After recruitment planning, what follows is the recruitment funnel. You can see it as an upside-down cone or a triangle that funnels down to fill vacancies.
What is a recruitment funnel?
A recruitment funnel is a framework for moving candidates from visiting the careers page and job portals to becoming employees. Narrow at the bottom and wider on the top, a recruitment funnel guides all the sourced and applied candidates to produce the most suitable hire. The stages between the wide area and the narrow opening of the funnel help filter out candidates unsuitable for the role.
Stages of a recruitment funnel
The funnel begins with sourcing candidates and closes at retention. The stages include – outreach, screening, interview, offer and retention.
- Outreach: The first recruitment funnel stage is reaching out to quality candidates. Make use of the most effective channels to attract candidates. Also, 70% of the workforce are passive candidates (LinkedIn). Hence, use recruitment and talent acquisition to maximise reaching qualified candidates.
- Screening: After a good outreach, screening is done to select candidates for the interview round. You can do it on phone calls or through video screening. Selecting too many candidates for the interview round increases the time and cost. Online skills assessment can make it faster and more efficient. Multiple choice questions, coding, and typing-based tests can be the various methods to select only strong candidates for an interview.
- Interview: Generally, the hiring managers interview the top qualifying candidates. A speedy interview scheduling, a well-prepared interview kit, and meaningful dialogue will ensure a good candidate experience.
- Offer: An extraordinary recruitment funnel would see more than 90% of the candidates accepting the offer.
- Retention: If a new hire leaves the job shortly, you have to go through the whole recruitment process again. It will take you more time to hire and increase the hiring cost. A well thought retention strategy would save you from expensive new employee turnover.
Why is it important to optimise a recruitment funnel?
If you have unplanned hiring and never thought of a funnel, you probably have an unbalanced recruitment funnel. It makes the candidate flow messy and unpredictable. You can streamline the candidate flow based on your needs with an optimised funnel. You will have a recruitment funnel that narrows down to an ideal new hire.
Metrics to track the recruitment funnel
Data-driven recruitment can help determine the efficiency of your recruitment funnel. Metrics to track include:
- Source of hire: Tracking the sources, career pages, job boards, referrals, etc., help determine which sources deliver more quality applicants. And which sources you must optimise to improve efficiency.
- Time to fill: Track the time taken to fill an open position. A longer time to fill suggests an inefficient recruitment process.
- Quality of hire: Getting a quality new hire is the ultimate goal of an efficient recruitment funnel. Hence, it is important to track the quality of hire.
- Candidate experience: It is crucial to track your candidate’s experience, from making an application to being communicated and interviewed. It will help you to understand how good your recruitment process is at different stages.
- Offer acceptance rate: Low offer acceptance rate indicates an ineffective recruitment funnel, failing to attract, process and hire new candidates. If you track it, you will know the reason and can work to improve it.
Gathering, storing and analysing the recruitment data
Besides the recruitment funnel, tracking how you gather data, store them, and generate reports could be beneficial. With the PyjamaHR applicant tracking system, you can study and track reports to improve the hiring process.
- The talent pool
The talent pool is the database of all the candidates who applied to your open positions or were sourced. So use this data, to begin with every time a new requirement comes up.
- The candidate source
Track the top-performing sources of your applications. If you use the PyjamaHR recruitment software, you can note the metrics concerning the sources:
- Number of applications
- Applicants for whom the interview was scheduled
- Number of Hired candidates
- Number of rejected candidates
- Rate of hiring
- Assessment and reports
Seeing through the recruitment report can help assess the team’s performance. You can identify mistakes and inefficiencies to determine what strategies worked and what did not.
If you have a new open position to fill, you can always go back, check the flow and identify the best strategies. Repeating the process for every new position will make your hiring faster and better.
