The workbook turns a hiring forecast into a 2027 recruiting plan. It gives hires by quarter and role family, the funnel volume those hires need, the recruiters to run them and a budget split by hiring channel. The input to get right first is the leaver rate, because with flat headcount every hire replaces someone who left. In the invented example on this page (illustrative, not a benchmark), 68.6 of 110.6 hires are backfills, and the agency channel makes 12.5% of hires but takes 69.1% of channel spend.

Figures are as of October 27, 2026. What the workbook adds to a plain headcount list is that one set of inputs (leaver rate, time to fill, funnel conversion) sets the recruiter count on two lenses and the channel budget together, and a Checks sheet turns red when totals do not tie or an input is missing. The page also lists published inputs worth sourcing for 2027. They come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), with releases from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Gartner, and the second table shows the next release date where the publisher gives one. The JOLTS release dates follow the first table.

What is in the workbook

The workbook has seven sheets. You fill the yellow input cells on four of them, and the rest calculate.

Every choice cell has a drop-down: currency, the backfill rule and the capacity method. Rates and shares reject values outside 0% to 100% when typed, and Checks flags pasted text and out-of-range rates. The four channels are agency, job boards and ads, referrals, and a direct and other line for the careers site, own sourcing and internal moves. Available FTE is the recruiters on staff times the share of their time that goes to candidate work.

Two lenses size the recruiter team because each one misses what the other catches. The requisition lens works from open requisitions: average open requisitions equal hires per month times time to fill, divided by days per month and by hires per requisition, and recruiters needed are open requisitions divided by the number one recruiter can carry. The Talent Acquisition Trends 2027 page runs the same arithmetic in its capacity example. The funnel-hours lens turns the funnel volumes into recruiter hours with your minutes per stage, then divides by the working hours one recruiter has in a quarter. The default method is the higher of the two.

How to fill it, with an invented example

Work through the sheets in order. Every figure in this section comes from the example inputs that ship in the yellow input cells, so it is illustrative, not a benchmark. Overwrite each input cell before you rely on an output.

1. Headcount. Set the currency and days per month first (USD and 30 in the example). Group roles that hire alike. The workbook has six family rows: set unused rows to zero, and merge families if you have more. The example has six families, such as Engineering and Leadership. It starts 2027 with 400 people and adds 42 new positions. Leaver rates sit between 8% and 25% a year. Define the leaver rate as leavers divided by average headcount over the same 12 months. CIPD’s 2026 report defines its turnover rate as the number of leavers divided by the average number of employees, times 100. The example then has 68.6 backfills and 110.6 hires in total.
2. Funnel. Time to fill is the number of days from requisition opened to offer accepted. Enter hires per requisition and the four stage-to-stage rates. In the example, Engineering needs 50.0 applicants per hire and Customer support 15.9, and the plan as a whole needs 129.0 offers and about 3,352 applicants.
3. Capacity. The example starts with one recruiter, adds one at the start of Q2, counts 85% of a recruiter’s time as candidate work, assumes 400 working hours per recruiter per quarter and loads each recruiter at $80,000 a year. Q1 needs 1.17 FTE against 0.85 available, so the status reads Short. From Q2 the team has 1.70 FTE against 1.07 needed in Q2, 1.09 in Q3 and 0.87 in Q4.
4. Channels. Enter average base salary and the share of hires by channel (each row must total 100%). Add the agency fee as a percentage of first-year base, the cost per hire for the other channels, any fixed annual costs and an approved budget. The example has $46,000 of fixed costs. It spends $483,475 on channels, fixed costs included, and $140,000 on recruiters, $623,475 in all, or $5,636 per hire, inside a $650,000 approved budget.
5. Summary and Checks. Summary puts the plan on one page. Checks holds 19 ties and input checks and three planning flags. The example passes all 19 checks and raises one flag, the Q1 recruiter shortfall. Checks also catches text in number cells and a blank or zero salary, fee rate, minutes per stage or recruiter cost that the plan uses. It cannot tell whether a plausible number is right.

What the example calculates, by quarter (USD, invented inputs):

Hires are expected loads, so fractions are normal. Round them when you open requisitions.

Why the leaver rate comes first

In the example, 42 new positions are the whole growth plan. Add 10 percentage points to every family’s leaver rate and hires rise by 41.8 and channel spend by $194,474. A leaver rate that is off by 10 points therefore moves the plan by about as many hires as the entire growth forecast. We would not paste a published rate into that column. Measure it by role family from your HR system, and use the published rates below as a sanity band.

Each rate in the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) covers one reference month, and BLS adds the 12 monthly levels of hires, quits and separations to get annual levels. Multiplying a monthly rate by 12 gives a rough annual equivalent. That is our arithmetic and not a BLS statistic. BLS computes an annual average rate as the sum of the 12 monthly levels divided by the sum of the 12 monthly employment levels, times 100, so a BLS annual rate stays on a monthly scale. At the national August 2026 rates, the multiplication gives about 23% a year for quits, which are voluntary separations other than retirements (1.9% a month), and about 38% for all separations (3.2% a month). The 38% is the closer match to CIPD’s all-leaver rate. CIPD’s 2026 survey uses another period, country and sample. It gives a UK median turnover rate of 4.1% for 2025. That median rests on 310 respondents, and CIPD notes that a disproportionate number of them were very small organizations with no or very low turnover. CIPD also reports considerable variation across organizations, so caution is required in comparing and interpreting the figures. A gap that wide between two figures that differ in country, period and sample is the argument for your own number.

