Market swings in the last handful of years alone have been enough to make recruiters motion sick, again and again chasing the cycle of hiring surges and purges. Then there’s the matter of unwanted employee turnover that has executives worried about unfilled seats. A new report by LinkedIn and Microsoft found that 46% of workers are thinking of quitting this year.

Talent acquisition isn’t getting easier. Forty-six percent of TA leaders say that business priorities are changing so quickly they can’t keep up, according to new research from the Josh Bersin Company. And rather than inviting talent acquisition teams to the planning meeting, business leaders are sending memos demanding cost reduction.

When the business plan is a moving target, making decisions about workforce planning is impossible. “As the business continues to evolve, so does our pace of recruiting,” said Anne Comolli, director of talent acquisition at 23andMe, the biotech company made famous by its at-home genomics testing kits. As soon as TA or finance makes a decision about hiring and the data is entered, that information has already gone stale, she said. “I never really had confidence–nor did my finance partner have the confidence–that it was 100% accurate. As we were making decisions about where we needed to make changes to headcount, the data just wasn’t available.”

Conversations about workforce planning were only hypothetical, she said during a From Day One webinar on the challenges of headcount management. She couldn’t confidently tie headcount changes to cost savings without sinking a significant amount of time into data analysis. Comolli estimates that between finance and herself, answering a single hiring question could take half a day, manually working across multiple systems and spreadsheets.

The same was happening over at health benefits platform Gravie. Syncing finance and HR was a multi-meeting, many-hours affair. And yet it felt impossible to get the right information at the right time, says Comolli’s fellow panelist Nick Price, Gravie’s VP of financial planning and analysis. “When you’re a small but fast-growing company, cash flow forecasting is so important. People are our number-one cost. Knowing not only how many you’re going to hire and in what departments you’re going to hire them–but also when you’re going to hire them–it’s so important to get that correct up front.”

Unless business leaders know what resources they’re going to have, they can’t forecast. Poor planning leads to over or under-hiring, which leads to layoffs and surges–and the cycle is doomed to repeat.

A Better Way to Connect Finance and Talent Acquisition

A few years ago, Tushar Makhija was working at a start up. After closing a big round of funding, Makhija had a pile of cash and a mandate to spend it on building the team he wanted. But then the pandemic arrived. You’re spending too much on headcount, executives told him, and he was made to clear house. “But Covid actually turned out to be a tailwind for software, so in another three months, I was told to go rebuild and hire everybody else back by the same very smart venture capitalists and also my CTO,” he said. Makhija endured exhausting cycles of recruitment and cuts, spent hours in spreadsheets, and ping-ponged between HR and finance. If it was this unwieldy with a team of 25, what is it like at bigger companies with hundreds or thousands of workers?

According to the report from the Josh Bersin Company, just 31% of talent acquisition leaders feel like they’re strategic contributors to the business. Most feel more like order-takers.

Makhija began looking for a way to help both finance and HR with the problem of headcount management. “One is a steward of capital and the other is a steward of people. If you don’t have enough capital, you can’t hire enough people; and if you don’t have enough people, you’re not going to grow revenue,” he said. “The biggest opportunity for us was to break these data silos.”

In the early stages of founding his company, TeamOhana, where he’s currently CEO, Makhija spoke at length with CFOs and attended workforce planning sessions. It was a stressful mess. There were too many people in a single spreadsheet, mysteries about who made this change or that one, broken formulas, and frustrated department heads.

With TeamOhana, he set out to design a platform that would connect HR and finance in real time with one source for everyone’s data, where requests can be made and approved, plans transparently changed, and decisions made. “We have drawn swim lanes,” he said. “The downstream effects of good strategic planning is basically good company strategy. That good company strategy results in more revenue, happier customers, higher bonuses, fewer layoffs, and more expansion.”

Gravie and 23andMe signed up, and it paid off. Both Price and Comolli said they now spend less time reconciling spreadsheets and more time talking proactively–and productively–about using human capital to grow the business, like, for instance, how long it will take to hire for a hard-to-fill role and when those contributions will start to make a difference for the business.

Price doesn’t feel like a gatekeeper anymore, which he never cared for in the first place, especially given finance’s reputation for opposition. As soon as his HR team loads information into the platform, Price can approve it and move on. And as an HR leader, Comolli is finally spending her time being a strategic contributor to the business, not chasing down numbers to punch into a spreadsheet. “We can be true thought partners and do actual workforce planning. It has been just a breath of fresh air,” she said. And that’s what she really signed up for when she got into HR.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, TeamOhana, for sponsoring this webinar.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.