The recruitment funnel—and its associated funnel metrics—is a way to measure the journey of a candidate from awareness to hiring. It’s illustrated as a funnel because the further you get down the journey, the fewer candidates there are—and therefore, the neck of the “funnel” narrows. It’s important to track funnel metrics to understand how well your recruitment funnel is performing—or identify areas that might need improvement. Keep reading for 7 important funnel metrics to track.
1. Source of Hire
The source of hire metric tells you how candidates entered your recruitment funnel. This might mean from social media or LinkedIn or job boards. Understanding this funnel metric is important because you’ll be able to tell if your recruitment tactics are causing you to over-index on some sources, which may mean you need to rebalance your strategy. In order to diversify your sources, consider smart recruitment software, like PandoLogic’s pandoIQ, which posts across a variety of popular and niche job boards.
2. Average Number of Applicants
This funnel metric is straightforward. If certain roles are yielding a much lower average number of applicants than others, you may want to consider what is causing the difference. This funnel metric can tell you how strong your job listing (and job title) is and if it’s getting in front of the right people.
3. Application To Interview
This funnel metric tracks how many candidates go from the application stage to the interview stage. There are a few reasons that a candidate may exit the funnel at this stage: they may not have been qualified to begin with, so you decline to set up an interview; alternatively, they may be qualified but are deterred by a drawn-out process. Conversational AI chatbots can help in this regard by boosting candidate engagement: these tools are often equipped to automatically schedule initial interviews with candidates, helping to keep the process moving and ensuring the integrity of your funnel.
4. Offer Acceptance Rate
This funnel metric is measured by dividing the number of offers accepted by the total number of offers. It can help you measure if you’re investing in the right candidates. You can track this funnel metric over time to see if your recruitment funnel is increasing (or decreasing) in efficacy.
5. Effectiveness Of Funnel
Speaking of the effectiveness of your funnel—there’s a metric to measure for that. In this case, you’ll want to divide the total number of applicants in each stage by the total number of applicants who entered the funnel. If you notice a drop-off in a particular area, you’ll know to spend some time refining your recruitment strategies in that area. One of the best ways to build a more effective recruitment funnel is ensuring that the applicants who enter the funnel are qualified to begin with. By using programmatic recruitment software, like pandoIQ, you can more accurately and effectively target the candidates you’d like to enter your funnel.
6. Time To Hire
When it comes to this funnel metric, the lower the number, the better. Time to hire (or time to fill) is simply the number of days between when the job is listed to when a candidate accepts an offer. You can measure time to hire for individual job postings or take an average over time. An efficient recruitment funnel will help you decrease your time to hire.
7. Cost Per Hire
Like the time to hire metric, this funnel metric can be measured individually or as an average. At its simplest, the cost per hire (CPH) is measured by adding internal and external recruiting costs and dividing by the total number of hires. By using smart hiring and recruitment tools, you can effectively decrease your CPH. pandoIQ has dynamic budget allocation built right in—that means that if one job ad needs an increase of budget while another is overperforming, pandoIQ can make that happen automatically.
Other factors you might want to consider when analyzing your funnel include:
- Quality of hire
- Application completion rate
- Interview to offer rate
While you can track and manage funnel metrics manually, doing so can quickly become an unwieldy and time-consuming task. The best way to track important funnel metrics is by using recruitment software. A robust solution will help you not only collect relevant data but also analyze it. PandoLogic can help companies understand the data and funnel metrics they want to track during all steps of the hiring process.