Hires also need a rule for who gets replaced. Set a family to No in the backfill column when you plan to absorb its leavers, and its headcount then shrinks with them.

Inputs worth sourcing for 2027

These published figures can sanity-check an input cell. None replaces your own data. Each row names the input it informs and what the number measures. The last column of the second table gives the next release, and the JOLTS release dates follow the first table.

BLS JOLTS gives monthly rates by industry, seasonally adjusted. The hires, quits and total separations rates are each month’s flow as a percentage of employment. The job openings rate is the openings on the last business day of the month as a percentage of employment plus job openings, so its base differs. The August 2026 figures are preliminary.

BLS published these on September 29, 2026. The next release is on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and covers September. The schedule page lists December 1, 2026, for October data. Read the rows against your own industry. A retailer and an insurer who both planned from the all-industry row would be wrong in opposite directions. The national series and the UK and EU official figures are on Recruiting Trends 2027.

The other inputs come from surveys and one price index.

CIPD’s cost per hire is a median for UK respondents, and each respondent decided what to count. The report’s cost list includes agency or search fees, so do not add the median on top of the agency fee the Channels sheet prices. Treat it as a range-finder for the Channels sheet and keep your own contracts as the source for the fee rate. For the agency market and what it does not publish on fees, read Recruitment Agency Trends 2027. Offer pay assumptions sit in Salary Increase Budgets 2027: Every Published Forecast.

Where the workbook can mislead you

Do not read the requisition count alone for high-volume roles. In the example, Customer support needs 0.03 FTE in Q1 on the requisition lens and 0.13 on the funnel-hours lens, because three hires share each requisition and one recruiter can carry 30, yet 15.9 applicants per hire still have to be read. Leadership runs the other way: in Q1 it needs 0.26 FTE on the requisition lens against 0.16 on hours, because each search stays open for 100 days. Each lens undercounts a different kind of family, so we would keep the default of the higher of the two.

Set the agency share family by family before anything else on the Channels sheet. In the example the agency channel makes 12.5% of hires and takes 69.1% of channel spend, and Leadership alone is 3.3% of hires and 28.8% of variable channel spend. The workbook prices an agency hire at salary times fee rate, so the same share of hires costs most where pay is highest. A debate about job board prices will not move the total as much as the agency share for the best-paid families.

The quarter you give each new position drives the timing of new-position hires and spend. The workbook books hires and spend in the quarter the hire starts, and a role with a 75-day time to fill needs its requisition open before that quarter begins. We would add the requisitions you already carry on January 1 to the Q1 load by hand. If every new position sits in the first quarter, the workbook will believe it.

The leaver rate is applied to start-of-quarter headcount divided by four. It ignores seasonality and treats every leaver alike. A family where you expect to absorb leavers belongs on No. A family with a reduction planned needs a rate that includes it. Referral bonuses and agency fees are booked in the quarter the hire starts. If your referral program pays after a service period, cash timing will differ from the quarterly budget.

What we could not confirm

• A published time-to-fill benchmark. SHRM’s Benchmarking landing page lists no figures. The CIPD text we read gives the share of organizations that track time to hire but no duration.
• An agency fee rate or a share of spend on agencies. The part of CIPD’s 2026 report we could read gives neither, and the same gap is noted on Recruitment Agency Trends 2027.
• Recruiter workload (requisitions per recruiter or recruiters per employee). We found no figure in the CIPD text we read or in Gartner’s October 2025 release, so the example uses labeled assumptions.
• Stage conversion rates for the funnel. None of the sources opened for this page publishes them. Gartner’s offer figure comes from unspecified Gartner research, and its release gives no sample size, countries or base.
• The CIPD report in full. We read the text on recruitment methods and costs, plus the turnover passage. Some figures in the extracted text were garbled, and we found no fieldwork dates.
• The September 2026 JOLTS data and the Employment Cost Index for the third quarter of 2026. Both are released after the date of this page.

What to do in your 2027 plan

1. Pull 12 months of data. Your applicant tracking system gives hires, requisitions opened and stage counts, plus median time to fill, counted the same way as in the Funnel sheet. Your HR system gives leavers by role family and average headcount.
2. Fill Headcount from the forecast and the measured leaver rates. New positions are decisions, and leaver rates are measurements. Save two copies: one with flat headcount, one with the growth forecast.
3. Read Capacity before Channels. A Short quarter is a staffing decision for the recruiting lead, and the budget follows from it.
4. Put three dates in the calendar. The Employment Cost Index is due on October 30, 2026. JOLTS follows on November 3 and December 1. Refresh the salary and rate inputs after each release.
5. If you pilot AI screening for high-volume roles, change the minutes per stage for those families only, and keep the pilot’s measured values in place of a vendor’s claim.

Your next step is to copy total hires and the channel-only cost per hire from Summary into the HR Budget Template 2027, and to rerun this workbook after the November 3 JOLTS release. In the example that is 110.6 hires at $4,370 each. Leave recruiter cost out of it, because the HR Budget template takes external spend per hire and pay comes from the headcount you enter.

Written and reviewed by the HR Riant Editorial Team. General information, not legal advice.