Bev Carleton leads people strategy at TeamOhana after a career running people teams at companies including LinkedIn, Fitbit and Pinterest. She was joined by Dani French, who leads TA enablement and operations at Everpure (about 7,000 people), and Amy Amato, who leads TA ops at Sprout Social.
The 80% problem. Bev’s opening fact: somewhere between 75% and 80% of operating spend goes to headcount, and people and TA teams often have the least visibility into it of any function. That work sits with talent and people, not finance, so don’t wait for someone else to raise it.
It’s a business problem, not a TA problem. When Dani’s team started, they found more than 12 different finance processes for managing headcount. Amy’s first headcount tool failed because TA led it alone, and finance and business leaders kept their own spreadsheets. The second attempt started with finance at the table.
Give finance the context layer. Finance can model a target start date, but not the pipeline or the market. Recruiting fills that gap. Amy started by learning what finance cares about (forecast accuracy, not sourcing before a role is funded) and now meets her finance partner weekly.
Hold a regular interlock. Finance, TA, the HR business partner and business ops or a chief of staff review the plan together weekly or monthly: what’s coming, what changed, what attrition to expect. Scenario planning in that room lets recruiting warm up the market before a brand-new role opens.
Get ahead of AI spend. Nobody is asking about it yet. Budget envelopes are fixed, so rising tool and token costs quietly eat program budgets. Bev’s advice: add an AI line item to your team’s budget and an R&D line for experiments, before a cut makes the decision for you.
Bev’s prediction for next year: it’s all about AI ROI.
