Building a Winning People Strategy With Workforce Planning | Melissa Dreuth and Justin Merritt

Mel: Thank you, everyone. Justin and I were laughing or joking that there was only going to be five people who showed up, so.

Justin: I said 10.

Mel: So now we ended on a good 12.

Justin: Yeah.

Mel: So by the end of this session, you are going to have solved the great resignation. You'll have no employee turnover and you'll figure out how to do all of that and Panful as well, okay? Just kidding. So joking aside, my role here I am the chief of staff to our CEO and chief people officer at Panful. For those of you who don't know what that title means, it means HR rebranded so that people could actually come and talk to us as well. And I'm very excited for you to meet Justin Merri, our senior director of solution consulting. He is my partner in crime for all things workforce planning related, just so he doesn't get any HR violations himself, but truly we are just so passionate about culture, our people, and then most importantly, being able to do all of that and Panful as well. So do you want to say something before I hijack your time?

Justin: No. I think you did a great job. Yeah.

Mel: Thank you. All right. So there's a mixed audience here today. Some customers who are using workforce planning already, some of you who may be new to it or unfamiliar. So I thought I would paint a picture for everyone about what life before Panful looks like. So this is supposed to be me and many other HR leaders under a pile of spreadsheets with no visibility, always fighting with finance, most of the time. Fighting with your hiring managers, because you have no visibility into what's coming up with headcount that is needed or headcount that is leaving. Some of you are smiling and nodding your head and maybe crying a few tears as well. And the story I always use is a few companies ago, we did not have a tool like Panful and our sweet CMO wanted to do some headcount changes. He wanted to increase some of the merit cycles, but really restructure his team. So we sent him his employee roster via Excel. He made all of the changes that he wanted and instead of sending it back to me, he sent it to the entire company. Now imagine what the entire company felt like when they heard what marketing were making. So that is why I love Panful so much because it creates that visibility. And it's very secure so that you shouldn't have those issues again. Then if we think about just the last two years, right? I hate using unprecedented times or the new normal, but the reality is that 39% of people are going to be looking for a new job this year. So as HR leaders, as business leaders, as hiring managers, how are we going to adapt and remain agile with the changing times? The headcount plan that you had in January could look very different to what it is in April or May and how do you stay ahead? We heard from Grant this morning and his keynote that, the great resignation, there's no single one competitor now. Everyone in our space is our competitor. So how do we stay ahead of our hiring needs our capacity plans while not sacrificing the quality of the headcount that we want to bring in as well. So hopefully today, Justin and I will be able to help you through that as well. And what we think could really work. Raise your hand if you remember what that image is. Thank you, Linda. I love you.

Justin: I thought there'd be a few more, but...

Mel: So this crosstalk.

Justin: This is now my favorite game.

Mel: I literally spent hours playing this game. So it's pipe dream, right? And when Justin pitched this to me, I'm like, yes, this doesn't have to be a pipe dream. We can have everything in one system. So can you imagine how it would feel if your finance team, your recruiting team and your HR team was speaking the same language, looking at the same data in real time and most importantly it was accurate. And for us, we don't think that the closed system has to be a pipe dream. So the way we achieve that in Panful is we are able to help you with your demand. So your capacity planning, your long range planning, what does your business look like when you need to expand into new regions? When you want to restructure certain departments? And then the supply, what can you do with your current head count? What can you do with your current teams that you have right now? And how can you plan your workforce more effectively? None of this would obviously be possible without the existing systems that you have in place today. So for me, the exciting thing as an HR leader is that normally we have the smallest budgets in the company and we have a limited set of tools that we can use. I'm seeing a lot of nods as well. With Panful, you can integrate your recruiting tools, your HRIS, all of your existing tools into one solution and get that single source of treat that we've all been craving. Anything else you want to add to that?

Justin: No. I mean, maybe just a quick show of hands. How many of you today have an integration or bring your people data into Panful and do your workforce planning in Panful? Cool, cool. How many want to do it? All right. Yeah. Cool.

