Headcount Planner App Overview

Headcount Planner

1. What it is

Headcount Planner lets managers and HR leaders build workforce plans — how many people to hire, in which departments, at what budget — and track those plans through to filled positions. It connects directly to Job Board: approving a planned position creates a real requisition with its title, salary range, and skills already carried over.

• Enablement: Headcount Planner requires a license. An admin enables it from the Apps Marketplace and configures it in the app’s Admin → General Settings tab.
• What it is not: Headcount Planner is for planning and budgeting headcount. It does not manage the recruiting pipeline itself — candidates, interviews, and offers live in Job Board, Interview Scheduler, and Offer Manager.

2. Standing it up

1. Go to Admin → Apps Marketplace and enable Headcount Planner.
2. Open the app and go to the Admin tab → General Settings. Turn on the features your organization needs (AI Forecasting, Recruiting Integration, etc.). All optional toggles default to Off.
3. Create your first forecast: go to the Planning tab → Forecasts → New Forecast. Give it a name, choose the type (Annual, Quarterly, Project, Strategic, or Custom), and set the date range.
4. Add at least one scenario to the forecast (e.g. Baseline). Inside the scenario, create department budgets — each budget defines the headcount, salary range, and priority for one department and role category.
5. Inside each budget, create position allocations — individual positions with a title, justification, salary band, and target dates.
6. Grant access: the app is visible to managers and above, plus anyone designated as a Headcount Planner app admin. No separate role assignment is needed beyond the organization’s existing manager hierarchy.
7. Confirm it worked: Managers should see the Headcount Planner Dashboard with active forecasts, key metrics, and upcoming milestones. The Headcount Grid shows a live view of employees and planned positions.

Silent-until-paired: A forecast does nothing visible until it has at least one scenario with a budget and a position allocation inside it. The Dashboard metrics, Grid, and Analytics all derive from allocations — an empty forecast shows zeros everywhere.

3. How it fits together

Forecast → Scenario → Budget → Allocation

This is the core nesting that governs the entire app.

A forecast is a time-bounded workforce plan — typically annual or quarterly. It moves through four statuses: Draft → Active → Completed → Archived. Only a draft forecast can be edited; only an active forecast is visible on the dashboard and tracked by milestones.

Each forecast holds one or more scenarios — named what-if plans such as Baseline, Conservative Growth, Optimistic Growth, or Aggressive Expansion. Each scenario carries its own revenue growth assumption, budget constraint factor, and hiring velocity assumption. You can compare scenarios side by side, then mark one as the selected scenario — the one the forecast’s headline metrics reflect.

Example: a 2026 Annual Workforce Plan might have three scenarios:

Scenario	Revenue growth	Hiring velocity	Total budget
Conservative Growth	5%	3 hires/month	$1.2M
Baseline	10%	4 hires/month	$1.8M
Aggressive Expansion	40%	10 hires/month	$4.5M

The team compares all three, then selects Baseline as the plan of record.

Inside each scenario, budgets break the plan down by department. A budget defines the planned headcount, salary range, per-position budget, recruiting and onboarding cost estimates, and target dates for one department-and-role combination. The total budget is computed automatically: (positions × per-position budget) + (recruiting + onboarding costs × positions).

Inside each budget, allocations are the individual positions. Each allocation has a title, justification type (New Role, Backfill, Expansion, or Replacement), salary band, seniority level (Junior through Executive), priority (Low, Medium, High, or Critical), hiring manager, and target dates. Every allocation gets an auto-generated position ID in the format DEPT-ROLE-YEAR-###.

Hiring status and the Job Board handoff

Each allocation moves through a hiring pipeline:

Planned → Approved → Requisition Created → In Progress → Filled

The key transition is Approved → Requisition Created. When recruiting integration is turned on and a manager clicks Start Hiring, the app creates a real Job Board requisition with the position’s title, salary range, skills, employment type, and hiring manager already filled in. From that point the allocation tracks the Job Board requisition’s progress. When a position is filled, the allocation records who filled it and when.

Positions can also be Rejected or Cancelled at any stage before filling.

Milestones

Each forecast automatically tracks milestones — dated checkpoints such as budget approval, quarterly reviews, and completion targets. Milestones can depend on each other and flag themselves as critical-path items. A milestone that is blocked by an unfinished dependency cannot be started until the dependency completes.

