A Crash Course on Building a High-Performing Recruitment Funnel
Hiring skilled professionals can be time-consuming and expensive—especially if your recruitment funnel is leaky. Subpar applicants, poor sourcing channels, and similar issues can drain your company’s resources and disrupt your operations by preventing you from filling open positions swiftly.
A great example is waste caused by a long time-to-hire, which not only takes away your recruiters’ precious time but also negatively affects candidate experience. According to Yello’s research, employers who make a hire within three weeks spend $1,000–$2,000 per new employee, while those who take longer spend $3,000–$4,000.
Time to hire isn’t the only factor reflecting your recruitment funnel’s effectiveness. This guide will show you the most important metrics to assess to see if your funnel is costly and inefficient. You’ll learn how to overcome the issues you identify and how Workello can level up your hiring process, especially for high-volume recruiting.
Hiring Funnel vs. Hiring Process
The terms “hiring process” and “hiring funnel” are often used interchangeably, which can be a costly mistake because focusing only on the hiring process makes your recruitment efforts too narrow.
A hiring funnel is a comprehensive recruitment framework that—among other purposes—defines and shapes your hiring process. The latter is a set of steps you take to attract and hire new talent. On the other hand, the funnel is a broader concept that represents a candidate’s journey from finding out about your company and vacancy to receiving and accepting the job offer.
Your recruitment funnel should include steps that aren’t part of the typical hiring process but still significantly impact it. For instance, spreading the word about your brand on social media isn’t a phase of the hiring process, but it can make or break its effectiveness by determining the number and quality of applicants you’ll draw in.
A hiring funnel can be broken down into various stages, each denoting a candidate’s position in it. By matching each stage with the right activity, you can turn a complete stranger into your best hire.
Stages of the Recruitment Funnel
There are several interpretations of a hiring funnel, so you can find 5–8 stages depending on your source of info. To dive into everything you should know without bothering you with unnecessary details, we’ll break the funnel into 6 phases:
Awareness
Attraction
Application
Assessment
Interview
Offer
As the funnel narrows, unsuitable candidates should drop out until you’re left with the best-fitting ones, as shown in this example:
To help you ensure your funnel always yields top talent, we’ll explain each stage more thoroughly.
Brand Awareness Makes or Breaks Candidate Turnout
Most companies focus their awareness efforts on customers, failing to address the importance of employer branding. Just as a strong brand is crucial for attracting attention to your product or service, having a compelling employer brand is equally important in portraying your company as an appealing workplace.
The main awareness challenge you might face is establishing the right touchpoints with potential candidates. To overcome it, focus on your:
Website—Highlighting company values, providing insight into day-to-day operations, and adding a “Why work with us” section are all great ways to position yourself well in the job market
Social media—Showcase your company culture, post employee testimonials, and communicate the benefits of working for you through your social channels
Attracting Quality Candidates
This attraction stage is many recruiters’ pain point because their ideal candidates might not be actively looking for a job. According to LinkedIn’s report, only 30% of the workforce are active jobseekers, while the remainder is passive talent.
Still, 87% of workers in both categories are open to new opportunities, which means you can draw in passive candidates with a compelling job offer from a reputable brand. While the specifics depend on your target audience, an appealing offer typically includes the following:
A descriptive, attention-grabbing title
Well-organized job details highlighting the benefits
Clearly outlined responsibilities and expectations
Where you publish the job offer is another key consideration, as you must put yourself in front of as many talented candidates as possible to find the perfect fit. Besides the industry and position, consider your candidates’ demographics and interests to find the best channel for your ad.
Maximizing Applications
Even if you draw in tons of potential candidates, getting them to take that first step and click the “Apply” button can be a massive challenge. You must make the application effortless to minimize the drop-off rate.
Recruiter.com’s stats show that job applications under 25 questions see a 10.6% click-to-apply ratio. This is already low, and the number halves if you go with over 50 questions.
Other factors that might negatively impact the completion rate include:
Too many job requirements
Leaving out compensation details
Overly casual tone of the application
Besides addressing the above, you must communicate enough benefits to make the application worthwhile. Doing so can improve the completion rate and push more candidates down the funnel.
Assessing Candidates the Right Way
Let’s say you’ve nailed the above aspects and got 400 applicants. How are you supposed to screen them all without spending countless work hours? More importantly, how do you know their skill and talent live up to the resume and cover letter?
