Recruitment Funnel: Everything Recruiters Need to Know

When there are too many candidates, filtering out and finding the right one is difficult, right?

But how can you solve this pressing problem? 

The answer is simple: Create a recruitment funnel to manage candidates easily and seamlessly. 

Think of the recruitment funnel like a tasty ice cream cone. At the top, you've got a scoop overflowing with potential candidates.

As you move down, there is less ice cream (candidate dropout), leaving you with a smaller, more manageable group.

Finally, at the bottom of the cone, you've got that perfect bite of chocolate—your ideal hire!

The recruitment funnel is a roadmap that guides candidates from the first time they hear about your job opening to the moment they get hired.

In this hiring funnel, you'll learn seven stages, from the initial awareness phase, where candidates first discover your brand, through the consideration and interest stages, all the way to the final decision-making and hiring process.

So, if you want to taste the perfect bite of the chocolate (ideal hire), then let's dive into this blog.

What is a Recruitment Funnel?

A recruitment funnel is a process that has different stages of recruitment.

It's a seven-stage process from attracting candidates to hiring them.

It narrows the candidate pool until one is selected or hired. It is making the recruiting process more efficient.

Let's understand how they help make recruitment more effective.

Standard Stages of the Recruitment Funnel

The recruitment funnel’s sub-stages may differ from organisation to organisation.

It depends on these 3 criteria:

• Type of hiring (temporary or permanent hiring)
• Type of roles (senior or junior position),
• Mass recruitment or Normal recruitment.

So, let’s learn the following standard stages and find your ideal candidate from your talent pool.

1) Awareness

Brand awareness is the first vital stage to bringing in more candidates. The goal in this stage is to reach as many people as possible. 

The main focus is on raising employer branding to attract many ideal candidates.

To raise awareness, you can use this medium, such as the company's website, social media pages, and job boards.

On these mediums, you can showcase the positive points of the organisation.

It is a core element of recruitment marketing. Recruiters will get more reach as they spread more awareness of the brand.

2) Attraction

In the attraction stage, recruiters concentrate more on social media and job boards. This way, they will attract potential candidates to apply for the job. 

While posting the job ad, recruiters must use a short and precise description of the open role. It helps candidates to understand the role in a better manner. 

A career site is extremely important to attract more talent.

Also, the clear-cut definition of the job will provide more clarity to the candidates. Recruiters must write the available position information to attract top talent. They must ensure that they target both active and passive candidates. 

3) Interest

In the third stage, you can increase engagement with candidates and also improve their experience.

You'll generate interest in the candidates for the open position. So that more people will apply for it, and recruiters will get more suitable options.

You can try to answer candidates' questions or queries related to the open jobs. 

Sometimes, continuously engaging and answering candidates is not possible for recruiters. To overcome this problem, you can use a recruitment chatbot.

It'll provide instant answers to the standard and common questions of the candidates.

Recruitment Chatbot also offers answers 24/7 and is utilised to eliminate prescreening rounds.

You can use such automatic tools to eliminate manual tasks and focus on other major tasks.

4) Application

The application stage is for candidates interested in the job role. Hence, the application form must be short and easy to apply.

Your application form should be mobile-friendly. So, it'll be convenient for candidates who don't have a PC and Laptop.

You can use tools such as Chatbot that auto-response to all the applicants who apply for the job. Thus, the applicants will know that the recruiters have received their applications. 

5) Pre-Selection or evaluating

In this stage of the recruitment funnel, you’ll get the qualified ones.

It eliminates those who don't fit the job requirements. Once recruiters receive applications, they start to assess resumes and their skills. 

At this point, technology can serve as a best friend. So, you can use tools like resume parsers and assessment tools to assess candidates. 

It will automate the manual tasks of screening thousands of resumes and testing technical skills. This stage offers the real gist of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses. 

You can use interview scheduling and interview management software during this stage. It also allows you to send interview invite links automatically. The interview management system provides the behavioural feedback skills of the applicants.

6) Interview

This stage offers the real gist of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses. Interview scheduling and management software help you enhance this stage's efficiency.

By using this software, you can send interview invite links to candidates. It'll also provide you with feedback on their performance. This way, recruiters can engage and interact with the candidates.

You can also use a one-way video interview system, in which candidates answer your questions in recorded video formats. Afterwards, you and your team can assess those interviews at your convenience.

7) Hiring

Hiring is the last and crucial stage of the recruitment funnel.

This stage is important for recruiters as candidates may reject the offer letter for various reasons such as lack of transparency, inefficient salary negotiation, improper onboarding, and bad candidate experience. 

Therefore, recruiters must conduct every stage effectively using modern technology to ease the process. Recruiters can use recruitment tools to automate offer letter sending and check when candidates accept the job offer. They can utilise online tools to automate the onboarding and document verification tools, saving them ample time. 

5 Steps to Effectively Manage Recruitment Funnel

1. Extend the candidate pool

It’s extremely hard to source and hire high-quality employees as they are generally passive candidates who are not actively looking for a job. Perhaps, posting job Ads on different job boards and organisation’s website is not enough.

