Interviews look for structured thinking across months rather than intervals, comfort with shrinkage and attrition assumptions, and the ability to defend a hiring number to finance.
- 01
Take me through how you build a twelve month capacity plan.
What a good answer covers
Give the chain clearly: forecast volume and AHT by month, convert to workload hours, convert to productive FTE using target occupancy, gross up for shrinkage to get planned FTE, compare against supply after attrition, then place recruitment and training with the right lead times. Emphasise that lead time is the whole point of the exercise, since a gap identified after the hiring window has closed is only a report, not a plan.
- 02
How do you calculate required FTE from forecast volume?
What a good answer covers
Work through it: workload hours equal volume times AHT in hours. Divide by target occupancy to allow for the fact agents cannot be busy every second. Divide by productive hours per FTE per month to get productive FTE, then divide by one minus shrinkage to get planned FTE. Be ready to explain why you divide by one minus shrinkage rather than multiplying by one plus it, because the two are not the same and getting it wrong understaffs you.
- 03
Which shrinkage categories do you plan separately, and why?
What a good answer covers
Split planned from unplanned. Planned includes holiday, training, coaching, meetings and project time, all of which you can move. Unplanned includes sickness, absence, unpaid lateness and system downtime, which you can only forecast. Explain that you plan holiday by month rather than as a flat annual average, since summer and December distort capacity badly, and that separating the categories tells you which part of shrinkage is a planning choice and which is a risk.
- 04
How do you model attrition in the plan?
What a good answer covers
Use a monthly rate rather than an annual figure divided by twelve, and separate early tenure attrition from tenured attrition, because new hire loss in the first ninety days behaves differently and undermines training pipelines. Model it as a monthly loss applied to the surviving population, and show the effect on the hiring number, not just on the headcount line. Mention that you sanity check the modelled rate against actual leavers every month.
- 05
Finance says your hiring number is too high. How do you respond?
What a good answer covers
Do not defend the number, defend the assumptions and the trade off. Show the drivers, volume, AHT, shrinkage, attrition, occupancy target, then present the options with consequences: fewer hires with a lower service level, or more overtime, or a slower ramp with a specific month of risk. Give the cost of each. Explain that presenting a capacity plan as a set of choices rather than a demand is what gets it approved.
- 06
How do you handle training and ramp in the plan?
What a good answer covers
Model new hires as partial FTE, not full FTE on day one. Represent classroom time as zero productive contribution, then a nursery or ramp period with lower productivity and higher AHT, reaching full effectiveness after a defined number of weeks. Also account for the trainers and coaches taken off the phone, which is shrinkage on the existing team. Explain that ignoring ramp is the most common reason a plan looks fine and the operation still misses target.
- 07
What occupancy do you plan to, and why does it matter?
What a good answer covers
Plan to something in the 82 to 88% range for voice, and explain the reasoning: occupancy above roughly 90% sustained drives burnout, AHT inflation and attrition, so a plan built on 95% occupancy is not efficient, it is self defeating. Also point out that occupancy is an outcome of size, since larger groups can safely run at higher occupancy than small ones, so a single target applied to every queue is wrong.
- 08
How do you present risk in a capacity plan?
What a good answer covers
Avoid a single deterministic number. Show a base case with a best and worst case around it, driven by the assumptions that move the answer most, usually volume, AHT and attrition. State the specific months where the plan is thin, quantify the exposure in FTE and service level, and name the mitigation and the decision date for each. Sensitivity on two or three drivers is more persuasive than a full probabilistic model nobody reads.
- 09
How often do you rebuild the plan, and what triggers an off cycle rebuild?
What a good answer covers
Describe a monthly rolling refresh with actuals reconciled against plan, plus a quarterly deeper review of assumptions. Triggers for an off cycle rebuild include a significant volume trend break, an AHT step change from a process or system release, an attrition spike, a change of service level target, or a business event such as a launch or acquisition. Add that you keep a version history so assumption changes can be explained later.
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