Recruitment Funnel: Streamline Your Hiring Process

Streamline your hiring process with an effective recruitment funnel, guiding candidates through each stage efficiently. Improve talent acquisition with structured steps.

By Brad Nakase, Attorney

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Have a quick question? I answered nearly 1500 FAQs.

What is the purpose of the recruitment funnel?

Talent managers can improve their ability to find, assess, and recruit top candidates with the use of a recruitment funnel. A well-executed recruitment funnel can streamline your company’s otherwise laborious hiring process.

Read on to learn the definition, stages, and process of a recruitment funnel, as well as how to design your own.

Let’s jump right in.

The steps involved in finding and hiring new employees can be mapped out using a recruitment funnel. From publishing a job opening to having a candidate accept an offer, the talent acquisition funnel has you covered. Starting with a large pool of qualified applicants, you will whittle down the pool until you have only the best applicants remaining at the bottom of the funnel.

There are different steps in the hiring process, and each one has its own goals and results. A recruitment professional can use this information to assess the efficiency of the company’s hiring process and identify areas for improvement.

What is the significance of a recruitment funnel?

The purpose of a hiring funnel is to create a scalable, methodical, and efficient procedure for attracting and employing top talent. In this way, HR and the company may better understand where they are in the recruiting process by breaking it down into manageable steps and collecting data at each one.

Rephrasely CEO Matthew Ramirez says recruitment funnel data helped discover hiring process bottlenecks and allowed his company to make modifications. An excessively lengthy application process was shown to be the root cause of their high dropout rates. They cut the application process down to five minutes for candidates. Furthermore, this assisted in filling positions that were vacant.

You may improve your chances of attracting top talent, guiding them through the recruiting process, and increasing the number of times they accept your job offer by breaking down your recruitment funnel into its component parts and studying each one.

The steps of a recruitment funnel

There are several steps in a hiring funnel, and they all lead to distinct outcomes. While every company’s hiring process is different, here are some typical steps:

  1. Realization

Establishing your company’s name recognition is the first step in the top of the funnel. Prospective employees might not know who you are or what you do right now. The more people who are familiar with your brand, the more likely it is that qualified individuals will be to apply for jobs with you. Approximately three quarters of those who are looking for a job take the company’s reputation into account.

What the HR department can do:

Take a look at your present employer brand and see what others are saying about it.

Make advertisements: Collaborate with your marketing group to launch initiatives to raise brand recognition.

Make the correct channel selections: Determine the most popular social media platforms where your candidates hang out by conducting an audit of your presence there.

  1. Drawing People to You

Attracting qualified applicants to your available positions is the next stage in your hiring funnel.

People who might be interested in working with your company have heard of it, but they haven’t applied just yet. Here are the primary tasks:

  • Creating job postings and detailed descriptions
  • Get the word out about available positions by posting ads on various websites, social networks, and your careers page.
  • Developing innovative strategies, such outreach programs, to entice candidates

What the HR department can do:

  • Make sure your ideal applicant can grasp the duties and responsibilities of the position without any difficulty by writing clear and concise job descriptions. Make sure the job posting and title are easy to find when people search for them online.
  • Using programmatic advertising, you may zero in on the demographics of your perfect applicant.
  • Make a referral bonus program for your staff: The employee will likely only recommend individuals they know who they think would be a good match, so this is a terrific approach to broaden your pool of possible applicants. Set up a referral bonus scheme and let your staff know about it.
  • Encourage recruiting managers to get in touch: As many as 56 percent of applicants will reply to a hiring manager’s outreach, according to a LinkedIn report.
  1. Interest

After attracting applicants to your company, the following stage is for those candidates to take action. At this point in the hiring process, prospective employees are doing research on your business online, either by looking at your website or following you on social media.

Among job-seekers who research a firm, LinkedIn reports that 38% use the company’s website as a resource, 32% rely on LinkedIn, and 53% receive their knowledge from personal contacts.

Your current responsibility is to:

  • Improve your online visibility, especially on your own web page and social networking accounts.
  • Prospective employees should be able to find the necessary information easily.
  • Share any requested information with candidates.

What the HR department can do:

  • Improve your company’s reputation as an employer by finding out how people see your brand through a brand audit. Take a look at what others are saying about your company on Google. You may learn a lot about your audience’s reactions and the information your business is offering by reading the comments on your social media pages and website.
  • Make data easily available: Including a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on your website will facilitate the access to information for potential candidates. Make a video that discusses your hiring success stories or answers frequently asked questions regarding your recruitment process. Make sure that your About Us and Careers pages reflect your company’s best qualities by updating them.
  1. Making an application

People that could be a good fit for your open roles have started applying, at long last. Notably, most firms take around two to three months to go from the application stage to the hiring stage. An key milestone to reach is making sure the proper candidates are applying.

