The Recruitment Funnel: A Complete Guide
From the many, one. Recruitment is about casting your net as wide as possible to find as big and diverse a pool of candidates as possible.
The recruitment funnel is a handy way of thinking about casting that net and then, as candidates move down the funnel, narrowing down who's the best fit and enticing them to join.
What Is The Recruitment Funnel?
The recruitment funnel is a model used by recruiters and HR professionals to describe the stages a candidate goes through from initial awareness to becoming a hired employee. It helps to visualize the hiring process and mange it more efficiently.
If you imagine recruitment to be like sales, with the product a role at your organization, then it’s very similar to the marketing funnel used by marketing teams.
Why Is The Recruiting Funnel Important?
The recruitment funnel is a useful tool to help manage the flow of the candidates from initial awareness through to them accepting a position at the org.
Recruitment is a notoriously chaotic process, but using the funnel helps hiring teams organize themselves around different tasks and use data to identify improvements at different stages of the funnel.
For example, recruitment funnel speed is a common recruiting metric to keep an eye on the length of the hiring process and how long candidates are spending at each stage.
If candidates are spending too long in the interviewing stage, why is that? Are they not willing to go through an assessment you have for them? Perhaps they’re completing it but waiting too long for feedback.
Recruitment Funnel Stages
Awareness
Every organization has two brands: the overall brand (product, customer service, voice) and the employer brand (how they’re perceived as an employer).
Your employer brand has significant impact on your ability to attract (and retain) talent so, if you haven’t thought about your employer brand yet, it’s time to do so.
The core of your employer brand is your employer value proposition (EVP), or what you offer to someone in return for their services. This covers purpose, mission and vision, values, total compensation, development opportunities, culture, how you treat people, etc.
Once you have a strong EVP in place you can combine it with all the external facing elements like logos and visuals that make up a brand.
Creating a strong employer brand will help generate awareness about your suitability as an employer and make finding and retaining talent much easier.
You can start to get your brand out there through advertising, social media, and your digital real estate such as the careers page on your website.
Attraction
With a clear and strong brand in place, you can start putting yourself out there and advertising your organization a bit more alongside specific roles.
This process, called recruitment marketing, covers activities such as:
- Writing and posting clear, enticing job adverts
- Making an attractive careers page
- Reaching out to candidates i.e. candidate sourcing
- Launching an employee referral program to incentivize and encourage referrals.
- Creating profiles on hiring platforms
- Being active on social media i.e. social recruitment.
It’s an opportunity to have some fun and show off what makes you unique. Sometimes, however, you might opt to work with recruitment firms to help find more or better candidates and fill hard-to-fill roles.
Technologies such as recruitment marketing software and applicant tracking systems (ATS) can help with creating careers pages and posting job adverts.
Applying
This stage is the point between a candidate deciding to apply and a candidate formally submitting an application.
It’s important to ensure that the application process is smooth, removes duplication, can be completed quickly, and only asks relevant questions (these might not be the same questions for every role). Going astray here can leave candidates feeling drained and cause the business to drive away talent.
In the words of recruitment expert, Liam Reese:
"The only information you really require at this point is the minimum amount of information you need to make a decision as to whether to interview the candidate or not plus contact information to communicate with the candidate—you need nothing else so ask for nothing else."
ATSs can help here by standardizing certain aspects of the application process and ensuring every applicant's information is captured so they can be tracked and responded to.
Another neat ATS feature is being able to program them to automatically reject candidates that don’t meet certain criteria, such as location or visa status, and sending next steps information to those that do.
Screening
Candidate screening is the process of assessing applications and deciding who’ll go to interview with the hiring manager.
The candidate screening process involves reviewing information about the candidate that is available to you (resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, etc.) and deciding whether they could be a good fit.
Companies leveraging resume screening tools often see faster hiring cycles and improved candidate quality.
If they seem promising, then the process would also normally involve an initial call between the candidate and someone from HR, called the ‘screening call’, to explore a little deeper and discuss the role.
At this point, you maybe only have one person involved in the process, but that will likely change.
As other people become more involved, it's not a bad idea to have a recruitment process flowchart for people to follow and a single point of contact for the candidate to interact with throughout the process, usually the person who does the initial screen. This is called full cycle recruiting.
Interviews and assessments
Now we’re getting into the meat and potatoes of the recruitment funnel where the most people are likely to be involved.
We interview candidates and give them assignments to determine their qualifications, communication skills, and motivations while verifying the accuracy of their application.
On the flipside, job seekers can showcase their abilities, understand the role better, and build rapport with potential employers.