The system runs a daily sweep that notifies milestone owners about:

• Overdue milestones — the owner is notified up to once per week while the milestone remains overdue, stopping after 90 days past due.
• Milestones due within 14 days — the owner gets a heads-up notification.
• Over-budget budgets — the forecast creator is notified when a selected scenario’s budget exceeds its allocation by more than 5%.
• At-risk forecasts — the forecast creator is notified when an active forecast is off track (milestone completion lags the timeline by more than 10 percentage points, past 25% of the timeline).

Notifications go to the in-app bell (and push where opted in) plus a preference-gated email. Sample/demo data never triggers notifications.

Who can access what

Headcount Planner is a management surface — it exposes compensation budgets and salary bands. Access requires Manager or above, or designation as a Headcount Planner app admin.

Within the app:

• Managers, Admins, Super Admins, and app admins can create, edit, approve, and delete forecasts, scenarios, budgets, and allocations.
• Admins and Super Admins (plus app admins) can manage AI model configuration.
• The Admin tab — General Settings, Integration Settings, Data Management, AI Configuration — is restricted to admins and app admins.
• Department-level access: when creating positions from templates, managers can create positions only in their own department or departments where they have direct reports. Admins, HR managers, and app admins can create positions in any department.

4. Running it

Creating a forecast from a sample plan

Go to Planning → Sample Plans. Choose an industry-specific template (Technology, Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Retail, Education, or General). The sample plan creates a complete forecast with pre-built scenarios and department budgets that you can customize.

Comparing scenarios

Open a forecast, go to Scenarios, and click Compare. The comparison view shows each scenario’s total planned hires, total budget, ROI projection, and hiring velocity assumption side by side.

Approving positions and starting hiring

1. Open an allocation and click Approve to move it from Planned to Approved.
2. With Recruiting Integration turned on, click Start Hiring to create a Job Board requisition directly from the allocation.
3. As candidates progress, the allocation tracks the pipeline. When the hire is made, click Mark Filled and select the employee.

Using the Headcount Grid

Go to Planning → Headcount Grid. The grid is a live spreadsheet-style view of employees and planned positions across departments, showing current headcount alongside planned allocations, open requisitions, and filled positions.

Reviewing analytics

Go to the Analytics tab → Analytics Dashboard. The dashboard shows planned vs. actual hires, budget utilization, hiring velocity, time-to-fill, and cost-per-hire trends over time. A daily snapshot job records monthly analytics so AI forecasting has real hiring history to draw from.

Standard Reports provides pre-built reports. If Executive Reporting is turned on, managers can also access the Executive Reports section for C-level summary reports.

Exporting data

Forecasts, budgets, the headcount grid, and allocations can be exported. If the admin turned on Require identity verification before exporting salary & budget data, users must re-verify their identity (step-up) before the export streams.

Mobile access

Managers can view the dashboard, active forecasts, upcoming deadlines, and approve allocations from mobile. Phone browsers are automatically redirected to the mobile view; tablets stay on the desktop view. Use ?desktop=1 to opt out of the redirect.

5. Settings

All settings live in the app’s Admin tab and default to Off. Each toggle is a tenant-wide gate — it applies to all users regardless of role.

Setting	Where	Default	What it changes
Enable Headcount Agent	Admin → General Settings	Off	Lets managers and HR ask the Headcount Agent questions about plans, budgets, and approvals via Ask AI
AI Forecasting	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the AI Forecasting and AI Optimization pages in the AI & Intelligence tab
Market Intelligence	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the Market Intelligence page in the AI & Intelligence tab
Advanced Analytics	Admin → General Settings	Off	Enables detailed analytics breakdowns and exports
Executive Reporting	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the Executive Reports section on the Analytics tab
OKR Integration	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the OKR Hub integration page in the Integrations tab
Recruiting Integration	Admin → General Settings	Off	Connects approved positions to Job Board; enables the Start Hiring flow
EPMS Integration	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the EPMS skills and performance integration page
Tasks App Integration	Admin → Integrations section	Off	Connects milestones and allocations to the Tasks app
Require identity verification before exporting salary & budget data	Admin → General Settings	Off	Adds a step-up verification prompt before salary/budget exports

6. More help

• Headcount Planner FAQ — specific setup, operating, and troubleshooting questions
• Ask AI — the Headcount Agent answers plain-language questions about plans, budgets, and pending requisitions when enabled