Mel: You know, we have a really large customer, I saw Linda from our professional services team at the back. We have a really large customer right now bringing in, I think it's 13 different HRIS systems all across the globe into Panful, coupled with their applicant tracking systems as well. And again, it's enabling recruiting to work on the approved head count that they know is a budget. It's giving that power to their hiring managers to see what's coming down the pipeline as well. It's then feeding in to the HRIS system to make sure that finance has an accurate record of the employee roster. And then our business users can log into Panful at any time and see what's still outstanding and what their current head count is. So Justin's going to jump into a demo to give everyone an overview of what workforce planning can do and then even more that you can do in the art of the possible.

Justin: Cool.

Mel: Great.

Justin: All right. Let's see. This is a little low, I'm kind of tall, so I'm not... Bear with me while I hunch over. There we go. All right. So, first of all, when you think about Panful, I guess just curious for those who are customers, how many use the dashboard component of Panful today? A few? Okay. All right. So we're going to come back to this at the end. I'm going to show you something really cool, but first I'm going to paint the picture. There's a mix, right? Blend 50:50, some folks who use workforce planning and Panful today, some folks who want to use it, probably some folks in the room who don't use Panful are looking at potentially becoming a customer and using it. So I'm going to spend a few minutes just to set the stage for what workforce planning does and how we do what we do with workforce planning. And then Mel and I work through a couple cool examples that I think will resonate well for both of those audiences. So we'll look at some things that are new related to that great resignation. We'll also look at some ways that we can take workforce planning and we can actually partner that workforce planning information up with things that we do in a more traditional or structured planning way. So things like FTE based planning. So when we think about the demand and supply equation, how we can actually bring those concepts together in the application. All right. So there we are. All right.

Mel: I'm going to sit down while you do this inaudible.

Justin: Okay. All right, by Mel.

Mel: Justin doesn't have to wear heels, so I'll let him do the demos.