Manual assessment is tedious and ineffective—you might waste a ton of time scanning resumes to find a seemingly good candidate, only to realize they’ve oversold themselves and don’t fit the position. Or even worse, you might miss out on a great candidate due to human error or bias during the assessment process.
Assessment software can solve these problems and save you a lot of time and money along the way. Workello’s automated pre-hire assessments are a good example—they help teams filter through hundreds of candidates to identify the top 1%. You can narrow your focus to only those who’ve proven themselves and trim the fat from your assessment process.
Interviewing Shortlisted Candidates
By the time a candidate has reached the interview stage, they should’ve demonstrated the necessary expertise and skillset. Now the goal is to get some face time with them and ensure they’re a good culture fit.
Having a defined interview structure is essential to having an apples-to-apples candidate comparison. Without it, you may let bias creep in because you won’t have objective criteria you’ll use to rate applicants.
Identify the most impactful questions you’ll ask each candidate and create a scorecard you’ll use to rate them. Such questions will depend on your specific needs and workflow, so you can define them based on your new team member’s expected contribution.
Making an Offer
If you’ve successfully moved candidates through the previous stages, this is the easy part. But the job isn’t done yet—you must make a compelling offer to prevent the candidate from dropping out last minute. This is particularly important if they’re an active jobseeker, as there’s a chance your offer won’t be the only one on the table.
It helps if you’ve already communicated the salary and other major benefits before this stage, as it proactively eliminates unpleasant surprises. If there’s any negotiation, set your upper limit and stick to it.
Why Do You Need a Recruitment Funnel?
A recruitment funnel is essential to attracting, nurturing, and hiring top talent. You should treat candidates as sales leads to give them the attention they deserve. If you do it well, you can expect many benefits, most notably:
Unbiased recruitment ensuring each vacancy is filled based on skill and merit
Paying close attention to your funnel also lets you identify the best- and worst-performing sourcing channels and strategies. With time, you’ll learn what works so that you can double down on it and minimize waste.
To achieve this, you must take a data-driven approach to your recruitment funnel. Getting the data you need isn’t as daunting as it may seem—all it takes is tracking the right recruitment metrics.
Key Recruitment Funnel Metrics To Follow
Staying on top of hiring metrics lets you find holes in your funnel and patch them up to ensure a consistent flow of top talent. You can focus on numerous metrics, but there are a few you must track:
Metric
Explanation
Time to hire
The total amount of time between position opening and filling
Candidate conversion rate
The percentage of candidates who sent an application after viewing your ad
Cost per hire
Internal and external recruitment costs divided by the number of hires
Source of hire
The most abundant recruitment channel your best candidates came through
Quality of hire
The contribution of a new employee typically measured through performance ratings
Each of these metrics deserves special attention, so we’ll cover them in more detail to help you start tracking them.
Time to Hire
Tracking your time to hire is easy—start when a position opens, and end when you fill it. Don’t make the common mistake of counting from the day you publish a job ad; the goal is to get the total time your vacancy stays open. This way, you can identify and tighten the most time-consuming stages.
According to a report by the Society for Human Resource Management, the average time to hire is 36 days. Screening and interviews alone take 15 days (7 and 8, respectively), and it takes another 5 days to make the final decision.
Breaking down your time to hire by stages is the best way to pinpoint inefficiencies. Your time can—and should—be way shorter than these averages, so you’ll learn how to minimize it later in this guide.
Candidate Conversion Rate
As you saw in the application stage breakdown, only a small portion of job ad viewers convert into applicants. This doesn’t mean you should settle for such a low turnout, as you can do a lot to maximize the number of applicants once you get some cold data.
The conversion rate is a direct reflection of candidate experience. Low percentages indicate a complex application process, so you should make it easier for candidates to complete it.
This is especially important if you sponsor job ads through a PPC (pay-per-click) model, as optimizing your application can result in significant savings. The aforementioned Recruiter.com report showed that the cost per candidate is $4 if the application takes less than 5 minutes to complete, while those requiring over 15 will cost you $13.85 per applicant.
Cost per Hire
When calculating your cost per hire, you need to factor in two types of expenses—internal and external. The following breakdown shows examples of both:
Internal Costs
External Costs
• Administrative expenses
• Recruiter costs (hourly wage * hours spent)
• New hire onboarding costs
• Ad costs
• Sourcing expenses (like paying for job platforms)
• Candidate expenses (background checks, travel, etc.)
The actual components of your cost per hire can vary depending on your recruitment process, so assessing every activity is a great way to identify waste and inefficiencies.
