Assessing the performance of your recruitment funnel is mandatory to ensure that your hiring process is running efficiently and that your company keeps attracting the best talent.
The recruitment funnel encompasses all the stages, active or passive, a potential candidate goes through before getting hired. Just like what happens in sales, your company can also use a funnel to make sure they attract and hire the best talent. If well managed, the recruitment funnel will provide you with a continuous pipeline of applicants and help you find the right candidate to fill each position in your company.
Recruitment marketing, which consists in applying marketing principles to and using marketing tools in your recruitment strategy, can really help you to attract, assess and hire top talent. But for the recruitment funnel to produce the desirable results, you need to systematically keep track of its performance, measuring and optimising each, and every, step.
In this article, we will analyse the recruitment funnel structure and give you some tips about the key metrics you should be looking at to successfully assess and manage your recruitment process.
The Recruitment Funnel Structure
The recruiting funnel’s structure may vary, but let’s consider this typical six-step structure:
- Awareness – the potential candidate gets aware of your company through your employer branding actions.
- Consideration – the potential candidate considers your company as a possible future employer (culture, benefits, projects).
- Interest – the potential candidate builds interest in your company (follows it on social media, looks at postings, etc).
- Application – the potential candidate applies for a job.
- Select – the applicants get through assessment tests and interviews.
- Hire – the best candidate is offered the position and commits with the company.
In every stage you need to focus on candidate engagement and build strong relationships with your talent pipeline. On the first three steps your employer branding actions (recruiting marketing) are key to attract qualified candidates, whereas on the last three steps a digital and automated application process and efficient selection process (recruiting) are mandatory to provide the best candidate experience.
6 Key Metrics to assess your Recruitment Funnel
Here are 6 useful and stage-specific metrics you should monitor to improve your recruitment funnel and save time and money:
1. Source of hire
You can determine the source of hire through your ATS. Knowing where your best candidates come from is of the utmost importance to keep improving your recruitment strategy and to make good decisions about where and how to spend your recruitment budget.
2. Time to hire
The best candidates won’t wait forever, so you need to make sure your recruitment process develops in an adequate time frame. Otherwise, you will miss out on the best talent available.
Measuring the time to hire will give you a clear picture of how long it takes to fill a position, from the moment the job is open until the moment the ideal candidate gets hired. This will allow you to keep improving every step of your recruitment process to prevent unwanted blockages and, ultimately hire better and faster.
3. Cost per hire
The cost per hire is a central matter when it comes to calculating and managing the recruitment budget. As we have discussed on an earlier article, the cost per hire calculation formula is:
Total Internal Recruiting Costs + External Recruiting Costs / Total of hires
The internal recruiting costs include recruiter salaries, fixed costs related to infrastructures and employee referral program, for example. While the external recruiting costs include agency fees, advertising spend, technology investments, job fair participation, travel and/or relocation costs, signing bonuses, among others.
It’s important to know your department’s costs well and use correct and precise data to calculate this metric. Only this way you will be able to examine your cost per hire and identify in which ways you can optimise it.
4. Careers site conversion
Having an appealing and user-friendly careers page is key to attract candidates. But you need more than just visitors. You need to get applicants for your vacancies.
For you to know if your careers page is an efficient magnet for new applications, you need to monitor its conversion rate. How many visitors do actually apply for a job through your website?
Once again, this is an information you can get out of your ATS. Looking at your careers page conversion rate will help you assess whether you need to improve usability, rewrite job descriptions, add more pictures and/or videos, etc.
5. Application time
The longer and hard to fill your application form is, the bigger your drop-out rate will be. And it makes total sense. Candidates apply to many job offers at the same time and filling out numerous application forms can become overwhelming. Also, currently employed candidates may not have much time to spend on job application forms.
So, in case you have never done it, you should definitely try to apply to different jobs in your company to see for yourself how it goes. And don’t forget to set the timer!
To guarantee that all your applicants finish their application you need to provide them with a quick, short and straightforward process, focused on getting only the information required to assess if the candidate is qualified for the job. Later, you can ask for additional information to the candidates that move on to the next recruitment stages.
6. Candidate experience
Perhaps the most decisive aspect of your recruitment process, the candidate experience you provide can either attract more candidates or drive them away from your company.
Measuring the applicant’s satisfaction level with your application process is crucial to know what aspects or steps of your recruitment need to be improved.
There are many ways in which you can assess how candidates feel about your recruiting. For example, you can do a survey or ask for feedback at the end of the application process and during each stage of the recruitment process. No matter how you choose to do it, it’s important to look at the rating and feedback provided by the candidates and work to improve the aspects that got negative reaction.
These are just some of the metrics that you can use to assess your recruitment funnel. The bottom line is you need to measure the effectiveness of your recruitment process to be able to manage your recruiting activities correctly. Establishing and analysing your recruitment KPIs is the better way to assess what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled
