Back Office Balance: Building Workforce Efficiency

Client Overview

Our client is a non-profit educational services organization dedicated to supporting a network of charter schools. By providing a comprehensive suite of back-office services—including finance, curriculum design, human resources, and operational support—they enable educators to focus fully on inspiring and educating students. Serving schools across the country, they combine decades of expertise in education, business, and nonprofit leadership to deliver innovative tools and tailored solutions. Their mission is to help schools operate efficiently and effectively, empowering them to achieve better educational outcomes for students, particularly those in underserved communities.

The Challenge / Mandate

The organization engaged us to identify a Workforce Planning Consultant to help right-size and strategically align their workforce of 315 employees across six departments. As the organization scales its services nationally, leadership recognized the need to assess staffing levels and ensure the workforce structure supports operational efficiency and organizational priorities. The consultant’s mandate included performing a deep-dive analysis of workforce utilization and capacity, identifying areas of overstaffing or understaffing, and assessing the alignment of roles to strategic objectives. Additionally, they were tasked with developing data-driven recommendations on hiring guardrails, promotion guidelines, and role optimization to create a sustainable blueprint for future workforce planning. The consultant worked directly with the CEO, COO, and senior leadership team to navigate sensitive organizational dynamics while fostering buy-in for proposed changes.

Search Strategy

We focused our search on senior-level workforce planning and human capital management consultants with extensive experience advising complex organizations on organizational design and workforce optimization. Priority was given to candidates with prior HR advisory experience at top-tier consulting firms and a strong background in non-profit or mission-driven organizations. We sought individuals adept at conducting organizational capacity analyses, defining functional strategies, and developing key workforce metrics and KPIs. The ideal candidate possessed exceptional interpersonal skills to guide C-level executives through challenging workforce decisions and experience implementing scalable workforce planning frameworks in organizations of similar size and scope.

The Placement

We placed an executive-level strategic planning consultant with over 15 years of workforce planning and HR advisory experience. A former senior consultant at Deloitte, she had led numerous workforce transformation initiatives across industries, including education and non-profit sectors. Her expertise included workforce capacity modeling, organizational design, and change management. She had a proven track record of working closely with senior leadership teams to develop performance matrices, headcount budgeting processes, and governance structures for workforce planning.

The Outcome

The consultant delivered a comprehensive workforce assessment and actionable roadmap for aligning staff capacity to organizational priorities. She created tailored metrics and dashboards to monitor workforce utilization and developed a framework to guide hiring and promotion decisions. By facilitating collaborative planning sessions with department heads, she fostered a shared understanding of workforce needs and opportunities for optimization. Her recommendations enabled the client to reduce inefficiencies, enhance staff productivity, and create a scalable workforce strategy to support future growth. The project positioned the organization to better serve its network of schools while maintaining fiscal responsibility and operational excellence.