What is a recruitment funnel?
A recruitment funnel represents the entire framework and the hiring process. At the top of the funnel, we have all possible candidates for a given position. At the bottom and narrowest part is the new hire. In between are all the steps in the hiring process that weed out applicants who don’t quite fit what you’re looking for. It also helps in keeping track of how candidates flow through the candidate recruitment funnel and gives insight into what needs to be done in order to make the hiring process more efficient
With the recruitment funnel data, however, it would be straightforward to determine how many applicants are needed to fill those positions and what sources offer the most and best-quality candidates.
Stages of recruitment
Stage 1 : Creating awareness
Posting job requirements on job boards is not enough for great candidates to apply, promoting the role and what is great about working for the company is very much necessary for great talent from the talent pool to attract and apply for the role. Hence, its needed to create awareness about the company as well as the role by highlighting the perks and benefits to work in the company page and Include photos, videos and employee testimonials which will help the candidates determine if the company is the right fit for them.
Stage 2 : Sourcing and screening candidate profiles
Once the company's career page is up and running we can start posting about the job roles on multiple boards and source candidates from various branches, like different job portals, LinkedIn and social media announcements (social recruitment), employee referrals and also select from the pool of applications applied on the careers page of company. Once the applicants are sourced in next would be a quick screening of the resumes that can help rule out applicants not fit for the role or saved for later roles.
Also Read: How social media can help you find and hire the right candidate
Stage 3 : The "Interview"
This stage in the recruitment funnel is the most obvious of all i.e "THE INTERVIEW STAGE". Here the candidate goes through multiple interview levels depending on the company's interview structure (for instance aptitude test > group discussion round > HR round > technical round > Team manager round) to assess how fit is the candidate for the job role. The interview stage helps in knowing the candidate's verbal fluency, technical and social skills with the help of various interview questions.
Stage 4 : Decision making
In this stage, the recruiters and decision makers choose the candidate with the potential for the organisation or someone who is committed to growing and staying with the organisation longer and has the zeal and passion to learn and adapt The decision is usually made based on scorecard, this means pre-defined criteria on which each candidate is rated during the selection process by each hiring process the candidate has gone through and different panel involved in it. The best candidate is then short-listed and given an offer.
Stage 5 : Job offer
Decision making is not the end of the selection process and the recruitment funnel, the candidate still needs to accept the offer for the cycle to be marked complete. After all the assessment including the background check and interview scores, the candidate is offered or rejected to the role. If the offer is accepted and signed the employee it would complete the candidate recruitment funnel.
Metrics to track the efficiency of the recruitment funnel
Being more data-driven can help in analysing the efficiency of the recruitment funnel of an organisation and identify the pain points and loop holes to be fixed and taken care of, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of hiring top talent!
- Quality of hire - This is definitely the most important aspect to track in the recruitment funnel, as the challenge is to not hire quickly but hire good quality talent.
- Career page conversions - This metric allows us to know how effective is our career page and what are the changes to be made
- Time to fill - The time taken to hire a candidate and fill the position is mandatory to track, in this way it can be analysed that, if it takes long to fill a position it is an indication of an inefficient selection process making it ineffective recruitment funnel
- Overall candidate experience - How have candidates rated their overall candidate experience with being interviewed by the company is a very essential and crucial step to be taken care of. This will help with know
- Source of hire - Tracking the source of applicants coming in and being hired is very essential metric, as this allows us to know the major source (career pages, job portals, social media announcements, referrals, etc ) contributing to the applicants which will in turn help in analysing the efficiency and improving other sources according to it.
- Offer acceptance/rejection rates - A higher rejection rate of offer from candidates is a crucial problem. It is essential to know the reason so as to to avoid wasting resources.
Conclusion
Every recruiter’s priority is to hire the best and quality talent that fits the job role and culture of the company. These processes take more and more time as the number of potential candidates constantly grows and also becomes difficult to track the candidate and draw the right journey for him/her throughout the hiring process which might result into less quality candidate experience leaving behind a negative remark on the company.
Hence the recruitment funnel is a breakdown of all the stages of recruitment process; it starts with generating awareness of your company's and ends with a candidate's eventual hire. The stages in between can sometimes vary depending on every organization's hiring model, but all recruitment funnels usually include the minimum of these five main stages.
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