The most important decisions a company makes are related to headcount.

There’s a famous saying in the tech world that:

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“You either build the product, sell the product, or help the people doing the first two things do them better.”

In fact, +70% of all dollars spent at SaaS companies are on headcount. Therefore, hiring is a leading indicator of future topline growth (or contraction).

In other words, headcount tells you where the puck is going.

And even better, if you can track headcount patterns at the departmental level you can detect more nuanced signals about a company’s future revenue (and ambitions).

For example, if a company is adding lots of sales, biz dev, marketing and customer support people, it usually means they are expecting topline growth and must build capacity to support anticipated demand.

Generally speaking:

  • Increasing Go to Market headcount (Sales, Biz Dev, CS, Marketing) is a bullish signal on topline prospects and a validation of management’s confidence

  • Increasing R&D headcount (Product, Engineering) indicates a company is investing ahead of it’s technical roadmap, and potentially moving into new areas

  • Increasing IT headcount may indicate a company is undergoing a digital transformation, and could be a big software buyer in the coming months

Here at Mostly metrics we track the headcount patterns of 339 technology companies on a monthly basis. 104 are currently publicly listed and 235 are currently privately held.

More specifically, we tag companies across the following characteristics:

  • Public vs Private

  • Sector (e.g., security, development, finance, HR etc.)

  • Business model (e.g., field sales, PLG, channel)

  • Pre IPO candidates

  • Vertical software

  • Take private

  • PE owned

In short, there’s a lot of money to be made for those who can spot patterns ahead of time - whether that be as an investor, a seller of technology, a CFO benchmarking their own company’s staffing model, or an employee looking to land their dream job.

In this post we’ll cover the top signals coming out of our May headcount data.

What you’ll find in this report:

  • OpenAI grew headcount more than 100% in just two quarters

  • Wiz is adding headcount when other cybersecurity players are making deep cuts

  • Cloudflare continues to put the pedal to the medal

  • Grammarly and two other Pre IPO companies are hiring lots of Engineers

  • A surprise publicly traded privacy and security player is scaling quota capacity

  • Salesforce has over 350 IT roles open?!

  • Anduril is on fire; military demand remains strong due to the geopolitical issues

  • A PLG player is hiring massive Sales heads, perhaps signaling a shift in GTM

  • Two recent take privates actually increased headcount Y/Y after being bought out

  • Toast, Samsara and one other well known vertical SaaS player are adding heads

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