The Recruiting Funnel

The Recruiting Funnel


Most would agree that recruiting is a time consuming and expensive process. Posting jobs, sifting and sorting through job applications, reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, conducting job interviews, and making hiring decisions requires a lot of time and effort. Adding someone new to your team is a big decision that requires serious consideration. Always do your due diligence when it comes to hiring – and never rush the process.

In order to hire the right person for the job you need to have a tried and true systematic approach that gets results. Once you’ve selected the top talent from the abundance of applications, it’s time to narrow down the playing field, select your top choice, and present them with a job offer.


To help you choose the right person for the job, here is a selection of questions to ask before making a hiring decision:

1.  Will the job candidate fit in with your corporate culture?

2.  Does the job candidate have the qualifications to do the job?

3.  Did you ignore any hiring biases?

4.  Did you identify any red flags during the hiring process?

5.  Will the job candidate help drive your business to success?

6.  Does the rest of your hiring team agree with your decision?

7.  Is this really the best person for the job?


Ask these questions every time you need to make a tough hiring decision. Not asking these questions can lead to major hiring mistakes that can be costly and annoying. We encourage you to create your own list of questions to ask before making hiring decisions. Use this checklist to ensure that you always gather all of the pertinent information about a candidate. If you want to hire the best of the best, put the necessary time and effort into your hiring process. Your company’s success depends on it.

Hiring great people takes a significant amount of intention and effort from all parties involved. An inefficient process is the largest contributing factor to requisitions becoming stale and eventually stalling. If the recruiting funnel proves to be inefficient, unfortunately, it cannot simply be solved by pouring more candidates into the top of the funnel. The end result will be frustrated recruiters, inefficient teams for hiring managers, and lost revenue and productivity for the company as a whole. 

Going back to the drawing board and internally realigning on the best way forward will produce an overall increase in experience for everyone at every stage. Meeting this challenge head-on may be hard work in some cases. No time wasted in taking a microscope to recruiting practices especially when the end result yields exponentially better outcomes. This will have a lasting and positive impact on overall company culture and productivity. 

It's no secret that marketing is one of the fields that has been amongst the best and most adept at incorporating data and technology. And as that advancement is applied to recruitment marketing, we can expect to see faster progress through the recruitment marketing funnel.

Currently, HR professionals are not doing a good job of progressing through that funnel. Only 32% of organizations really understand recruitment marketing and of that 32%, only 20% do a really good job.

But in order to understand recruitment marketing, we first have to dissect every stage of the funnel. The recruitment marketing funnel has been around long before the advancement of technology and big data; it's a series of marketing steps that become increasingly specific toward a set goal: an action or decision.

And now that we have artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance every step of that process, it means funneling down faster and with more insight.

The recruitment marketing funnel is a handy visual aid to picture how a candidate moves through the recruitment process-or rather, how an organization guides candidates through the decision to apply. In the first, broadest phase, the candidate becomes aware of the company and the open job. At this part of the funnel, it's the organization's job to ensure that they're publicizing jobs in the right venues for the candidates they want to reach.

The next phase takes awareness a step further: attraction. At this point, the candidate is engaged, and interested in learning more about this specific job and your organization. The organization's obligation is to make sure that the EVP (benefits, unique aspects of the company, most appealing aspects of the opportunity) are clear to the candidate via public branding (company website, social media accounts, etc.).

The next phase is interest, in which the candidate is actively considering applying for the job. The organization should be keeping the candidate engaged-interacting, providing information, ensuring that the candidate has a good experience at all outreach points.

And finally, there's applying-which we know isn't the last phase of the hiring process, but is the crucial step at the bottom of the funnel. At this point, the organization still needs to ensure that the candidate is having a high-quality experience with the process.

At virtually every phase of the funnel, employer branding is key. It's also the part that requires the least individual tailoring. Your employer branding is all about you as a hiring company-not necessarily the brand you cultivate with your end product or service. Potential candidates are your customers here, so the focus is on what you provide as an organization. Presenting a clear vision of who you are as an organization, and what you value, is essential. This is something you can do fairly simply by updating your public-facing content, like your website and your social media presence.

And don't forget the other side of the coin: job marketing and advertising. Recruitment marketing is all about finding the best ways to reach potential candidates, not just posting everywhere and hoping that the right candidate finds you. AI-enabled programs like PandoLogic's can help you mine essential usage and engagement data from your job advertising in real time, allowing you to refine on the fly to make sure that you're spending your precious recruitment budget in the places that are most likely to yield good results.

What are the benefits?

According to a recent survey conducted by HR.com, 73% of HR professionals said that the most tangible benefit of adopting data-driven recruitment marketing is the quality of candidates who ultimately come through their door.

There are additional bonuses as well, like the efficiency of targeting your job ad spends and streamlined resources that are required to reach high-quality candidates, but the most important effect is one you'll see when you get great candidates. Other benefits of data-driven recruitment marketing include:

  • Better marketing and word-of-mouth. Conscious attention to your branding on sites like Glassdoor & LinkedIn can help improve your image. Targeting specific aspects of your public persona, using analysis software, can help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing and what you're putting out there.
  • Reducing time-to-hire. Filling jobs more efficiently often fills them faster. AI-enabled recruitment marketing software can help you save time on once-manual tasks that get people in the door more quickly.
  • Improving the quality of hires. Using data to target people who meet a certain standard helps ensure that you'll get better candidates.

Getting better ROI for your budget. Analysis of your job advertising spend can help you figure out where your money is most effectively spent, what's not working, etc., and reallocate resources as necessary.

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