· 3 min read

Hiring Funnel

What Is a Hiring Funnel?

You’ve probably heard of the concept of a funnel in a marketing context, and a hiring funnel is the same idea. It’s a series of steps that take candidates from being interested in your job opening to actually getting hired by your company.

What Is a Hiring Funnel?

A hiring funnel is a process that helps you hire the best person for the job. It’s broken up into stages, each with its own purpose:

  • **Sourcing: **Finding and attracting candidates who are interested in your organization, usually through a job posting or other form of advertising
  • Recruitment: Nurturing promising candidate leads and convincing them to apply to a role
  • Interviewing: Evaluating whether or not a candidate is qualified for the role, based on their skills and experience
  • **Pre-hire assessments: **Background checks, references, and drug tests
  • **Offer: **Drafting up an offer based on the candidate’s skills, experience, and location
  • Negotiation: Working with the candidate to agree on hiring terms

How Do Hiring Funnels Work?

Candidates can enter the hiring funnel in several ways. Some companies hire outside sourcing firms to get candidates into the funnel, others use cold outreach, some use employee referral programs, and many use a combination of all three.

Once in the funnel, candidates jump through a series of hoops, in the form of screening calls, assessments or case studies, and formal interviews. Companies probably have multiple candidates in the same stage of the hiring funnel at the same time. Having several folks in the pipeline is useful if candidates voluntarily remove themselves from the process.

Candidates can opt-out of the hiring funnel at any point in time but advance depending on their application, ability to pass screen calls or questionnaires, and interview performance. Because not every candidate who comes into the hiring process makes it to the final stage, the candidate pool looks a bit like a funnel一starting wide at the top and getting smaller and smaller as people drop out of the process.

To make each step more efficient, ask yourself:

  • What do we need to do to prepare?
  • How long will this take?
  • Who needs to be involved?

The Benefits of a Hiring Funnel

When executed well, a hiring funnel should:

  • Get the right people in the right seats
  • Use resources effectively
  • Help new hires hit the ground running
  • Get everyone excited about the new hires joining the company

Hiring is one of the toughest parts of running a business, and it only gets more difficult as time goes on. That’s why it pays to be proactive when sourcing candidates for positions within your organization.

If you’re able to find talented candidates before they apply for jobs at other companies (or even better yet before they even know they want those jobs), then there will always be a steady stream of qualified talent coming through your door without having spent too much time or money on finding them in advance.

Why You Should Use a Hiring Funnel

A hiring funnel is a great tool for understanding how your hiring process works, making improvements to it and identifying when not to hire someone. It can help you understand how your candidates move through different stages of the interview process, what each stage should look like and what should happen there.