Justin: No comment. All right. So when we go into workforce planning, when you think about it, I always think of this as the balance and the application of... you have things that exist in the business that happen that are very similar, no matter what business you're in. I think back to my life as a financing accounting guy, and we had tons of different businesses that we rolled up. One of the only common threads we had across all these different manufacturing businesses, was planning for people. And those plans were pretty much the same across all of those businesses, right? Because we have people, we have their benefits, we have their start dates, their end dates, their promotion dates, merit increase, right? Those things are very common. The benefit packages may be different. We may have union, non- union, but the actual calculations and the way we go about those plans is very much exactly the same. And so in Panful, we've taken that and leveraged it to our advantage where we've created out of the box, the ability for us to do this type of planning. And the other thing I want to bring up is that it's very different. When you think about traditional planning and you think of how we approach creating a financial plan, there's usually accounts down the rows, time across the columns, right and that's how we do it. But with people it's different. With people, we have people down the row and we have how they're compensated across the columns. And we need to translate that into the accounts and the time. And that's why, what we've done in Panful is so powerful because we've created that different interface and that ability to bring in the data from those HR systems, so that we can look at it and plan for people as people, and then let Panful actually do that translation automatically for us, based on the rules that we've set up. So I have to show this view. So Mel don't slap me, but we also have this view. So when you think about business users, so for people like Mel and I, we like to look at that grid view, we find it really powerful. But what we found also is that as our customers who are really heavy users of this, as they get those folks out in the business, as they get like a sales manager in here to manage their sales team, they really like to look at it in a little bit different way even yet. So those employee cards, as we call them, we can create that employee card view. The information, the data is the same, we're just displaying it in a slightly more friendly, more approachable type of way. But underneath each of these employee cards is then going to be all the pieces of information that make up the ability for us to do that projection. So much of this data, when you think about people again, when we have people who are actually on payroll currently, of course this information's going to come from an HR system. So we can take that data directly out of that source of truth. We can bring in those compensation items, we can bring in things like what their pay is, what their start date is. We can even create those tables to create, for 401k matches or tiered benefits, tiered bonus plans. We can create all of those pieces and we can have them tied to the employees so that then Panful can automatically do those projections. When you think about some of the complexity that comes in, especially for organizations that exist across, let's say more than just the United States or more than just north America, you have different types of employees often, right? So beyond just full- time, part- time you might have US full- time, Canada full- time, Europe full- time or UK full- time right. With those different positions, with those different locations and geographies come different benefits, plans, different compensations. You might have those across different entities. And so when you look at the different compensation items within the application, we can create all of those different compensation items that are part of the plan. And then we can simply turn them on or off for the employees that they're relevant to. And now this might seem like a lot. Right now I'm looking at Mike and we're looking at his compensation, but of course we don't have to manage this at an employee by employee level. We can manage this more in aggregate. So when we look at Mike and think about the benefits that he has, these are going to be directly related to his positions. Right now he's Us full- time. Let's say Mike wasn't US full- time but he was actually Canada full- time. If we go back to those compensation items, we can see that changes automatically. And so this is some of that association that we can create. So think about if Mike moves from being one of our sales leaders in the US, to being a sales leader in Canada, we can now seamlessly create that transition, set a transition date, and then even the benefits and information will follow off of that because out of this, all of those data goes in and translates that view into the financial projection. So like we talked about. And one of the things that I think is really helpful here is, I'll pick on Mel a little bit. So Mel knows a lot about finance, but she's not a finance or accounting person. So like, even this view is a more friendly view than your traditional accounting view of it. Because we're just taking and summarizing all those items that are associated to Mike, and then we're showing how those lay out over time. So if we create a new position for Mike or we change his role, we can start to see that change happen visibly both from the employee card, but then also from the projection that we see here on the screen. And then if there's ever a question about, well, where do these numbers go? How do they get into our GL? We have all of that set up and all of that mapping that's occurring between the two. And this becomes really powerful when you think about reporting and some of the other things that we'll look at here in a few minutes, and then finally we need to translate that to the full GL account view. So for those of us in finance and accounting, this crazy strand numbers and stuff, it makes a lot of sense for us, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for others, but this is how we can check, right. If there's ever a question on like, where did Mike's pay go? Well, now we know exactly where it went. And again, it's based on that setup based on those rules. So there's no template building or anything that we have to do when we talk about workforce planning, it's just configuring this. So just literally turning it on and then setting up what those compensation items are. And then all we have to do is bring our HR data into the system that's going to create those projections for us. Okay. So let's talk about some of the things that we can do that are maybe a little bit different with planning for people. So when we think about planning for people and we think about the great resignation, one of the challenges that Mel gave me was, hey, we just got all this great analyst data about compensation bands, by title and how people are paid and we want to do a compensation analysis, right? And we want to be able to look at and see both by department, by individual employee and aggregated across the company, how are we doing? Do we have people who are potentially at risk because maybe they're significantly underpaid for their title or for their job grade? Do we have people who are potentially significantly overpaid? We want to be able to do that analysis. And so I thought, I bet we could do that in workforce planning.

Mel: Yeah. And I think a little bit of context. Some of you might know, right, we're all doing merit cycle. Some of us are doing it twice a year and once a year, depending on the different departments. And when thinking about the great resignation, paying 75th percentile or 80th percentile may not need to be the same way for next year, if you want to remain competitive. So for us, we want to be able again, to harvest everything we can from the employee information, bring it into Panful and allow you to have those conversations with finance saying, this is the gaps that we have. If we want to maintain this workforce or restructure this workforce, this is where we see that we'd have to invest in or make some changes as well.

Justin: Yep. Yeah, exactly. And so what we can do is just like we talked about with compensation items, we can actually set up a compensation item that's tied to those employees. And let me just switch scenarios here. So I'll go back into Mike. And so we can see that as this compensation attribute, we have a position grade here. So again, we can take this information, we can bring it into the system systematically. We can also go adjust it employee by employee, but behind the scenes, what we've done is created a data table within workforce planning that's just simply, here's how many grades we have. Here's the median pay for those grades? So at an employee level, we just need to know what grade that employee is. But now that empowers us to systematically do a compensation analysis because we can now calculate the comp ratio. We can look at the total pay for any of our employees. We can compare that against the analyst driven data and do a comp issue analysis directly in Panful.

