What is a recruiting funnel?

A recruiting funnel (also called a hiring funnel or a recruitment funnel) is a step-by-step diagram of the hiring process. It clearly demonstrates all the stages of interaction with candidates from their first response to a job offer to contract acceptance.

Why is a recruiting funnel important?

A recruiting funnel helps simplify the time-consuming hiring process:

The entire process is broken down into smaller tasks that are easier to manage and track;
You can plan the recruiting process more accurately;
You can reduce the number of open positions and, as a result, save on the company’s budget.

What are the stages of the recruitment funnel?

Each company may have a different recruitment process so stages can vary depending on vacancy, goals, company strategy, or executives' wishes. However there are five key stages of the recruitment funnel:

Candidate attraction
Candidate engagement
Candidate assessment
Job offering
Job offer acceptance

Candidate attraction

The first step that starts the recruiting machine is attracting job seekers by posting a job opening. It's easy to do this with PeopleForce. All you need to do is create a job description in the system and post it to job sites with just one click. In the meantime, job seekers use a search function to find your vacancy, read the description and decide whether or not to apply.

The number and quality of responses depends on a well-written vacancy. There are several key rules to writing a job description correctly:

Title: Be specific. Include a job title that your job seekers can easily find you by.
About the company: Describe the company with specific facts, and add links to your website and social media pages so that the job seeker can quickly and conveniently review information about you. This will increase loyalty to you as an HR brand.
Terms: List around 10 points about your company’s ethos along with its "perks".
Objectives: Describe what the candidate would be doing at your company.
Requirements: Describe the key competencies needed for this position.
Contacts: Include several sources for contacting you, so that the job seeker can clarify the necessary information.

Candidate engagement

At this stage, the HR manager or recruiter studies and analyzes dozens/hundreds of resumes, portfolios, cover letters etc. The best applicants become candidates, and the task of HR at this stage is to provide the specialist with all the necessary information to make them want to proceed further.

Analysis of the funnel at this stage demonstrates how successful the first stage has been.

If there were, for example, 100 applicants in the first stage of the recruiting funnel, and after the second stage there were 40 applicants left, it means that the job description was incorrect as many irrelevant specialists responded. Based on the data of the funnel the HR specialist can make changes to optimize the hiring process.

Candidate assessment

At this stage, the HR-specialist checks whether the applicant meets the requirements of the company. For this, various methods of analyzing the qualities, experience, and competencies of candidates can be used.

This stage can be divided into several rounds, such as HR interview, supervisor interview, screening tests, it all depends on the assessment methods you choose.

You can mark each round separately in the recruiting funnel, so that you can analyze the success of each step and understand possible mistakes more quickly in the future.

For example, after the first interview round, eight candidates were selected, and after talking to the manager, all of them dropped out. The possible reason is the difference in understanding between the HR and management departments about what kind of employee the company needs. In order to try to correct the mistake, HR and management should jointly draw up a portrait of the desired employee.

Job offering

At this stage, the company sends a job offer after proper evaluation of candidates along with an agreement on all employment details (salary, probationary period, insurance, formalization, working conditions, etc.).

For convenience, you have the opportunity to document all the details of the deal in PeopleForce and send them to your future employee to sign.

Job offer acceptance

Here comes the most long-awaited moment of truth - acceptance or rejection of the offer. When a future employee signs a job offer, the HR manager needs to do the paperwork, discuss the date and time of the job, and start onboarding.

If an applicant rejects the offer they can specify the reason in a special field thanks to the PeopleForce system.

Additional funnel stages

Onboarding steps can be added to these steps if the company officially hires an employee after the probationary period. Also, certain jobs require the addition of pre-training step after the offer is sent.

In the PeopleRecruit module you have the ability to create, add and modify the stages of the recruiting funnel in the hiring cycles for each job or group of jobs. Thus, each time your recruiting funnel will be perfectly suited to a specific job and company requirements.

Hiring automation

Everyone wants to hire only talented and suitable professionals, while spending a minimum of time and resources. That's why we created a recruiter's go-to tool - the PeopleRecruit module where you have all the information about candidates in one place and at your fingertips. You can quickly move candidates through the selection stages, schedule interviews, involve your colleagues in candidate evaluations, and conduct regular recruiting analyses. PeopleForce's various hiring process reports are like litmus papers, indicating your company's recruiting weaknesses and strengths. We invite you to read them in detail:

Recruitment timeline: This shows the minimum, maximum, and average time from publishing a job to finding the right candidate.
Vacancy closing time: This shows how many days a vacancy has been open.
Candidate source: The report shows which site, portal, social network, or personal search provides the most relevant candidates. This helps you understand where to post a position and which source is not worth the time and effort.

Recruiting funnel