Hence, recruiters and HRs may have to go the extra mile by leveraging various social media platforms for effective advertising, creating fruitful employee referral programs, and asking their previous employees. These practices enable them to hire more diverse candidates within the company. 

2. Precisely determine the potential talent you want to hire

The hiring team's first step is to know the exact requirements of the open position. For that,  communicate with the hiring managers to understand their needs.

Once it is clear, then it’s time to set those detailed criteria in the ATS, such as

• Specific education
• must-have skills
• career history, etc.

It'll help you to narrow down the potential candidates. It is incredibly important to set clear-cut requirements to avoid hours of work.

3. Assess soft skills

The interview stage is the best opportunity for the HR team or recruiters to evaluate the competencies and professionalism of the applicants. Also, It enables them to check the personal traits of the candidate who might be their next employee. Hence, the hiring team assess the situational behaviour, ability to work in a team,  general knowledge and personality of the candidate to know how nicely they fit in the company culture and their future team. 

4. Analyse every phase of the recruitment workflow

Recruiters need to involve the hiring manager in the recruitment process and analyse the ratio of the candidate who initially applied for the position, moved to the interview round, and eventually got the offer letter. This way, the hiring manager will know which stage is not necessary for the recruitment workflow and can remove them. 

5. Utilise recruitment metrics to check the efficiency

Recruiters and hiring managers must utilise and leverage the benefits of the AI-based hiring system to analyse their hiring workflow and improve it accordingly. It’s the best way to check whether your hiring funnel is working efficiently or not. 

Core Metrics to Optimise Recruitment Funnel

Brand awareness

Companies need to know their values in the market. Recruiters can inspect the brand awareness metrics by checking multiple surveys, focus groups, and online research. These are the ways to know where your brand stands in the marketplace. Plenty of review platforms are also available to check the brand's value. Also, the effective way is analytics websites like Google Analytics to check how many visitors are checking your website daily. 

Time to hire

There are multiple ways to calculate the time of hiring for each position. Recruiters must consider parameters like The average amount of time to fill the role while determining the hiring time. Recruitment software features of reports and analytics will help recruiters understand where they are lacking or wasting time. A survey by Robert Half found that 57% of job seekers lose interest because of a lengthy recruitment process. 

For example: if the analytics are showing that you are wasting your time reviewing a lengthy application and it is increasing your average time to hire, then after getting feedback, you can lessen it or add automation to the process.

Offer acceptance rate 

This metric is crucial to measure the effectiveness of the process. The offer acceptance rate will determine your recruiting process efficiency. It can be measured simply by the total number of candidates who got the offer letter divided by the number of candidates who accepted it. This metric will determine what kind of mistakes recruiters make at which stage. 

Cost per hire 

One of the efficient and simple ways to calculate Cost-per-hire (CPH) is to divide the total value the recruiter spends (on things like job advertising, software or technology expenses, and agency fees) by the total number of applicants they have hired. This metric will define the cost recruiters spend on the recruitment process and provide the analytics of which stage they spend too much or make mistakes. 

Candidate screening

Candidate screening metrics will determine how efficient your sourcing strategy is. Recruiters can inspect the candidate screening ratio by dividing the quality of added candidates in the talent pipeline by the candidate who clears the screening stage. This way, hiring teams and recruiters will know which sourcing channel brings talented candidates. 

 Diversity metric 

Applicants consider the diversity of the workplace while accepting a job offer. Thus, recruiters must check diversity metrics as it is a critical factor for applicants. The most common practice recruiters can use to inspect diversity is to define the total number of employees and then check the number of underrepresented groups. Also, they can increase diversity by sourcing from various social media channels and hiring the top candidates for the job. 

Why is the Recruitment Funnel an Effective strategy? 

The recruitment funnel determines what factors recruiters need to consider to enhance the effectiveness of the recruitment process. 

Recruiters need to ask these questions to enhance the quality of the funnel. Are they exploring various social media and job boards to bring diverse candidates, as sourcing is an initial and vital parameter of the hiring process? Do they analyse a hiring funnel analysis and improve areas of weakness when found? Are they measuring the recruitment funnel metrics accurately or consistently? 

Recruitment funnel metrics are crucial with an actual hiring and recruiting funnel. One can look at every step and optimise what you need for you and your business. 

Final Thought On Recruitment Funnel

The recruitment process is essential for every organisation as hiring the best people helps them to grow. Therefore, recruiters must use the best strategies and tools to hire top-notch candidates to ensure the firm's success. 

In addition, the hiring funnel is the best way to make sure that you will recruit or hire the best candidate possible. Recruiters funnel seven (7) steps strategy of the recruiting process. Also, the recruitment funnel metric will tell you at which stage you are making mistakes or spending more time or money by data-driven analytics and calculation. 

 By using the recruitment funnel strategy, recruiters' productivity will increase, and they can focus on more important critical thinking tasks. Also, the online tech and tools mentioned in this article will surely help them to enhance the recruitment process, and they'll get the best out of it.