Out at Greenhouse OPEN this week and I was completely captivated by one of the sessions and the topic of Capacity Modeling in recruiting. It was introduced at the conference by Shane Noe of Box, and he was cool enough to share a url so everyone can download the information to do it on your own.

I love that!

So, what is Capacity Modeling and why is important for TA and HR Leaders add this to their recruiting operations?

In simple terms, Capacity Modeling is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products. In recruiting then it’s the process of determining your recruiting capacity needed by the organization to meet the demands of your talent needs.

Here’s what happens in real life. Your talent acquisition team is working their butts off day in and day out. Little by little you keep getting a bit better, but most days you’re still just keeping your heads above water. But still, you’re making it happen!

Then the CEO comes into your office on an idle Thursday and says we’ve made some decisions and it’s going to have an impact on recruiting. We’ve decided to make an investment in “X” and as such we will need to hire an additional 300 employees in the next 12 months. Can you make this happen?

The savvy TA leader will say “No!” immediately! Most TA leaders will say “Of course! Just let us know what you need and we’ll make it happen!” That’s failure point number one.

You truly have no idea if you can make this happen. What you know is it feels like you’re at full capacity and hiring an additional 30 new people will kill you, 300? You might as well just quit now.

Capacity Modeling allows you to tell your CEO, “let me show you some data about where we are at, and how we can meet your needs”. We are currently at 87% capacity. The best practice is to be at 85% since we will always have stuff pop up and we need that extra cushion. If you would like us to hire an additional 300 that would put us at “X” over capacity, so we will need the following time and resources to meet that need.

That my friends is a powerful conversation that puts you at a completely different level in your career. Too often we just throw ourselves on the sword and say we can do something when we really have no idea if we can do it, and we mostly fail. We have to better than that. Take a look at Shane’s information. It’s a bit technical but very doable and worth it!

Greenhouse Open is a non-user user conference. GH has put a ton of time into producing some of the best recruiting content on the planet for its users, but I would say as a recruiting conference alone it’s one of the better ones I’ve attended. Kudos to them. If you’re looking for a top Hiring Platform that meets your end to end talent needs, you should be demoing Greenhouse.