Mel: So think about the Radford data, your Mercer data, salary. com, everything that we're paying thousands of dollars for every single year, bring that into Panful now, and then be able to reflect what your current employee base are earning.

Justin: Yep. Cool. So let me show you a report that actually brings this data in, stevia flavor. So again, just like with any data that we have in Panful, we can then surface that. So in this report, I'm now looking at that employee by employee level, but because of the aggregation that happens naturally in the system, we could look at this at an employee level, department level, company wide. We could look at it by manager, by job title, because all of those pieces are now attributes, are things that we can report off of. And then we've just set some simple conditional formatting to highlight anybody who's plus or minus 20% off of that median band. So again, really a simple concept but if you think about the steps that you go through to do this in the business without leveraging Panful, and this would, to me... somebody was talking to me earlier today about how do I know if I should do something in Panful versus just do it on the side? And I thought about that. And that's a question when I was a practitioner that we'd ask all the time on my team is like, should we build this in the tool or not? And this is the type of thing. It may seem like, oh, we're going to... Mel's asked us to do this, we do it one time, but in reality, this is something you want to continuously be doing because it's part of your business. You want to look at this all the time, if you're going to manage your compensation for your workforce.

Mel: I didn't know if I'm allowed to ask questions to the audience now.

Justin: Yeah.

Mel: But how are you guys doing this today? Are you doing it in a spreadsheet or doing it in your HRIS system? Not doing it at all, which is also fine?

Speaker 3: Excel.

Mel: Excel. How many hours do you think it could save you if you could do it in Panful?

Speaker 3: A lot.

Mel: Yep.

Justin: Sure.

Mel: Anyone else doing anything differently? Yeah?

Speaker 4: We do Excel.

Mel: Okay.

Justin: Sure.

Mel: And are you just, again, pulling information from an external source, your HRIS system?

Speaker 4: inaudible data report from inaudible workforce inaudible.

Mel: Great. And how protective or how many hours of sleep do you lose every night making sure that no one gets that Excel spreadsheet instead?

Speaker 5: Don't have a problem.

Mel: No? You sleep fine? That's great. I will ask you for tips afterwards.

Justin: Cool. Cool. I guess, any questions? So the next thing we're going to look at is how we can start to take this data and tie it into more of an FTE based plan. So we can look at more, what do we need from a hiring plan standpoint? Because oftentimes right, we send out to, like Mel will say, Justin, how many people do you need on your team?

Mel: Always too many.

Justin: Yeah. A lot. And we force... My counterpart Ben and our boss, Steve is in the room. So we do, we need lots of people, but yeah, we have of course a model that we use that defines how many people we should have. And it's very easy to set up that model in Panful because that model for our team is based on, well, how many demos are we going to have to do? How many events are we going to have to support? And it becomes a calculation to understand, well, how much capacity to do those things, do we need on our team versus what the current capacity is? And so we can boil that down to an FTE basis. There's a lot of places in the organization where you can do that type of analysis. And a lot of times I'm guessing you guys, I see some nodding heads as well, that that just ends up being done in Excel, whether it's by the hiring manager or just an offline calculation. So I want to highlight for you how you can actually bring that actually directly into Panful as well and use that in conjunction both with planning and with workforce planning to help create that balance between the supply and demand side.

Mel: Yeah. And the conversations that we have in our annual planning cycle, or just even in our leadership meeting right, to Justin's point is, what is the ratio of support does our sales team need when we want to expand into new markets, right? As you said, back of the napkin, Justin and his team may seem that they need 20 resources and maybe they can get away with 15. So for us, it's really about being able to analyze those ratios and then also be able to support our business managers saying, this is when we think we should be hiring those resources to hit our top line number as well. This is when we need to buffer our capacity to plan for the unexpected too.

Justin: Yep.

Speaker 6: But this would give you a different look. So somebody who's in the HR organization, part of the organization looks at employees in terms of what drives how many people you need, right? Service organizations are much better at that as opposed to manufacturing where the employees are, not your product. Your product comes out of your plant, out of your manufacturing. So they... Not all managers look at that data that you need to understand, to know how many people you need to produce the product that you want. They don't get deep enough into it to understand that. So you're saying this would give a better way to give those statistics to your operational inaudible?

