Headcount Planning
Hit your headcount plan without a single spreadsheet
overview
The easiest way to share, track, and stick to your headcount plan
Share your hiring plan
Create and share plans across departments, aligning everyone.
Track your progress
View open roles, new hires, and costs in one place.
Stick to the plan
Use permissions and approvals to keep managers from going rogue.
Keep recruiting in sync
Give your talent team instant visibility into changes in your hiring plan throughout the year.
unified analytics
Know how you're pacing relative to plan at all times
Give every team visibility into headcount with reports that include hires who haven’t started. Track progress by location, start date, cost, and more.
Break down costs by plan, department, hiring manager, and more to stay on top of your budget.
Measure success to date by tracking target against total goals, attrition, and transfers.
Create any report you want with Rippling Unified Analytics
Advanced approval management
Enforce your plan with (almost) zero effort
Automatically approve planned hires
Hires who meet your role criteria, like compensation band or level, will be automatically approved.
Require manual approval for off-plan hires
If a request deviates from plan, Rippling will route it through an approval chain predetermined by you.
fast-track hiring
Stay in sync with recruiting
You can optimize recruiting capacity with Workflow Studio. It’s easy to build workflows that keep your team up to date on approved roles and change requests.
Notify recruiting when headcount is approved
As soon as headcount gets approved, Rippling automatically notifies the recruiting team with each new role’s details, so they are able to begin sourcing candidates quickly.
Auto-update your Headcount Plan after a position is filled
When a position is filled, Rippling automatically updates your Headcount Plan, notifies recruiters, and sends a reminder to remove the job posting.
compensation bands
Control your headcount costs with compensation bands
Give everyone a single source of truth
Create and manage compensation bands for everyone in your org while protecting sensitive data. Rippling automatically maps each employee to the right compensation band based on their role.
Prevent out-of-band compensation
Rippling enforces compensation bands during onboarding and flags out-of-band adjustments, so you can approve special cases, block others as needed, and keep headcount costs on plan.
Spot potential issues early
Rippling notifies stakeholders of changes, like when an employee’s compa-ratio drops because of a location change, or if an employee’s compensation is too high or too low.
ROlE-BASED PErmissions
Automatically give everyone visibility into the right bands
Rippling automatically gives everyone in your organization—whether they’re the head of HR, a recruiter, or a hiring manager—visibility into the right compensation bands, without ever oversharing.
Workflow Studio
Customize workflows
to manage pay equity and more
Automated workflows help you stay ahead of the curve. For example, Rippling can help maintain pay equity by sending an alert whenever specific employee compa-ratios drop.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to have headcount?
Headcount refers to the total number of employees in an organization. Open headcount refers to positions that have been approved as part of a hiring plan but not yet filled with actual employees.
What is headcount management and planning?
Headcount planning and management is the process of determining a company's headcount needs for the following year, allocating specific headcount to different departments, and tracking how the company performs against its plan. It is a cross-functional process that involves HR, Finance, Recruiting, and hiring managers.
Why is headcount planning important?
Headcount planning ensures that companies have the specialized workers they need to meet their strategic initiatives in the near and long term, while aligning business leaders around a plan to keep costs down. Without headcount planning, larger businesses run the risk of overhiring or hiring in a way that isn’t cost-effective.
How do you make a headcount plan?
Traditionally, businesses have managed headcount plans using spreadsheets. Because many different people are involved in the headcount process and the data related to headcount can be sensitive, this approach traditionally involves multiple spreadsheets. This can lead to challenges such as version control issues, lack of real-time visibility, and manual data entry errors. In Rippling, business leaders can start their headcount plan in a few simple clicks and adjust it collaboratively without ever seeing data they should not have access to.