Every recruiter’s top priority is to recognize, evaluate, and hire the talent that best fits the specific opening of the company. In their search for high-performing individuals, hiring managers screen hundreds of applicants, analyze their career histories, and schedule interviews. These processes take more and more time as the number of potential candidates constantly grows, turning hiring procedures into quite a costly operation for the company.

What Is the Recruitment Funnel?

In essence, the recruitment funnel is a breakdown of all the stages in a recruitment process; it starts with generating awareness of your company's prospective candidates and ends with a candidate's eventual hire. The stages in between can sometimes vary depending on the model, but all recruitment funnels usually include the minimum of these five main stages and are commonly depicted in a funnel-shaped diagram.

• Awareness – getting onto the prospective candidate's radar
• Consideration – attracting the prospective candidate to an open position
• Interest – being contacted by the prospective candidate
• Application – assessing the prospective candidate
• Hire – making an offer to the candidate

Breaking down the complexities of the recruitment process into its basic stages allows us to further simplify them into targets and tasks and, with that - optimize and manage a solid recruitment funnel.

Metrics to Master Your Recruitment Funnel

Being more data-driven can help you to analyze the efficiency of recruitment efforts and identify which components of your recruitment funnel need improvement. There are various metrics that Lanteria can help you track. If you are looking to optimize and streamline your recruitment funnel, here are the most informative recruiting funnel metrics your HR and recruitment team should be monitoring:

1. Quality of hire – this is arguably the most important metric, as the ultimate goal is not just hiring quickly but hiring the best candidate quickly! Measuring the quality of new additions to your workforce can tell you how effective your recruitment process is at attracting the right talent and filtering out candidates in the assessment and interview stages.
2. Source of hire – this metric can tell you where to look for the best candidates by knowing where they are usually coming from or sourced. It can also determine which channels are the most or least effective and assist you in making decisions about how to redistribute your recruitment budget in a way that will save you money.
3. Career page conversion rates – this is the rate at which site visitors become applicants. It is another indicator of job listing effectiveness and assesses the proportion of candidates that actually submit an application after seeing a particular job listing.
4. Recruitment conversion rates – this will give a better understanding as to whether or not your hiring strategy needs tweaking. It does so by delving into the ratios of applications to interviewees and interviewees to new hires. You could be interviewing too many candidates or too few; this would either imply some modification is needed in your screening process or that you are not attracting enough candidates.
5. Offer acceptance/rejection rates – it examines the proportion of offers being accepted/rejected. A high rejection rate from candidates after a long and vigorous search is a major problem. It is important to know if and why this is happening to avoid wasting time and money. Gather feedback on what is causing these rejections and make adjustments accordingly.
6. Time to fill – it is an efficiency metric that measures how long it takes for an open position to be filled. It allows you to identify if any improvements are needed to expedite your recruitment process. If it takes too long, candidates may be poached by another company during your hiring process. It can also be used to better understand the candidate experience, as a long time to fill would often be viewed negatively by prospective candidates and can cause high-quality candidates to lose interest in a position entirely.

Cost per hire – it is the average total amount spent to fill an open position. This is an imperative metric to analyze for your recruitment budget and reflects upon all expenses and fees involved in recruiting a candidate.

There are lots of HR strategies that are used to hire talent and optimize the process of recruitment. Recruitment funnel management assumes that you can (and should) optimize each stage of the recruiting process, which is often visualized in the form of a funnel. By putting the hints listed below into practice, you will attract more potential employees, speed up the recruiting process, and noticeably minimize the odds of hiring the ‘wrong’ person.

1. Expand the Pool of Candidates 

The competition for good positions is fierce, but why is it sometimes hard to find a high-achieving employee? The problem is, maybe the person you are looking for isn’t planning to make their next career step. Consequently, posting on a job board and the company website isn’t enough. Diversify your efforts by taking advantage of social media and employee referrals, and by discovering the talents best fitting your criteria on career sites like LinkedIn.

To help you expand your candidate pool, we’ve compiled some tried-and-true actionable strategies for getting eyes on your job listings. 

- Optimize the title. Put the job role in the posting’s title, make it unique, and try to keep it under 60 characters. For SEO, add parentheses to the listing, as this has been shown to increase the clickthrough rate. An example of a great job posting title would be: Administrative Assistant Needed! (Gym Membership & Full Benefits).

- Add keywords: Do a little keyword stuffing in your job description to make it more findable for potential candidates. However, don’t sacrifice the post’s readability just for the sake of squeezing a few more key terms in!

- Reduce friction in the application process: Many potential candidates may click out of the application if it is not user-friendly. Try to keep the process as simple as possible. One hurdle that turns off users is when they have to restart huge portions of their uploaded resume. An Applicant Tracking System will help reduce this sort of friction.

2. Accurately Define the Talent You Want to Hire 

To make the applicant tracking system really helpful and to streamline the hiring process, you need to set detailed criteria for the person you are planning to hire. Specify their education, career history, skill sets, and achievement types to narrow down the number of applicants and toss out those who definitely don’t fit your requirements and the job description. Remember that setting requirements precisely can save you hours (or even days) of reading resumes and conducting interviews – thus effectively cutting the application process in half.
 

3. Access Soft Skills During the Interview 

Most recruiters rely on interviews to evaluate the competencies of the candidate and their professionalism. Meanwhile, interviews make great ways to screen the personal traits of a candidate who is probably going to work with you. And in this case, their ability to work in a team, personality, and general knowledge will determine how well they fit in their future team and the overall company culture. In order to tell if they will fit well, however, you need to clearly define your employment brand – make your company values transparent and at the forefront of the hiring process. 

Are you not sure what soft skills questions to ask during an interview? Here are a few of our go-to questions: 

• How do you prioritize your projects when there are multiple deadlines that you have to stick to?
• Tell me about a situation in which you had to make a decision with no input from a manager. How did you approach this decision, and did you seek advice from anyone else?
• What is a task you have fulfilled with no preexisting experience?

4. Analyze Each Stage of the Recruitment Process 

Starting from the applicants who expressed their interest and moving to the interview and negotiation stage, each step is subject to analysis to improve this process. For instance, if you feel that LinkedIn is more productive as a source of hire, you can focus your efforts here. Alternatively, you can intensify the promotion of the next vacancies on Facebook.

5. Use Recruitment Metrics to Evaluate Efficiency 

One of the best ways to understand if your funnel works smoothly is to calculate the common metrics (applications to interviewees, interviewees to offers, the conversion rate of offers to hires, etc.) and compare them to average figures. This will give you a clear picture of what the weak points are and at which stage of the funnel the efforts for improvement should be intensified.

Recruitment metrics are an absolute must-have component of data-driven hiring. However, by trying to track everything manually, you’ll waste too much time and have no energy left for the actual hiring. We recommend using a recruitment solution that has inbuilt metric tracking. Some important metrics that such solutions often track include: 

• The amount of time to fill a position
• The source of hire
• The number of applicant per opening
• Candidate retention rate
• The selection ratio (this is the total number of candidates divided by the number of hires)
• The cost per hire
   

With the help of the above methods, you will manage to make the recruiting candidate experience less time-consuming and costly. Hiring talent is not a walk in the park; still, you will not only hire the best fitting person but also make the entire funnel more effective in the long run.

Optimizing your hiring process results in stable and qualified employees. Don't waste time, money, nerves, and other critical resources - automate your recruiting processes with comprehensive software, such as Recruiting solution by Lanteria.