Justin: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm going to show you, yeah, is how you can start to surface that data for them so that they can create that walk and make that more intelligent decision about how many people they need based on the factors that actually influence it, whether it's number of widgets output, right or it's number of opportunities that come through the pipeline or yeah, whatever it would be.

Speaker 6: The number of chefs you need for. inaudible.

Justin: Yeah, yeah.

Mel: Exactly. Yeah. And to Justin's point to support that business case, so while I do make fun of him a lot, as we are expanding into new markets, those are real conversations we're having. If we're going to have 10 sales people in a new region, what other supporting roles do they need? And this just empowers us to make those business cases to finance or to the decision makers who can write those checks for us as well.

Justin: Yep. All right. So, go back to planning here.

Mel: You've really hyped up your report. I hope it delivers.

Justin: I know, I know. Right. So let me go in here. And so this is an example that's sales based. So when you think about that flow down, whether it's products or anything else, right, so with sales, a lot of times what we start with is what's the revenue plan? A lot of times that might even not be by month, right? It's just by year or maybe by quarter, but we have some sort of idea of where we want to land from a sales perspective. When you think about the translation of that, then we have to start to break that down and say, well then how many quota carrying reps do we need? And what is their quota going to be? And what's their quota attainment going to be? What's attrition going to look like? And then we have the people who support those reps. So like the SDR development reps, the people who are actually helping to generate the leads, all those different pieces. And when you think about that, it's a lot of different variables that you start to have to manage. And the point here is we can start to take, and we can actually use that data because oftentimes most of that information is already in Panful. And what we're doing is we're doing those calculations off to the side versus actually just doing it directly in Panful, to then come up with how many people might we need. So the first step in this example is just our quota and headcount driver. So this is just a simple planning template where what we're doing is we're bringing in our revenue. So we're starting with our historical revenue as a baseline and then we're just setting a top line growth revenue. And again you'll notice here for those who are Panful users, this isn't a reference account, and there's a reason for that. I see Matt Mullet in the room. Sometimes we task sales with a number that's maybe a little bit higher than what the number is that we put out to like the board and others, right? So this allows us to actually create that model. And so you can see we're looking at that five year planning horizon, and we're creating a revenue target number that we're going to work with our sales team on, to use as that foundation to start to back into, or to calculate into how many people will we need to staff our sales organization to, versus how many people we have in the sales organization today. And so when we go down the list here, we've got our different quotas for our different types of reps. We've got then the lead capacity, so how many things can they work on? So again, these are just different data points. These could be sourced directly in Panful. So if you are bringing in CRM data, you might have this information and then you can reference to that. Or maybe you just start typing it into the sheet to follow through that calculation. You notice also we've got some attrition assumptions. These are not Panful numbers. But you know, when you think about attrition, it's often different across different positions. So a lot of times with your inexperienced type roles, those entry level type positions, you might experience additional churn in the employees so you might want to have a slightly higher attrition assumption versus a more experienced role; maybe you have a little bit longer tenure with those folks. And so ultimately what this is doing is then calculating into the planned FTEs or in other words, how many people do we think we need across these roles to achieve our objective as a company? And so then the key comparison point here is to take this and now compare that to what our actual, on payroll, I come from manufacturing so I always think butts in the seats, that's what we always called it. But then we are comparing that. So now we're taking that and just saying, okay, well, how many people do we actually have in those roles? When we look at our area sales manager, we have 62 as our target, which is coming from that role forward and