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.

To optimize the recruitment funnel, recruitment database platforms can assist in tracking where candidates are in the hiring journey.

The recruitment funnel is a handy way of thinking about casting that net and then, as candidates move down the funnel, deciding 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 and manage the hiring process 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.

Recruitment Funnel Stages

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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 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 as well as internship programs you create and make finding and keeping talent much easier. 

Attraction

With a clear and strong brand in place, you can start putting yourself out there and advertising your organization and 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
• 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 your 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 (in addition to diversity data which is required for your benchmarking) you 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.

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. But 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 likey to be involved.

We interview candidates and send 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, reducing the risk of turnover and ensuring a good match.

Ultimately, we want to thoroughly investigate the necessary skills, behaviors, and motivations and create a positive candidate experience regardless of the outcome.

For a deeper dive, check out Mariya Hristova’s excellent article on how to interview someone.

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 and relationship with the candidate is the most important thing as this will keep your offer acceptance rate (OAR) high. A good OAR is generally considered to be ~90%.

For more, check out Mariya’s great article how to make a job offer.

How To Create A Recruitment Funnel

Here’s a quick process to help you create a recruitment funnel:

1. Develop your EVP and employer brand
2. Define your recruitment goals
3. Define your ideal candidate
4. Create email templates for each recruitment funnel stage to optimize candidate communication.
5. Write and post some job descriptions
6. Source and screen candidates
7. Develop an interview process
8. Make them an offer they can’t refuse
9. Develop some useful recruitment metrics to help you optimize your funnel.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Source of Hire: Tracks where candidates are coming from (e.g., job boards, social media, employee referrals, recruitment agencies).
4. Application Completion Rate: Measures the percentage of candidates who complete the application process after starting it.
5. Screen to Interview Ratio: Measures the number of candidates screened versus the number of candidates interviewed.
6. Interview to Offer Ratio: Measures the number of candidates interviewed versus the number of job offers extended.
7. 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:

1. Always be branding: Your brand is precious, lead with your values and protect it at all costs!
2. Develop candidate personas: Create detailed profiles of your ideal candidates, including skills, experience, and cultural fit, to guide your sourcing and screening efforts.
3. Leverage existing employees: Leverage existing employees to refer candidates and take part in your recruitment marketing efforts
4. 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.
5. Frequent communication and collaboration: Hiring should be a collaborative effort between recruiters and hiring managers.
6. A Diverse talent pool and interview team: Important for bringing in new ideas and perspectives in both sides of the interview table.
7. 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.
8. 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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