There’s a reason that the talent acquisition journey is illustrated as a recruitment funnel. The further you get down the journey, the fewer candidates there are—the neck of the funnel narrows and narrows. In ideal scenarios, unqualified or undesirable candidates naturally filter out of the recruitment funnel. In less ideal scenarios, qualified candidates drop out before the end—or never enter the recruitment funnel to begin with. Luckily, there are tools you can use to help you optimize your recruitment funnel, including programmatic recruiting. Learn how this recruitment method and other modern tools can affect your recruitment funnel from top to bottom.
What Is The Recruitment Funnel?
The recruitment funnel, sometimes referred to as the talent acquisition funnel, is a way to map and measure the flow of a candidate from initial awareness all the way through to hiring. Recruitment isn’t the only industry to use a funnel—it’s common nomenclature in the marketing world as well. And like with other journeys, the recruitment funnel isn’t an exact art, with some illustrations including more or differing levels than others. We like to think of the recruitment funnel as being comprised of the following levels, or stages: awareness, consideration, interest, application, selection, and hire.
Awareness
Awareness is at the top of the recruitment funnel and, simply put, is the stage at which you create awareness around your employer brand and open positions. One of the best ways you can raise awareness of open roles is by casting a wide—but strategic—recruitment net. And to do that, you should use programmatic recruitment software, like pandoIQ. pandoIQ uses proprietary algorithms to analyze over a decade’s worth of data points to figure out what is the best online job ad board for your job ad, when to place it, and for how long.
Interest and Consideration
After awareness, consideration & interest come next in the recruitment funnel. At this point, you’re looking to interest candidates and get them to consider your open role. Candidates will likely do their own research into your company and the open role. This is when your employer brand and job description or job title will speak volumes. You can also help move the candidate along into applying with a conversational AI bot that engages with them on a career page.
Application
If you’ve successfully caught the candidate’s interest, they’ll move into this level of the recruitment stage and apply. In order to keep candidate engagement through the funnel, it’s important that you make the application simple and seamless for the candidate. You don’t want the candidate to reach this stage but then drop off because the application is too complicated or time-consuming.
Selection and Interviews
Selection and interviews are next in the recruitment funnel. It’s when you’ve parsed through the applicants and chosen the qualified candidates you’d like to move forward and interview. In addition to helping nurture people through the funnel, conversational AI can also automatically schedule interviews with qualified candidates; this means candidates don’t have to wait around wondering when—or even if—they’ll hear back.
Hire
And, finally, you’ve reached the last level of the recruitment funnel—the bottom, if you will: Hiring. This is when you’ve committed to your candidate and extend an offer to hire. If, when using tools such as programmatic recruitment and conversational AI, you end up with multiple qualified candidates, it’s useful to keep track of these with an applicant tracking system (ATS).
Ensure that all the candidates who reach the bottom of your recruitment funnel are the perfect fit for your open roles by taking advantage of programmatic recruiting.