New-hire ramp & hiring lead-time calculator
A new starter isn’t a full agent on day one. This tool models the effective FTE a cohort delivers while it trains and ramps, the productive weeks you lose to that climb, and — working backwards — the date you have to start recruiting to have people productive when you need them.
The cohort & ramp
Edit these numbers to model any glide path — a slow start, a plateau, a late jump. The ramp length follows the number of values you enter. Changing the ramp-weeks or week-1 % boxes above rebuilds a straight line.
lost to ramp
(weeks of output)
productive
on the phones
─ Headcount ■ Effective FTE ■ Lost to ramp
Back-plan: when to start recruiting
To have this cohort fully productive by your target date, working back through ramp, training and recruitment…
Open the requisition by —
| Week | Productivity | Effective FTE | Lost FTE |
|---|
Why the ramp is the expensive part
When you replace a leaver or hire for growth, the cost everyone sees is the advert. The cost that actually hurts the plan is this curve: weeks of below-full output while the new starter learns. Those lost FTE-weeks are real capacity you don’t have — and because they’re a productivity loss rather than a cash line, they rarely appear in the business case. Two practical lessons fall out of it. First, model new starters as the fraction of FTE they really are, not full heads the day they hit the floor, or you’ll overstate capacity and miss service. Second, because the climb takes weeks, the only way to have people productive when you need them is to start the recruitment-and-training pipeline well before the gap opens.
Pair this with the cost of attrition calculator, the FTE & budget builder, and the article attrition is a capacity problem.