Both parties can clarify expectations, negotiate terms, and make informed decisions about moving forward.
Ultimately, through interviews and assessments, we want to thoroughly investigate the necessary skills, behaviors, and motivations and create a positive candidate experience regardless of the outcome.
Having a clear structure for interviews is important. In her excellent article on how to interview someone, Mariya Hristova recommends structuring interviews like a funnel starting with the most must-have skills in the first stages, and moving towards the optional ones in the next stages.
Example:
- Stage one: Deep dive into their experience with specific questions prioritized by must-have experience first and moving further towards optional experience.
- Stage two: “Technical” interview, maybe involving a task, where you get to assess must-have skills and potentially get an understanding (based on the candidate’s performance during the first interview) of their nice-to-have skills.
- Stage three: Focus on the culture add and the behavioral fit.
Highly recommend reading the article for a deeper dive!
Offer
While the job offer is the end of the hiring process, closing candidates (i.e. making sure they accept the offer) starts from the moment you first talk to them and their information enters your hiring software.
The actions you take at each stage of the funnel help you to bring them to a "closeable", “Yes I want to work at company!” state of mind (or do the opposite and get them to self-select out).
Building a rapport with the candidate is crucial as this will keep your offer acceptance rate (OAR) high (a good OAR is generally considered to be ~90%).
As they progress through the process, you’ll find out more about the candidate you can then use to close them at the negotiation stage.
For example, if a developer wants more experience using a certain technology, and this is something you can genuinely offer, then that’s something to highlight.
For more, check out Mariya’s great article on how to make a job offer.
How To Create A Recruitment Funnel
Here’s a quick process to help you create a recruitment funnel:
- Develop your EVP and employer brand
- Define your recruitment goals
- Define your ideal candidate
- Create email templates for each recruitment funnel stage to optimize candidate communication.
- Write and post some job descriptions
- Source and screen candidates
- Develop an interview process
- Make them an offer they can’t refuse
- Develop some useful recruitment metrics to help you optimize your funnel.
Pro tip: Free recruiting tools help visualize and refine your recruitment funnel for better hiring outcomes.
Recruitment Funnel Metrics
There’s an old saying that goes “What gets measured gets managed,” meaning that monitoring the effectiveness of something using clear metrics is essential for improving it.
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of the recruitment funnel, there are quite a few to choose from:
Recruitment funnel metrics are crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of and streamlining your hiring process.
Here are some key metrics to consider:
- Time to Fill: Measures the number of days it takes to fill a position from the time the job is posted to the acceptance of the offer.
- Time to Hire: Measures the number of days from when a candidate enters the pipeline (e.g., applies or is sourced) to when they accept the job offer.
- Source of Hire: Tracks where candidates are coming from (e.g., job boards, social media, employee referrals, recruitment agencies).
- Application Completion Rate: Measures the percentage of candidates who complete the application process after starting it.
- Screen to Interview Ratio: Measures the number of candidates screened versus the number of candidates interviewed.
- Interview to Offer Ratio: Measures the number of candidates interviewed versus the number of job offers extended.
- Offer Acceptance Rate: Measures the percentage of job offers accepted by candidates. As ment
Thankfully, you can lean on your recruiting system to help you track these metrics since many will have built-in reports for these metrics already (or reports you can customize to your specific needs).
Recruitment Funnel Best Practices
Follow these best practices to help create and optimize your recruitment funnel:
- Always be branding: Your brand is precious, lead with your values and protect it at all costs!
- Develop candidate personas: Create detailed profiles of your ideal candidates, including skills, experience, and cultural fit, to guide your sourcing and screening efforts.
- Leverage existing employees: Leverage existing employees to refer candidates and take part in your recruitment marketing efforts
- Implement an ATS: When your hiring gets active enough, use an ATS to manage and streamline the application process, track candidates, and maintain organized records. Here’s our pick of the best applicant tracking systems.
- Frequent communication and collaboration: Hiring should be a collaborative effort between recruiters and hiring managers.
- A Diverse talent pool and interview team: Important for bringing in new ideas and perspectives in both sides of the interview table.
- Standardize screening and interview processes: Develop consistent screening criteria and interview questions to ensure fairness and objectivity and ensure interviewers are trained on best practices for conducting effective and unbiased interviews.
- Be transparent and honest: Being open and honest opens the door to a variety of questions that will allow you to gauge whether the person is a good candidate for the role.
You can optimize your recruitment funnel by leveraging small business recruitment systems that automate these key processes.
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