I am building an operating model, and would like to include logic that a new salesperson is hired when a certain criteria is me (in this case, when the average productivity per sales person is above a certain threshold).
My starting point is a headcount model with my existing staff details, start dates etc. in a similar fashion to the Headcount Hiring Plan template and some of the category tutorials.
The issue I seem to be hitting is that the current setup seems to be relying upon my staff table / linked data, and I don’t seem to be able to blend/incorporate formula based rows to this data set. Or to put it another way, I’m struggling to get to a formula that will assign a start date based on a criteria.
Ideally, I would have in my linked table:
Sales Hire 2
Sales Hire 3
etc.
but with blank start dates, and then have a formula assign a start date for the current period if the criteria was met.
Has anyone got a suggestion for this, or another approach to dynamic headcount growth that is compatible with a detailed staff table? (I am keen on this approach as there are a large number of linked categories and variables relating to staff that I would like to make use of)
Thanks!
Hey @Alex_Godsell,
Interesting question! There isn’t a method I can think of to build the model the way you describe here. I can only think of a very manual workaround where for each New Sales Hire Category item, you define a unique formula that returns the date of the timestep when a new hire is forecast by the model. It would be a manual solution.
How we usually see customers approach this problem is show in this template. Effectively there is a bottoms up Employee roster feeding from your HRIS or just within Causal. There are then forecast hires are done on a top down basis for Account Executives - in this example they are manually entered. These Account Executives drive additional revenue and that drives hiring in the other departments with various different logic applying for each Department. You can see this in the Driver Based Inputs group in the Inputs section as well as the calculations in the Driver Based Headcount section.
For your use case you could use similar logic to the Driver Based Headcount section to forecast Sales Hires, though this wont populate the data table with hire dates as you desire I’m afraid.
Does this make sense as an approach? Please let me know if you have any questions.