Understanding Recruitment Pools, Forecasting, and Capacity Planning
Part of The PIRATE Way — Stories about scaling up engineering teams
Forecasting and Capacity Planning: An Essential Skill Set
As we delve into scaling an engineering team, we’ll tackle aspects that may not immediately strike you as ‘exciting’, yet they remain pivotal to the process. This involves understanding and growing your recruitment pool, effective forecasting, and capacity planning. These skills are essential to foresee the following:
- The number of individuals you can hire and onboard
- The number of new teams you need to establish
- The number of members required in the interview pool at each stage
- The necessary budget, including OPEX
- The need for a new Tribe and its ideal inception time
In most product engineering organizations, the available engineers will delineate the number of teams you can deploy. In turn, this forecasts other key roles for the organization such as Staff or Principal Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Product Managers, Product Designers, Managers and Directors for every discipline, Data Analysts, Data Engineers, and Business Analysts when needed.
Scaling Your Hiring: The Matrix Approach
A spreadsheet matrix, informed by your team’s current size and future monthly or quarterly requirements, can be crafted with basic formulation skills. This aids in understanding how many people you can realistically hire and onboard.
Start by considering the size of your current team and estimate the potential churn rate based on the previous year’s monthly figures or your target for the upcoming year. Then, consider how many people you can hire — this should ideally be at most the number of people you can effectively onboard. This will require understanding your target number of engineers per team and the availability of free spots in the current teams.
In this scenario, you may face various options depending on the maturity of your teams: creating new teams, overstaffing existing ones before splitting them, or a mix of both. Both options have implications on team maturity and their delivery and productivity capacities.
Forming New Teams: Balancing Objectives and Resources
Deciding on new team formations requires collaboration with leaders from other disciplines. Leverage resources like the book Outcome Over Output to identify critical outcomes for dedicated teams and Team Topologies for insights on team configurations. Considering your hiring/onboarding pace and upcoming team formations, you can predict the timeline for rolling out new teams.
Interview Pool: Maintaining a Balance
Balancing the interview pool is crucial to avoid potential disruptions to productivity and morale. Suggestions include:
- Creating experts for each stage to minimize cognitive load.
- Allowing periodic rotation of roles for members.
- Setting a maximum limit for interviews per member per week.
- Letting pool members declare their interview slots in advance.
Training and Quality Check: Enhancing Consistency
Invest in training materials for new joiners and existing members of the interview pool, ensuring consistency across the interview process. Periodic quality checks and retrospectives are crucial to garnering feedback and making informed changes. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and test changes in a small group before broader deployment.
Avoiding Burnout: Balancing Time and Effort
Finally, avoid burnout by balancing time dedicated to hiring and your other responsibilities. Proactively managing your time, such as blocking interview hours, can significantly reduce cognitive load and prevent burnout. Also, remember that hiring is a shared responsibility and a growth opportunity. Therefore, involving more team members in the hiring process can be beneficial.
Example: Hiring Capacity Plan
We start with 40 members in 7 squads, and we want to finish the quarter with nine squads with 54 members, which is a target of approximately five hires every month.
We are going to use a simplified version of the hiring process including the following:
Definitions
- Churn Rate: Rate of people leaving the team, total including regrettable and non-regrettable. For the purpose of the exercise we used a higher number and rounded it up. (Interesting article from Gergely here about good and bad attrition)
- The offer acceptance ratio estimates the number of candidates who receive and accept an offer. You can use metrics from previous quarters.
- The final stage pass ratio estimates the candidates completing the final stage. You can use metrics from previous quarters.
- Limit of weekly interviews: Compromise for limiting productivity impact to only two weekly interviews.
- Required coding pool: We need 12 (5 / 75% / 60%) coding interviews monthly, with two interviewers limited to two weekly interviews. We will need three interviewers for the coding stage.
- The preliminary pass ratio estimates the number of candidates completing the preliminary interview. You can use metrics from previous quarters.
- Required preliminary pool: We need 20 (12 / 60%) preliminary interviews every month, with one interviewer, and limited to two weekly interviews. We will require three interviewers for the coding. We will need three interviewers for the preliminary stage.
Onboarding Forecast
Doing a similar exercise forecasting when the people will be onboarded, you can anticipate when you can deploy new teams. Similarly, by measuring the previous months’ data, you can anticipate using past data on the average time from when the offers were accepted to the final starting date.
Remember: This is a blog post from the series “The PIRATE Way”.
