Pigment for Pigment: Workforce planning with Benjamin Lillitos

Pigment isn’t just for FP&A teams. 

In the spirit of extended planning and analysis (xP&A), we apply its  capabilities across other fields in the organization. It helps align everyone to Pigment’s goals, and breaks down some of the barriers that might traditionally exist between finance and other departments.

In this blog series, Pigment for Pigment, we’ll be interviewing stakeholders across Pigment to spotlight how they interact with the tool. This time, we’re talking to Ben Lillitos, Head of Talent & HR Business Partnering.

Q: Who are you and what do you do at Pigment?

I’m Ben, and I look after the ‘front of house’ side of HR - everything to do with TA activities, talent development, performance management. Basically, the end-to-end journey people go on through their time at Pigment.

‍Q: What do you and your team use Pigment for?

Primarily around understanding workforce planning, and its impact on our hiring plan. 

The reason I make a distinction is we look at this in two ways;  headcount plan and hiring plan. The former looks at things from a financial planning basis (i.e. cost out of the business, ramp time impact for sales productivity etc), and latter looks at when we ‘open’ a role from a talent acquisition basis. 

We use Pigment to determine how and when we open roles, control for team ratios, how we track those roles, and how we predict resource demands. It can be used as a hiring tool - not in the sense of an ATS (application tracking system), but in that it helps us understand where we need to be and when, in what region, and by department.

Q: What would you be using if not Pigment?

Excel or G-sheets.

Q: You don’t seem particularly enthusiastic at  that prospect?

No. The challenge with Excel or G-sheets is that you have multiple users going into the documentation and making edits - that’s massively difficult from a permissions and access control point of view. 

There’s also visibility issues. Working in HR, there are all sorts of things that I wouldn’t want going in a spreadsheet that could accidentally be shared with the wrong people. Pigment removes that as a possibility.

Q: How long have you been using Pigment as a team?

We began in H1 this year and as ever, when you’re deploying something you continually iterate how you show data, how you record data and manipulate to inform decisions. It now integrates with Lever and HiBob, so we’re able to pull data from both in real-time so we can evaluate where we are, and expect to land once positions are filled - this works for both growth and departures.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about using Pigment?

Manipulation. You can manipulate data in Excel, but Pigment is able to pull data out faster, and make it more visual. And it makes it easy - I’m no finance modeling wizz, but I’ve spent time in the tool and now I’m able to get some really nice results.

Q: What are the main benefits you’ve seen from using Pigment?

The visual outputs are far better than anything I’d been able to achieve previously, and the fact that it integrates with the tools we use already means I’ve got one place that I know has the most up-to-date information.

I’m able to pull reporting down far quicker, too. And I can run hypothetical scenarios with finance super quickly when we need to. If, for example, sales pipeline conversion changes, that changes when my team needs to hire people.

You can build those things in Excel, but it’s more complicated, it’s harder to manipulate once it’s built, and if more than a few people are trying to use it, that can get quite frustrating.

…that’s all from Ben

But it’s not enough on workforce planning for you, Pigment has a webinar coming up that you should sign up for.

Join Colin Sygrove, US Solutions Consultant for Transform FP&A to xP&A with workforce planning on October 10th, 2023.