According to Scout Logic, the average cost in the U.S. is $4,000 per hire. Note that this cost includes a component employers often overlook—onboarding. This might seem strange because onboarding happens after the hiring process is completed, but it’s another excellent example of the difference between the recruitment funnel and the process.
Even though the process is technically over, your funnel’s effectiveness determines the number of times you’ll have to onboard new people. An optimized funnel yields new employees who are the right fit and will stay in your company. You won’t have to onboard new people anytime soon, so you can keep the associated costs minimal.
Source of Hire
Source of hire is the most important metric for assessing the effectiveness of each recruitment channel. Once you know where your top talent is coming from, you can stop wasting time and money on low-yielding sources.
Job boards and social media are the leading recruitment channels. According to Content Stadium’s survey, the most popular social channels recruiters use include:
Once you launch your job ad, spread it across multiple channels to see what works best. Assessing the sources manually is possible but tedious, so a better alternative is an applicant tracking system (ATS) that will clearly outline where your candidates are coming from.
Quality of Hire
Your recruitment funnel’s ultimate goal is to secure high-performing talent. That’s why the quality of hire is among the key hiring funnel metrics you must track. If your new hires tend to leave too soon or fail to meet your expectations, some stages of the funnel aren’t working. Perhaps your candidate assessment is inadequate, or your interviews aren’t effective.
Besides performance reviews, there are several ways to track the quality of each hire:
Hiring manager satisfaction
Turnover and retention
Employee lifetime value (ELV)
These metrics aren’t mutually exclusive—it can even be beneficial to track some of them simultaneously to get a clear picture of the new hire’s quality.
Equal opportunities are the foundation of successful hiring. Tracking candidate diversity shows whether your business provides them, allowing you to create a more diverse workforce.
Still, this metric often goes to the backburner in favor of the ones above. Don’t make this mistake, as you may lose lots of potential candidates. A Glassdoor survey showed that 32% of jobseekers and employees wouldn’t apply to work at a company lacking diversity.
Surveys are the most common way to track candidate diversity. This may be a sensitive topic, so make it clear why you’re asking for the related info. A DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) statement on your job ad can show candidates you strive to create an inclusive workplace and encourage them to complete the survey.
How To Build a Better Recruiting Funnel
We’ve already covered several ways to optimize your recruitment funnel, from focusing on employer branding to defining an interview scorecard. Besides those activities, there are two recruitment tips you shouldn’t ignore:
Focus on top-of-funnel recruiting
Use software to automate your processes
Understand the Importance of Top-Funnel Recruiting
You should optimize the stages of your recruitment funnel in the order they happen. There’s no point in improving your application process or interviews if you can’t attract enough high-quality applicants.
Candidate sourcing can make or break the effectiveness of all other efforts, so make sure to do it right. Workello can take your sourcing to the next level by letting you publish pre-optimized job ads resonating with top talent. You can post the ad on various job boards and social channels to cast a wide net and get a flood of candidates in no time.
To avoid getting lost in all those applications, you can leverage the platform’s comprehensive candidate overview and give each applicant enough attention without wasting time on manual processes.
Invest in a Software Solution
Speaking of time waste, we’re long past manual recruiting. To keep up and make your process more efficient, you can utilize numerous recruitment platforms. Doing so lets you automate mundane tasks and spend more time on high-impact activities like interviewing.
An ATS platform can be particularly helpful, as it structures what would otherwise be an avalanche of scattered info. You’ll have all the crucial data neatly organized in a dashboard, so you can move applicants through stages and make important decisions more effortlessly.
Supercharge Your Hiring Funnel With Workello
How long does it take you to test an applicant, notify them about progress, or reject unfit applicants? With Workello, each of these tasks takes under a minute.
Packed with automation features, the platform provides one-click assessments, interview invites, offers, and many other actions. It also serves as a centralized hub aggregating applicants from all your channels, ensuring nobody gets lost in the shuffle. Whether you have a defined funnel or have only started recruiting, Workello can make your process a breeze.
Sure, we may be biased—but dozens of businesses who’ve knocked countless hours from their hiring process aren’t. To join them and turn your recruitment funnel into a well-oiled machine that yields top talent on autopilot, sign up for Workello today.
Share this:
Hire the Best of the Best
Join hundreds of ambitious companies using skills tests to identify and hire the top 1% of their job applicants. Signup and start accepting new applicants in 3 minutes.