Limiting Post Length

I’m in the process of designing a template and I was wondering what I can I use to show only a specific number of words in a post. This template is for displaying profiles of employees in an organization. The goal is to keep employees from writing overly lengthy bios by hardcoding it to only display X number of words from their post. We’re not interested in using the “more” tag, either.

This is similar to using the_excerpt() except that I’m already using that for something else on the site. This is not a request for how to display a word count on their post.