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The bar for People leaders has moved.
Headcount and HR investment are facing greater scrutiny, while AI is changing how companies think about roles, skills and the work that still needs a person behind it.
Andrea Bartlett, Chief People Officer at Lillio, shared with Tech Talent North what she has learned about making the case for people decisions, and why knowing the business is now fundamental to leading its people strategy.
4 Key takeaways:
- People decisions need to connect clearly to business outcomes.
- The cost of not hiring can be as important as the cost of hiring.
- The one metric every P&C leader should know: revenue per employee.
- AI is making context and judgement more important when assessing roles and talent.
Know The Business Behind The Headcount
Andrea’s advice starts with the fundamentals: understand how your company makes money. Know the revenue model, average deal size, sales cycle, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and who buys the product.
“Every decision for headcount or people project investment has to connect back to this.”
At Lillio, moving further upmarket changed the company’s sales cycle and, in turn, the profile of revenue talent it needed. Understanding the customer became part of understanding the workforce.
Know The Number Behind The Ask
One metric Andrea believes every senior People leader should know is revenue per employee.
“If you don’t know this number, this is one of the easiest back-of-the-napkin math pieces that any business leader and decision maker is going to expect you to know.”
Lillio has been working towards doubling its revenue per employee over two years, a target that directly affects who gets hired, which skills command investment and the company’s cost load.
Andrea also points to cost of vacancy as an underused way to make the case for hiring. Leaving a role open can mean lost revenue, additional pressure on the team and a lengthy ramp period once somebody joins.
“It has been the number one way that I have seen success with a CFO in terms of talking about the real risk to a business if we do not hire or if we delay a hiring decision.”
The point isn’t to turn every People decision into a spreadsheet. It’s to make the business consequence visible.
AI Has Changed The Headcount Question
That business case is becoming more complicated as AI enters workforce planning.
Andrea has heard from People leaders whose requisition processes now include questions such as “How can this job be done with AI?” and “Why is this role needed instead of leveraging AI?”
She encourages leaders to consider which work has high potential for AI substitution, which can be partially augmented and where human involvement remains critical.
The risk is assuming AI automatically means fewer people.
“There are a lot of assumptions at the leadership level that things can just be done and we will figure out how with AI. There are trade-offs to that. There are costs to that.”
Lillio experienced those trade-offs firsthand. After investing in an AI bot to reduce customer support tickets, product changes drove ticket volumes to an all-time high while the business was also losing valuable context from direct customer interactions.
An initiative designed to improve efficiency was creating costs elsewhere.
Efficiency Can Move The Problem
The same tension appeared within Lillio’s engineering team.
Andrea shared that around 80% of its code is now developed with AI. That creates an obvious question from investors: can the team become leaner?
But as AI-generated code increased, so did the need for quality assurance. Lillio didn’t yet have enough internal bench strength to review the output.
The work hadn’t disappeared; it had moved.
“Make sure that you’re not just talking about the costs, but you’re also talking about productivity wins or losses.”
For People leaders, that’s an important distinction. Automating part of a role can change where work happens, which skills become valuable and where new pressure appears.
The headcount conversation needs to consider how the work is changing, not simply how many people AI might replace.
The Same Case Won’t Work With Every Leader
A strong business case also depends on who’s hearing it.
CEOs tend to focus on whether the right people and skills are in place. CFOs want cost, efficiency and ramp time. COOs look at capacity and workforce ratios. Investors are particularly interested in talent density and efficiency.
People leaders need to understand which part of the case matters most to the person making the decision.
They also need to bring options. During restructuring decisions at Lillio, Andrea presented best-case, base-case and worst-case scenarios, giving leaders a way to weigh the trade-offs and revisit decisions as circumstances changed.
There was one thing she learned not to leave out: her recommendation.
“The most important part of the conversation the board wants to hear from you is: what do you think is best? You’re in the business. You know.”
Data strengthens the case. The People leader still needs a point of view.
People Are More Complicated Than A Score
That judgement becomes particularly important when investors apply simplified frameworks to talent.
Andrea spoke candidly about the ABCD model used by Lillio’s investors. Performance scores make a workforce easier to discuss at board level but can strip away important context.
At one point, some employees classified as C performers held the strongest customer relationships, significant internal influence and deep industry knowledge.
“It’s your responsibility to make sure you’re not just playing into this type of overly simplistic framework, because you need to create the whole picture.”
AI adds another layer. An employee’s current performance might tell one story, while their ability to adopt new tools, learn quickly or help others adapt tells another.
People leaders need to make both visible.
A Final Thought
During the Q&A, Andrea was asked how much airtime HR actually receives in board meetings.
Her answer was candid: “HR is almost always deprioritized.”
Much of her People content is now discussed during the financial review before the board meeting, where there is more room to connect workforce decisions to business priorities.
There’s a useful lesson in that approach. Influence isn’t necessarily about getting more minutes on the agenda. It’s about bringing evidence, context and a clear recommendation into the conversations where decisions are already being made.
For People leaders, a stronger voice in the boardroom starts long before they walk into it.