from those calculations. And then we're saying that our current is 61. So we need to go hire one. Now the cool thing about this is, I can then go take this, I can open up my workforce planning template and then just create a new area sales manager role and then that reduces this to zero. So you get that back and forth because these are connected data sources, right? Because with Panful, all that data is in the same place and so we can manage that. Or we could, for example, maybe finance does this analysis and then sends this out to the sales department and says, based on the numbers we've agreed on, this is the staffing that we believe you need. And then they can go start to play with the actual positions and the target pay, however, you guys manage that as an organization. This can now be that tool of collaboration across those different groups and across those different resources. Cool. All right. And so then I promised we'd come back to the dashboard. So the really neat thing about this, and this is what gets Mel and I really excited. When you think about just workforce planning and people, one of the hard things about it is a constantly changing thing, right? Every day, there's some surprise that where, oh, okay, you decided to go somewhere else. Not at Panful. Or, you've hired new employees or you have a candidate that you've made an offer to and they back out of the offer. So you have all these variables that are happening. And so it's a really great candidate to use something like dashboards to get a feel for where are things right now? Because it doesn't have to be something where we wait until... and become very reactive. We want to be proactive with managing that. And Mel and I often have a lot of laughs, not really, over what we call headcount roll forward. And so you think about... I guess maybe a show of hands. How many of you guys have to do a headcount role forward in your business today where you show, here's my starting headcount, here's how many people we hired, people who left, people have transferred, right, how painful is that? How long does it take? inaudible Right. Right. So the beauty is when you really start using workforce planning to its full extent, you now have the ability to actually create things like that automatically through Panful. So this dashboard is using that data that we just looked at through those couple templates and now giving me a really good feel for where we're at, at any point in time, because as we upload, as we update data, this is going to show me that new view of information right away. Right? So as soon as that data loads in, as soon as we get that sync from the recruiting system on the new status, the new anticipated hire dates, we're going to have that real time feedback on where we're at in our plan. And of course this is going to be fully interactive. So, this was my very first job at a college. I spent a lot of time with contracts and trying to make contracts that weren't profitable, profitable. And so we always had all these people charging time to contracts who weren't working on those contracts. Anyone who's ever worked at IBM knows exactly what I'm talking about, that's where I worked. And so something like this, we did very manually, and it took many, many, many hours to put together with lots of data. But, you know, being able to look at this and say, hey, I've got these consultants charging time to my sales and marketing department. Well where are they? They're in department 100. And then being able to just drill into those people and actually see who the people are, who the resources are. And now I can start to actually do something with that. But you think about how much time that takes when you're not fully utilizing workforce planning, this becomes an extremely manual exercise working through all those different data points. The other piece that's really nice, and if you guys haven't used this, I definitely recommend it. But you'll notice now that in any of our drills, there's actually a link. So for workforce planning, it's going to be under home entity. For any financial data it's going to be under doc ref, but that's going to allow you to link back directly to the template where that data came from. So let's say I wanted to adjust these consultants, remove them from my plan and have them go somewhere else, or we're going to terminate the relationship, I can just click that link and make that happen as long as I have the right access. So again, some different little shortcuts and things, but ultimately what we're trying to do is just make it easier to deal with and work with that people- based information, that traditionally is the little side child of finance and accounting. It's really important. It's 80 plus percent of most of our costs, but we end up pushing it over to the side because it's really hard. And so we're really trying to make that easier for folks.