Recruiter.com research found that only 10.6% of job applications are completed. This is because the application process is so complicated, so it is very important to get this step right.

Creating a positive experience for candidates is of utmost importance at this point. Recruiters should prioritize:

  • Minimizing application drop-off by keeping complexity to a minimum
  • Keeping applicants updated on their progress
  • Looking for ways to enhance your application process on a continuous basis.

What the HR department can do:

  • Minimize complexity: Use plain language, ask fewer questions, and make the application process more interesting for the applicant to make it easier for them to complete.
  • Regular and early communication is key: Get the word out to candidates early on about what to expect from the process.
  • Create a unique confirmation email and send it: Keep applicants updated on what’s happening and when they can expect a response.
  1. Checking and evaluating

As a recruiting specialist, your current objective should be to conduct a thorough evaluation of each candidate’s knowledge, experience, and abilities. This is a difficult step since you can get a large number of applications and not have the resources to handle them all.

Setting up tests to evaluate applicants’ skill levels, abilities, or even personalities might help you do a good job of assessing them.

A high-quality applicant tracking system (ATS) can also aid in the automated screening, sorting, and shortlisting of applications on a massive scale.

What the HR department can do:

  • You may learn a lot about a candidate’s strengths and areas for improvement by administering tests that assess both their technical and soft abilities.
  • Hold preliminary screenings: Find qualified applicants by combining your applicant tracking system (ATS) with manual screening.
  • Make your interview selections: The next step in your procedure is to conduct interviews with the most qualified prospects.

In order to prepare for an interview, Circuit CEO Jack Underwood suggests giving candidates some “homework” to analyze a problem and come up with solutions. Then you’ll have a better idea of the candidate’s potential performance on the job. For the sake of testing their time management abilities, let students choose their own due date. Since not all qualified applicants do well in interviews, this is a great way to level the playing field.

  1. Conducting interviews

Once you have a short list of possible prospects, the next step in your hiring process is to interview them.

This is often the most labor-intensive part of the hiring process. A LinkedIn poll found that small businesses can spend up to seven hours per week interviewing prospects.

As a general rule of thumb, three rounds of interviews are ideal. Whether you are filling a senior or technical role, among other considerations, will influence this. Having too many interviews, though, could exhaust your candidates to the point that they don’t want to continue or even quit the process altogether.

Currently, a recruiter’s duties include:

  • Giving the interviewee background on what to expect and how the process will work.
  • Putting a hiring team together to carry out interviews using a tiered system.
  • Training the recruiting staff to ask objective questions free of prejudice.
  • Think about the candidate’s needs, wants, and expectations as you conduct the interview.

What the HR department can do:

  • Make things easy for your candidates: Give your applicants the tools they need to ace the interview process. Give them some background on the company, what to expect, and some examples of questions they might encounter.
  • Make the most of interview structure: In order to cover more ground efficiently, divide the questions among the interviewees. Make sure the interview goes smoothly by not leaving any crucial questions until the last minute, when candidates might feel pressured.
  • Give quick feedback: After each interview, be sure to let the candidates know how they did and what they may expect next.
  1. Hiring

Well done. At this point in the hiring process, you are prepared to formally provide an offer of employment to the most qualified candidate. The best candidates are now taking the time to weigh the offers they’ve received from various recruiters and companies.

Doing the following will improve your odds of the applicant accepting your offer:

  • Make an effort to understand the candidate’s goals and what drives them.
  • Learn about the qualities they want in a job.
  • Be aware of their long-term professional objectives
  • Find out what perks they’re looking for in a new position.
  • Notify the candidate of what is to come in the onboarding process once they have signed and accepted the offer.

What the HR department can do:

  • Compensation is a major factor for candidates, but it isn’t the only factor that matters. Highlight the ways in which the candidate’s career can be advanced and why your company is the better choice.
  • Share an interesting business story: Potential candidates seek a sense of purpose and belonging. Give an account of your personal beliefs, the company’s objectives, and the role’s potential influence on the business.
  • People looking for jobs want to know that they will be able to challenge themselves and advance in their careers. Therefore, it’s important to outline chances for skill development.

Essential points to remember

  • A hiring funnel allows your business to streamline its hiring process by breaking it down into manageable steps.
  • Set up your hiring process: Create a successful hiring funnel for your business by following our seven-step guide.
  • Measure the success of your hiring process: If you want to know how to improve your hiring process, you need to measure and optimize each phase.
  • Put the candidate’s experience first: With the use of a recruitment funnel, your company can ensure that applicants have a pleasant application process.

Have a quick question? We answered nearly 2000 FAQs.

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