for specialists, where the pool is thinner but the screen pass rate is higher:

If you've never tracked this, your first set of numbers will be rough. That's fine; the plan is mostly sensitive to the big stages, and you'll improve the numbers as you go. Our recruiting metrics service sets up the tracking so next year's plan starts from real data.

Step 4: multiply out the volume

Now multiply hires by candidates per hire.

Customer-facing (12 hires): 960 applicants, 192 screened in, 120 phone screens, 60 interviews, 16 offers.

Specialists (6 hires): 180 applicants, 54 screened in, 36 phone screens, 21 interviews, about 8 offers.

Supervisors (4 hires): suppose 25 applicants per hire, 3 interviews per hire and about 5 offers in total: 100 applicants, 12 interviews.

Across the year that's roughly 1,240 applications, 156 phone screens and 93 interviews. Laid out like that, the question is no longer "can we hire 22 people?" but "who is going to read 1,240 applications and run 93 interviews?"

Step 5: convert volume into hours

Assign a realistic time to each activity, including note-taking and scheduling:

That's about 450 hours of recruiting work in the year, or roughly 11 full working weeks, before anyone writes a job ad or answers a candidate's question. Spread across managers, it's manageable. Landed on one office manager in a busy quarter, it isn't.

This is the number that justifies process changes. If a structured hiring process cuts interviews per hire from 5 to 4 by screening better, it removes 12 interviews a year in the customer-facing family alone: about 30 interviewer-hours, plus the debriefs.

Step 6: put it on a calendar

Hires don't arrive evenly. Map them by month using the business plan (when new locations open, when contracts start) and spread replacement hires evenly unless you know your turnover is seasonal.

Then add lead time. If a customer-facing hire typically takes 5 weeks from posting to acceptance, plus 2 weeks' notice for the new person, the role must open 7 weeks before the start date. For specialists, it might be 10 weeks plus notice.

Plot the result and look for collisions: months where several families are recruiting at once and the same managers are interviewing for all of them. Those are the months to plan around, by opening some roles early, or by running a focused candidate attraction campaign before the crunch.

Canadian seasonality matters here. Employers with outdoor or seasonal work often hire in late winter for spring starts, while many office employers see a slow August and a busy September. The region pages describe how climate and local labour pools shape timing in each province and territory.

Step 7: test the plan against reality

A capacity plan is only useful if you check it. Each month, compare:

• hires made versus planned
• applications received versus needed
• actual conversion rates versus assumed
• recruiting hours spent versus planned

If applications fall short, the fix is at the front: your job ads and careers pages. If applications are fine but hires lag, the fix is in the middle: speed and process.

Common mistakes in hiring plans

Ignoring turnover. As Step 1 shows, it can nearly double the hiring load.

Using one conversion rate for every role. Specialist and volume roles behave completely differently.

Forgetting interviewer time. Two interviewers per interview doubles the hours, and managers' time is the scarcest resource.

Assuming every offer is accepted. Build in declines, and track the reasons.

Planning once a year. Business plans change; the hiring plan has to move with them.

Making it routine

Build this as a single spreadsheet with one tab per role family and a summary tab that adds up hours and months. Refresh conversion rates each quarter from your applicant tracking system, and review the summary at the same meeting where you review sales or operations. Hiring capacity is an operating constraint like any other.

If you'd like help building the first version, or setting up the tracking that makes the second version accurate, the contact page explains how to reach us. For the rest of our guides, see the guides index.