How To Create An Effective Recruitment Funnel

An effective recruitment funnel can make all the difference when it comes to effective and efficient hiring, but the only way to make it work is to ensure that all the steps are in the right place (and they are all needed).

Below we will look at what a recruitment funnel is, why it is important, and what stages you should include to make sure that you are getting the best candidates through the process so that you can make the best hiring decision.

What is a recruitment funnel?

A recruitment funnel is a tool that is used in hiring. It is a structure that the recruitment team develops which starts with lots of applicants at the top, and then filters out unqualified and unsuitable candidates through various screening and assessment stages, to leave the ideal candidate at the end.

A good recruitment funnel has well-considered stages, including:

• Sourcing candidates

• Screening

• Assessing

• Interviewing

• Making hiring decisions

• Making job offers

• Onboarding

The best recruitment funnels are simple and efficient, and they can be scaled to be relevant for hiring at all levels, whether volume hiring or looking to fill executive positions.

Why is a recruitment funnel important?

With a good job advert, posted in the right places, a recruitment funnel will source as many pre-qualified leads as possible - and then distill them down until only the most qualified and suitable candidates remain.

This structured approach saves time and money for the recruitment team, removing unnecessary steps and utilizing technology where possible to reduce bias. A streamlined recruitment process helps hiring teams make better decisions faster.

For the candidate, a streamlined recruitment funnel leads to a better experience - the stages are simple and easy to understand, the communication tends to be better, and the whole process is faster.

The stages of a recruitment funnel

The specific stages that your business will use in the recruitment funnel will depend on the role that you are hiring for; you may need to add different aptitude assessments or types of interviews in specific circumstances.

However, most recruitment funnels will look something like this:

Stage 1: Improving Reputation

This usually means raising employer awareness and improving branding, so that the position is more attractive to potential candidates.

Stage 2: Sourcing

Putting out the right job description and advert in the right places to attract the best candidates to apply.

Stage 3: Screening

Initial application forms and resumes are screened to check for basic criteria like education level and relevant experience.

Stage 4: Assessing

Pre-employment assessments can be used to establish competencies, soft skills, and aptitudes that are relevant for the role.

Stage 5: Interviewing

Phone, video, and face-to-face interviews can be conducted to ask questions about work behaviors, motivations, and preferences as well as learning more about a candidate’s professional background.

Stage 6: Hiring

Using all the data from previous stages to choose the best candidate for the role.

Stage 7: Making Offers

Putting together a relevant and attractive job offer to send to the candidate

Stage 8: Onboarding

Providing a really simple, straightforward, and effective onboarding process to ensure that the new employee can find their feet and become a productive member of staff faster.

How to create a recruitment funnel

Define the stages

Employers should know exactly what stages are involved in their recruitment process and be able to define them for each vacancy that they are hiring for.

This includes deciding where to source candidates from, how to screen resumes, and which assessments to use. It also means knowing which types of interviews are most effective and what the job offer and onboarding process is going to look like.

Defining the stages of the recruitment funnel also means knowing what the key milestones and benchmarks are that the applicants need to reach before moving on, and will let recruiters and employees know which stages are effective and which might be unnecessary.

Identify the channels

There are many places that talent can be sourced from, and different resources are better for different things.

The recruitment team might already have candidates in a pool, perhaps signed up to job alerts from the company website. They might have a group of potential applicants who have been headhunted by an executive search firm.

In most cases, your team will be advertising the role on a job board - like Indeed or LinkedIn.

There are job boards that have been created to find specific types of roles, so you could use those if you are looking for something like a marketer or a back-end developer.

In essence, the recruitment team should focus resources on the places that yield the best results, which needs some measurement of metrics to get right - so a wider net to start with might be the best idea.

Develop a lead magnet

In recruitment, the lead magnet is most likely to be the job description, but there is work that you can do around that to make it even more compelling.

As mentioned before, making the company attractive to top talent is about raising brand awareness and improving reputation - and that might mean looking at things like company culture or refreshing the website, for example.

Having a strong employer brand means that potential candidates will recognize the mission and values of the company, and that can draw them to apply for the role.

This only works if you use a detailed job description that shows applicants exactly what you are looking for, and the skills that they need to have to be competent in the role.

Create screening criteria

The screening criteria will be the first step in filtering through the applicants, and you will need to have a clear idea of what your ideal candidate will look like in terms of experience, education, qualifications, and skills.

This can be formulated by looking at successful employees already in the role, and can be separated into ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ - so required and desired.

Minimum qualifications for the role might include:

• Degree in a relevant subject

• 3+ years experience in a similar role

• Leadership experience

• Professional certifications

This will be used in both the initial resume screening process, but will also be used when conducting pre-employment assessments - especially when it comes to aptitudes and soft skills that are not easy to evaluate in other ways, such as numeracy and literacy, or communication and teamwork.

Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

The right Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will make your recruitment funnel simple and straightforward, keeping you abreast of the status of every applicant and ensuring you know all the metrics of the process, too.

The ATS will come in useful when screening resumes and application forms, because it can be programmed to look for certain keywords relating to the basic criteria of the role.

It will also help the recruitment team to stay in contact with applicants at the right times, making the process even more streamlined.

Pre-Employment Assessments

Assessing aptitudes and skills using remote testing is a useful stage to add when looking at filtering through large numbers of applicants, especially when there are key skills and attributes that are needed in the role.

Some popular assessments include verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, and logical reasoning, as well as soft skill tests on leadership, interpersonal skills, and teamwork. Job-related skills like software knowledge and programming can also be tested at this point.

Candidates who do not meet the benchmark scores will not progress further, and the recruitment funnel will get narrower.

Conduct interviews

Interviewers are costly in terms of finances and time, and the idea is that there will only be a handful of candidates left at this point.

The interviews that should be conducted at this stage can include:

• Motivational questions - Why the candidate wants to work at the company, and what their future career plans are.

• Behavioral questions - How have they dealt with situations and problems at work in the past, with examples.

Some interviews might be more technical, using a case study to demonstrate a particular skill or ability.

Make sure that the questions are relevant to the role, and that the interview is the same for every candidate in terms of questions - this makes it much easier to compare results.

Make an offer

The offer stage is where everything will come together, and at the end of the funnel after all stages have been completed, the recruitment team should be left with the ideal candidate - so all that needs to happen is that they will accept the offer.

Remember that the onboarding process should be a natural continuation of the recruitment funnel, ensuring that the new employee is supported and trained to become operational and productive as soon as possible.

Evaluate the funnel

As applicants pass through the recruitment funnel, metrics should be used to ensure that every stage is working effectively.

Some of the popular metrics to check in the recruitment funnel include:

• Best sourcing channel - where did the best candidates come from? Focus budget and effort there in the future

• Interview qualification rate - how many applicants made it through to interview?

• Offer acceptance rate

• Time to hire - from the beginning of the fennel

• Cost per hire - both in actual financial burden and in time

• Quality of hire - this is tied into retention

• Candidate experience - this is usually more subjective data but still important to measure

These metrics can provide insights that will help the recruitment team make decisions about the effectiveness of the process and whether anything needs to be changed.

Key takeaways

A good recruitment funnel makes the application process simpler and faster for recruiters and candidates alike, but it needs to be built around the needs of the business rather than just applied as it is.

The idea of the recruitment funnel is that at every stage, candidates are being assessed on the skills, abilities, and competencies that they need to be successful, with poorly-matched applicants being removed from the process at each milestone, ensuring that only the top get through.

This helps streamline the whole process and ensures better quality of hires, but the effectiveness should be monitored and analyzed regularly to ensure it is fit for purpose.