Bernardo Sosa runs Recruiting Ops at Vercel. In a fireside chat with Felicia, who leads talent acquisition at Juniper Square, he walked through how Vercel plans headcount and which recruiting metrics still earn a spot on the dashboard.
Budget envelopes, not headcount numbers. Three years ago, Vercel planned headcount in spreadsheets run by RecOps. Now finance runs it in an EPM tool, and each functional lead gets a budget envelope instead of a headcount number. Leaders can trade 1 senior hire for 2 junior ones, or spend a full headcount on a sign-on bonus for a top candidate. Nobody has gone over their envelope yet.
Weight reqs by complexity. Internal moves and contractor conversions count as 0.5. Regular hires count as 1. Director-plus and senior engineering hires count as 1.5. Recruiters with an AI sourcing agent get higher goals, because they effectively have a sourcer that never sleeps.
Time to fill means start date. Vercel measures from req open to the person in seat, not to accepted offer. Time in stage tells them whether new tools are actually speeding up the funnel, and they A/B test tools to find out.
The board asks about revenue per employee. Recruiting now also tracks agent-sourced vs. human-sourced pipeline. (When a hire comes from an agent, they celebrate.)
Quality of hire, made objective. Recruiters get credit for their hires’ first calibrated performance rating and get dinged for anyone who leaves within 6 months. Showing recruiters the leaderboard started some useful arguments.
His one metric to retire: scorecard completion. A single Greenhouse MCP prompt pulled the worst offenders across the company, and some of them were recruiters.
