Headcount Forecast Prediction

Probabilistic forecasting for Finance, People Ops, and Recruiting

Overview

Headcount Forecast Prediction introduces probabilistic forecasting into TeamOhana, giving Finance, FP&A, People Ops, and Recruiting a realistic view of forecasted headcount outcomes — not just plan math.

TeamOhana’s Planned Forecast is deterministic and it reflects your plan, it hides the execution reality. Two visible gaps exist today:

• Hiring execution risk — not all planned or committed hires will close as expected.

• Hidden attrition demand — when employees leave unexpectedly, additional backfill hiring demand emerges that isn’t captured in the current hiring targets

Forecast Prediction addresses both gaps by introducing three new outputs that sit alongside your existing planned values: Predicted Forecast, Predicted Terminations, and Predicted target hires. Together they make the gap between what is planned and what is likely to happen visible and explainable.

Note: Predicted outputs are available at the department level and above.

Prerequisites

• Org-level feature flag must be enabled by your TeamOhana administrator.

• View Predicted Forecast role-level permission must be assigned to your role. Administrators receive this permission automatically when the org-level flag is turned on.

• Filters must be applied at the department level or above — predicted outputs are hidden when non-department filters (e.g., location, team, role, individual) are selected, because the historical rate model is not reliable at that grain.

How It Works

Predicted outputs are built from four inputs. The system derives sensible defaults from your own historical data

Input 1: Predicted Attrition

Predicted Attrition estimates how many employees are expected to leave during the remaining forecast period. It’s based on your own termination patterns over the last 12 completed months

How we arrive at the attrition rate

• Your past terminations: we look at each of the last 12 months and how many terminations happened relative to the average number of employees in that month.

Input 2: Backfill Rate

Backfill Rate is the percentage of attrition events you expect to result in a replacement hire. Unlike Predicted Attrition, this is your input — the system doesn’t derive it from history.

• Default: 100% — every departure is assumed to be backfilled.

• Editable at Org level:,customers can customize the backfill rate at Org level, TeamOhana support team will help you set it up. (Part of next version of the release)

Input 3: Time to Backfill

Time to Backfill is how long, on average, it takes to close a backfill hire. It’s what lets the system judge whether an attrition event that happens late in the period can realistically be backfilled before the period ends.

• Default: 2 months. System-set; a user override is planned for a future release.

Input 4: Cumulative Hiring Gap

The Cumulative Hiring Gap represents the expected shortfall on your currently planned hiring — the hires on the plan today that, based on past execution patterns, are unlikely to close on time. 

Predicted Outputs

Three outputs flow from the inputs above. Each answers a different operational question and is tuned for a different audience.

Predicted Forecast

Predicted Forecast is where headcount is likely to land at period end after accounting for expected attrition beyond what’s already planned, backfills that can realistically close within the period, and planned hires that may not land on time.

Factors used

• Your planned ending headcount for the period — the starting point.

• Expected attrition beyond what’s already logged — only the extra attrition the model predicts on top of terminations already recorded. We don’t double-count anything already reflected in your plan.

• Backfills that can close in time — attrition happening early enough in the period for a backfill hire to realistically close before period end, scaled by your Backfill Rate. Attrition too close to period end is excluded from this because a hire can’t realistically close in time.

• Cumulative Hiring Gap — the shortfall expected on current open hires not closing on time.

Predicted Terminations

Predicted Terminations is the total expected terminations between now and period end. It combines terminations already logged with predicted terminations for the remaining months of the period.

Factors used

• Logged terminations within the period — confirmed departures already recorded in TeamOhana.

• Predicted terminations for remaining months — the attrition rate applied to the expected employees in each remaining month, using the larger of prediction and logged departures for that month.

Predicted TBH

Predicted TBH is the revised hiring target once attrition-driven backfill demand is added to your planned hires. It answers: how many hires does Recruiting actually need to open?

Factors used

• Planned TBH within the period — the hires already on the plan for this period, including any past-due TBH if today is inside the period.

• Backfill demand not yet opened — for each remaining month, expected attrition multiplied by your Backfill Rate, minus any terminations already logged for that month so we don’t double-count demand that’s already been turned into a req. Months where logged terminations already exceed modeled demand contribute zero.

Tip: The gap between Planned Forecast and Predicted Forecast is the number Finance should understand as execution risk. Use it to inform scenario planning and budget reserve conversations.

Where Predicted Outputs Appear

Predicted outputs appear on the following surfaces, subject to the feature flag, permission, and supported filter grain being met.

Access and Permissions

Access to predicted outputs is controlled at two levels, and both must be active for a user to see these features.