How Fin's headcount-to-hire process aligns finance, recruiting, and the business

A single source of truth starts with trust

Since Fin launched its AI agent in 2023, it has scaled to resolve 2 million customer conversations a week for more than 12,000 businesses. Keeping pace with Fin’s customer base put pressure on hiring, but headcount planning didn’t belong to a single team. Every planning cycle meant reconciling competing workbooks line by line, with finance forecasting ending headcount, recruiting projecting quarterly hires, the business naming hiring needs, and no single team held the full picture.

Rachel Lanman’s vision was to eliminate the silos and give every leader a number they could trust. The challenge was in cross-functional change management. Everyone could see the potential; the work ahead was turning it into the trusted source of truth. The fiscal year planning cycle was the opportunity for buy-in across the business. Running a full fiscal-year plan inside Caro meant the whole organization could see every role, every hiring manager, and every approval status in one place. "That's when everyone knew Caro was the source of truth for our headcount,” Rachel notes. “We no longer had to rely on various Google Sheets.”

But getting there meant earning trust with data, especially with senior leaders. "We needed to do the discovery and make sure the data is in a perfect state before putting it in front of leaders," she says. Inviting managers to Caro also improved data accuracy, because managers have context that no one else has: backfills, location changes, the exact job profile. Rather than headcount being a game of telephone between managers, finance, recruiting, and operations, managers could see their own roles, and catch any mistakes."The leaders and finance have the perspective of heads and comp. Managers have the perspective of the exact details of the position." This also gave the organization continuity through change, since the context that used to live in people’s heads now lived in the system. "Caro has all the information you'd need to answer any headcount question," she says.

Building the headcount-to-hire machine

With Caro established as the source of truth, Rachel focused on tightening the process that turned approved headcount into actual hires. Her team was swamped in data reconciliation at the point of hire: a role opened at one level in Dublin might be filled at a different level in London, each corrected by hand. The slow reconciliation rippled downstream, delaying onboarding. Rachel realized the root cause was upstream, at the creation of the position. She had to tackle the entire process end to end.

Rachel architected a solution covering the full lifecycle: finance approves headcount in Caro and sends it to Workday when ready for hiring, recruiting pushes it to Greenhouse to recruit, and Greenhouse writes the accurate details back at the offer stage. "We ended up with this intricate, well-connected machine for headcount, from requesting it all the way through hiring," she says. Fixing the whole workflow at once was a larger undertaking, but produced something far more robust.

The bi-directional integration with Workday became a game changer for the R&D org at Fin. Every headcount change could now originate from a single surface instead of being reconciled across systems after the fact. The complexity of creating and updating positions in Workday collapsed into a single "send to Workday" action in Caro. That consistency across systems is what earned the leaders' trust. "Caro is the best tool at this point," says Rosa Jin Wang, from the R&D Operations team. "I'm pushing all of our managers to make their updates there."

The payoff was concrete: the initiative saves an estimated 100 to 150 hours per quarter across the organization, and is widely regarded as a cross-functional win.

Finance, recruiting, and the business, in lockstep

With one shared plan, finance, recruiting, and the business each own the part they know best: finance manages the numbers and the budget, managers own the details of their own roles, and recruiting owns the execution. Because everyone works from the same real-time picture, decisions that once traveled through a chain of hand-offs now happen in one place.

This transparency allows leaders to make informed headcount decisions and trade-offs. In Caro, a manager could see that they have a second headcount opening up the following quarter. "They can ping the finance manager and say, we identified a spectacular candidate – can we pull this headcount forward into this quarter," Rachel says. A conversation that once would have been guesswork is now grounded in a plan everyone can see.

For Rosa and the R&D org, having a trusted source of truth became the foundation for more. She built a pipeline to send Caro data into their data warehouse, powering multiple downstream use cases. "We used the new Caro export feature, and now that data powers things like software capitalization and developer experience too," she says. When the data is trusted, it becomes the backbone that other systems can build on.

Change management isn't easy, but the result is a streamlined org built to scale. "You're not going to get everyone to agree on day one," Rachel says, "but now Caro is fundamental to our entire headcount-to-hire process. Our hiring process would break if we didn't have it. It's become crucial to our ability to hire quickly, manage headcount, and understand our org structure."