How to Optimize an HR Recruitment Funnel to Secure Top Talent

Recruitment can be tricky and stressful for companies and job applicants alike. How can you take the stress out of hiring without risking ending up with the wrong employee?

A recruitment funnel could be the answer.

A good HR recruitment funnel will help you to streamline and optimize your recruitment process while simultaneously improving and clarifying things for your applicants. Let’s take a look at how it works, and how you can optimize your own recruitment funnel to secure top talent:

What is an HR recruitment funnel?

An HR recruitment funnel is a framework that helps you to organise, standardise, and optimise your recruitment process. 

A typical recruitment funnel will have six stages. At each stage, unsuitable candidates drop out, until you’re left with the very best candidates at the end of the funnel.

For talent acquisition, the stages will be slightly different. But for now, we’re going to concentrate on recruitment.

The six stages of a typical recruitment funnel are:

• Awareness

• Attraction

• Application

• Assessment

• Interview

• Offer

We’ll go into these stages in more detail later. For now, the important thing to note is that getting each stage right will help you to bring in and hire the perfect person for the job.

Why do you need a recruitment funnel?

Designing and optimising a recruitment funnel may seem like a lot of unnecessary hassle. Why go to all that trouble when you could just post an ad the old-fashioned way?

Well, recruitment funnels actually bring a lot of benefits. A good recruitment funnel will:

• Make your recruitment process more efficient.

• Make your recruitment process more cost-effective.

• Remove bias (both conscious and unconscious!) from your recruitment process.

• Help you to attract the best possible talent for the job.

Optimizing each stage of your recruitment funnel

Now you know what a recruitment funnel is and why you need one. Let’s turn to how you can optimise each stage of your recruitment funnel:

Awareness

The Awareness stage of your recruitment funnel is all about making people aware of who you are and what working for your brand is like. General brand awareness works wonders here, but it’s always worth targeting some extra marketing towards potential candidates through things like B2B SEO. 

Good B2B SEO will bring potential candidates from within your industry to your website and social media. Once there, make sure it’s easy for them to find things like your hiring page, job descriptions, and details of the benefits they could get by working for you. If you’re not sure how to rank for B2B on search engines and social media, it might be worth getting professional advice.

Attraction

Having made potential candidates aware that you’re hiring, you now have to attract them. This is where the art of writing job descriptions comes in handy.

A good job description will pique the interest of potential candidates and encourage them to apply. The tone you use and the job aspects you highlight will depend a lot on the nature of the job and the kind of person you want to hire. But, in general, an enticing job description is:

• Clear. Jobseekers want to quickly and easily understand the most important elements of the job like compensation, hours, skill requirements, and benefits.

• Positive. Job descriptions that contain a lot of ‘do-nots’ (for example ‘successful candidates will not dress scruffily’) aren’t enticing. Nobody wants to feel like they’re back at school. Instead, present things in a positive light (for example, ‘successful candidates will take pride in their appearance’).

• Benefit-rich. Heavily emphasising the benefits of each offered position will help to make the job more attractive to top talent.

• Well-differentiated. Demonstrate what makes your job different to similar jobs offered by your competitors. Why should the best candidate work for you rather than a competitor?

• SEO-optimised. Again, it’s important that your job description gets seen and prioritised by search engines. SEO is a must.

If you’re not confident in your ability to write job descriptions that will please both search engines and job-seeking talent, a B2B SEO company may be able to help.

Application

If everything goes well, the candidates attracted by your job description will now want to apply. It’s important that you make the application as easy as possible for them. Applying for a new job is a big step, and a lot of potentially great hires will click out if this part of your funnel isn’t as smooth as possible for them.

How can you make applications easy? Here are some ideas:

• Don’t make the applicant enter and re-enter the same information. If you’re using a recruitment site that requires jobseekers to upload resumes to their profiles, use those resumes rather than asking each applicant to fill out a new resume form. Many candidates will tailor their resume for each job anyway, but try not to force them to.

• Make the application process very clear. Walk the applicant through each step, and make things like the ‘apply here’ CTA as obvious as possible.

• Remove friction by having the entire application process on one site or platform rather than, say, hopping from a recruitment platform to your website and back again.

• Reassure each applicant that their data will be safe and secure and seen only by need-to-know parties.

Assessment

Assessing candidates is a process that’s unique to each business. Only you and your team members know what you’re really looking for in a successful hire, so it’s up to you to determine how you assess and narrow down your applications.

That being said, we do have a few tips that might help:

• In the early stages, use recruitment software to highlight the best candidates through things like skill spotting and keyword checking.

• Choose objective criteria against which to assess candidates. Eliminate bias as far as you possibly can.

• Use blind assessments. This technique assesses people purely on their skills and experience, without identifying features like gender or age. This can be a good way forward if you’re struggling with bias and diversity in your team.

• Keep an open mind. Some candidates are better in person than on paper. If someone has all the skills and experience you need but their personality doesn’t spring to life on the page, give them the opportunity to sparkle at interview.

Interview

During the interview process, your candidates will get a clearer feel of things like company culture, personal dynamics, and so on. 

So, you shouldn’t try to cram your interview process into a standardised formula. It’s important that your interview gives candidates the opportunity to see what it would really be like to work for/with you.

That being said, it is a good idea to give each interview more or less the same structure (i.e., to ask the same questions at the same time and in the same manner, as far as possible). This helps to eliminate bias and gives each candidate a fair and objective standard of comparison.

Sometimes, several rounds of interviews may be needed to narrow down the candidates to a perfect choice. Do remember, however, that interviews are stressful and time-consuming for candidates. Being asked to come back for endless rounds of interviews could prove a dealbreaker for some potential hires.

Offer

Having fairly assessed and interviewed your preferred candidates, you may now be ready to make an offer. Do not at this point discard your runner-up candidates. Your favorite candidate may refuse your offer, or want a deal you can’t give them, so keep your runners-up on file just in case. 

Before you make your offer, work out how much you’re prepared to negotiate. For example, could you raise the salary for the right hire? What about work location – could your preferred candidate work remotely if they need to? Would you even be willing to hire international candidates? Establish what (and how much) you’re prepared to offer if your candidate wants to negotiate.

When designing your offer, make it compelling. Don’t just say ‘congratulations! You’ve got the job!’ Be clear about why this is a good thing. Remind them of the benefits they can expect for accepting your offer.
 

Finally, remind them that you hope they will accept, and that you look forward to working with them. It’s always good to start new working relationships on a friendly note!

With any luck, your preferred candidate will accept your offer, and you’re onto the next stage: onboarding!

Optimise your HR recruitment funnel to hire the right person every time

A good recruitment funnel will streamline your recruitment process, clarify things for your applicants, and generally take the stress out of recruiting both for you and for your candidates.

Use the tips in this article to build and optimise an HR recruitment funnel that brings in the perfect hire every time.