Mel: I think that's the end of our song and dance. But we do want to definitely add some time for some questions or open Q and A, if anyone has some. We've got Genevieve running around with the mic, so.

Speaker 6: Benton will also be running around, so I don't have to do it in heels, but yeah, if you guys have any questions?

Speaker 7: I understand that your HR framework and that the permission is very, very robust, but is it possible to anonymize comp data? Because if I'm a Panful admin, I could just toggle that and have full access to everything.

Mel: In terms of you want to suppress comp data for certain individuals?

Speaker 7: For specific attributes or metrics. In this case a metric for just baseline compensation.

Mel: Yeah. Depending on your permission set, this customer that I mentioned as well with all of their different HRS tools, they're very high on security. And so for their user permissions, they just wanted someone to be able to come in and see just the employee name, their start date, but they didn't want them to see any sort of compensation data related to them. And we do something similarly for our recruiting team. I only give people access to the departments that they support. And again, they only see those employee names. They don't see their compensation if it doesn't relate to them.

Speaker 7: But if I'm an admin, I'm able to actually toggle with that myself though.

Justin: Depending on what level of admin access you have, yeah.

Speaker 7: Okay.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 8: My question is, have you guys ever think about building org chart related to workforce planning? I did notice for our company, a lot of managers and team leaders, they don't think employees by a list or employee card, but they want to think everything as a team. They want see who reports who and etcetera. So I'm just wondering if in the future, if you guys are planning to have like employee related to your positions and reporting, et cetera.

Mel: Yeah, so I think whenever I get asked this question, I always want to make the clear differentiator that Panful will never become an HRIS right. We won't store the traditional things that some things like an org chart or we won't store resumes for employees, really the heart and soul of Panful is making sure that we're your planning system, connecting your finance data to all of the business units. With that being said though, with some of the custom fields that we have, we can bring in the departments, the managers, and as many fields as you want to, but we'll never be that HIRS replacement for an org chart solution.

Speaker 8: Okay. Okay Makes sense. Thank you.

Speaker 9: Yeah, just a, probably a follow on to that question. From a finance perspective, what I typically care about and ask my organization to plan is I ask them to plan the org chart. So I want to know what positions are actually going to be in my plan for the year. And then what I find is it gets very, very complicated really quickly when we're trying to plan people without planning for what positions that are going to be available, or even be available for them to fill or not fill. Have you guys had much success in flipping the paradigm from planning for people, to planning for positions and whether or not those positions are filled or not filled?

Justin: Yep.

Mel: Yeah. I think with the report that Justin just showed right, just thinking about what positions would be needed to achieve our growth or our top line number, that's where we want our managers to anchor to. And once we realize what is needed, then being able to look at the employee roster to see what we already have. And then the differentiator between do we need to go to market for more of those roles or can we have any internal team members fill those positions? Did that answer your question then?

Speaker 9: Well, no, not exactly crosstalk. No, what I'm really.. Like the specific control is, hey for every distinct position, for every distinct seat, as you mentioned, I have a number. I'm like, that is the seat that is available today. And so I tell my hiring managers, you have these four seats and when you fill them, you're done. Right?

Justin: Sure.

Speaker 9: But unfortunately in the system today, it's all done by name and then you have to, this thing is like new hiring crosstalk to go identify anything that's not filled.

Justin: Yeah. So that's the closed system that we're talking about and we didn't dive deep into that, but actually behind... So if you think about... without getting super technical, so if you think about each one of those records. If I create a planned hire record. So I say I've got these four seats, these are the titles, this is that median pay that I'm planning, that's going to be in my plan, that record has what we call Panful ID. And so that Panful ID can be interfaced across your recruiting tool as well as your HRIS. So that's how we close the loop on that system internally at Panful. And then we also have customers doing that as well. So once that position is approved, once your budget's approved and you want to trigger that, right, that can actually then even create the record in the recruiting system so that then it can be recruited for. We can pull data back in terms of what the status is of the recruiting. So to drive like the push out of the position. But then once we've hired for that position, that Panful ID can actually even go into the HRIS to then again, complete that loop where now that position is no longer a nameless, to be hired, but it actually is a person. The HRIS is now providing that specific comp detail to close that system. Where I find that gets really, really nice is if you have somebody then who leaves the organization, right, you don't have to let go of that. You can continue that cycle to show that that's a back filled position and not lose the history on that position, or if someone gets promoted and goes to another position. So there's actually some neat things that we've been able to create and do around that.

Speaker 9: Yeah, great. Thank you.

Justin: Yeah, you're welcome.

Speaker 10: So if I'm understanding what you're talking about, so I know we are pulling information out of our HRIS system to populate the positions in workforce planning. So you're taking data out of workforce planning and feeding it back to your HRIS system. So this is your planning tool. So I need to add a position in Panful, and then that information gets fed back to your HRIS system to be built out for other items that you might need in that system?

Mel: Yeah. So if we use Justin's example of needing a new solution consultant, we would put that in Panful as a to be hired. It would push out to our applicant tracking system for recruiting so they know that's an approved hire to work on. They can see the Panful ID. Once we've hired that person we would load them in an HRIS with their normal onboarding. And that would again, come back into Panful as a hired position and would replace that to be hired record.

Speaker 10: Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 6: Okay. I think that's all the time we have for questions. Thank you so much. Please give them another round of applause.