Headcount planning turns a growth target into recruiting work. Enter the headcount you have, the headcount the plan calls for and your own attrition, and this calculator returns the hires, the offers and the recruiting capacity the plan actually requires — backfills included.
Enter the headcount you have, the headcount the plan calls for, and how your funnel actually behaves. Everything is calculated in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere.
62
Total hires needed
5.1
Hires per month
73
Offers to extend
Where the hires come from
Growth 45
Backfills 17
Backfills are the line most plans forget. They are hires that produce no net headcount, and at any meaningful attrition rate they are often the larger half of the workload.
Recruiting capacity
Required 1.7 recruiters
You have 2
At your stated throughput the current team covers the plan. The usual risk from here is timing — demand arriving in bursts rather than evenly across the window.
Method: growth hires = 165 − 120 = 45. Backfills = 120 × 14% × 12/12 = 16.8. Offers = 61.8 ÷ 85% acceptance. Recruiters = 5.1 hires per month ÷ 3 per recruiter. Attrition, acceptance and throughput are your inputs — no benchmark is applied for you, because published averages for all three vary far too much by industry and seniority to substitute for your own history.
That gap closes three ways: more recruiters, more agency spend, or a faster process. See how Pitch N Hire compresses posting, screening, scheduling and decisions so the same team carries more requisitions.
A headcount plan is usually written as a target: we are 120 people, we should be 165. That framing quietly hides half the work, because the 45 it implies are net new roles and say nothing about the people who will leave during the same twelve months. Those departures have to be replaced, they consume exactly the same sourcing, screening and interviewing time as a growth hire, and at any meaningful attrition rate they often outnumber the growth roles outright. The plan that gets approved is therefore the plan for a smaller year than the one the team will actually have. Adding attrition to the arithmetic before the budget conversation, rather than discovering it in month four, is the single most useful thing this calculator does. If you want to model the leaver side more carefully first, the turnover calculator works out your rate from your own headcount and separations.
When the arithmetic says the plan needs more recruiting capacity than the team has, there are only three answers. Hire recruiters, which takes a quarter to pay off. Spend on agencies, which is fast, uncapped and the one most teams drift into without deciding to — the agency fee calculator shows what that costs at your volumes. Or make the process itself faster, so the same recruiters carry more open roles at once. The third is the only one that compounds, and it is mostly won back in the stages nobody defends: multi-day scheduling gaps, manual screening of applications that were never a fit, and feedback that arrives after the candidate has accepted elsewhere. Reducing time to fill covers where those days usually hide, and recruitment automation covers which of them software can genuinely take off a recruiter's desk.
Most capacity gaps close in the stages nobody defends — scheduling, screening and stalled feedback. See how Pitch N Hire compresses them on your real roles.
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