Capacity Planning for Talent Teams

Capacity Planning for Talent Teams (Without the Guesswork)

Capacity planning for Talent teams can be a nightmare.

You’re under pressure to deliver hires, keep the bar high, and protect your team from burnout. Meanwhile, you’re guessing how many hires your recruiters should be making and whether your process is slowing you down.

We’ve seen this across dozens of fast-scaling companies, and it doesn’t have to be a guessing game.

Here’s how we break it down.

Why Capacity Planning Matters

Getting this right helps you:

✅ Set clear, realistic expectations with leadership and hiring managers
✅ Benchmark how efficiently your team is delivering compared to best-in-class
✅ Spot leaks in your hiring process before they become bottlenecks
✅ Plan future hiring without overloading your team
✅ Justify resourcing needs with clear data

Without it, you’re stuck in reactive mode—either under-delivering or burning out your team to hit goals.

Why Our Framework Works

Most capacity planning attempts fall short because they:

• Rely on gut feel or arbitrary “industry benchmarks”
• Don’t account for the real-world friction of your processes
• Ignore how recruiter effort varies by role complexity and seniority
• Fail to quantify how tools and automation impact efficiency

Our framework is practical because it ties inputs you can control (time allocation, tooling, process design) to outputs you care about (hires per recruiter, time-to-fill, candidate quality).

It also factors in process drag—internal misalignments, approvals, or unclear briefs that slow everything down—and normalises effort per hire, recognising that a senior engineer in Lisbon isn’t the same as a support hire in Manchester.

Instead of giving you an abstract “you should make 3-4 hires per month,” we help you understand why your number is what it is—and how to improve it without harming quality or candidate experience.

The Core Factors We Use

• T (Time): % of working hours spent actively on recruiting
• E (Efficiency): Impact of tools, automation, and recruiter experience
• A (Active Reqs): Number of live roles managed
• C (Conversion Rate): Reqs-to-hire pipeline efficiency
• H (Hiring Speed): Time-to-fill and cycle speed
• R (Effort per Hire): Role complexity normalisation
• P (Process Drag): Delays, misalignment, approval slowdowns

Formula:

RCap = (T × E × A × C × H) ÷ (R × P)


It’s nerdy, but it turns a foggy guess into a clear, data-backed plan.

How AI is Changing the Game

We’re actively testing how AI sourcing, screening, and scheduling impacts the Efficiency multiplier (E).

So far, the signal is clear: automation can add capacity, but only if your processes and stakeholder alignment are strong. Without this, AI tools often amplify chaos rather than reduce it.

What You’ll Get

If you’re a Talent Leader working on hiring plans for H2 or 2026, our capacity planning framework will give you:

✅ A clear benchmark: how many hires per recruiter you should expect
✅ A view of where you’re leaking capacity (and practical ways to fix it)
✅ A plan for scaling up without burning out your team
✅ A CFO-ready report to justify additional resources or process changes
✅ Clear talking points for aligning with hiring managers and leadership

Want to Pressure Test Your Team’s Capacity?

If you want to see how your current team stacks up—or want to plan your next phase of hiring without the usual guesswork—drop us a line.

📩 info@wearemove.com

We’ll share the framework, talk through your live hiring plan, and leave you with a Notion-ready report you can use for board updates, planning cycles, and setting targets that are ambitious and realistic.

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