Don't Know How to Build an Effective Recruiting Funnel? Flip it Upside Down.

The best kept secret to building a recruiting funnel that works is not starting at the beginning, but rather starting at the end. I know it seems somewhat counterintuitive, but it’s a strategy that Joseph Jaffe suggests when looking to bring in more (and better) clients. Since online recruiters and marketers’ roles are pretty much the same, this strategy can also be applied to building a high quality recruiting funnel.

The best kept secret to building a recruiting funnel that works is not starting at the beginning, but rather starting at the end.

Before we discuss how to flip our recruiting funnel though, it will help us to review what a traditional recruiting funnel looks like.

Recruiting Funnel Step 1 – Attract

The first step in our (very oversimplified) recruiting funnel is attracting applicants to your job openings. This is done in a number of ways, but most commonly through job ads that appear on your website, on job boards, or scraped from job feeds via job aggregators.

Recruiting Funnel Step 2 – Screen

The second stop on our recruiting funnel journey is the screening portion. After you effectively attract the applicants to you and (hopefully) convince them to apply, it’s time to filter through the applicants via strategically designed screening questions.

Recruiting Funnel Step 3 – Select

Finally, after you’ve effectively drawn quality applicants through your recruiting funnel, it’s time to select the candidate or candidates that best align with the needs of your company. This is usually the final step after an interview is conducted and involves onboarding your new employee.

Okay, so now that we’ve breezed over an extremely watered down version of the recruiting funnel, let’s discuss some challenges that exist with starting at the top and working our way down.

The first recruiting funnel snag is knowing where to go to attract the right applicants. If you don’t know where your quality applicants come from, you’re going to waste a lot of time designing a recruiting funnel marketing strategy that may not target the type of employees you’re looking to hire.

The biggest benefit of starting at the end of our recruiting tunnel is that it saves us time.

Additionally, if you’re new to hiring or are new to your company, you may not know your company well enough to create a job ad that is compelling to potential employees. So, in a sense, you’re starting from scratch and it’s going to take a lot of trial and error before you know which sources provide the most quality talent and which job ads cast the widest net to reach superstar employees.

Now that we’ve explored our options when we start from the beginning, let’s look at examining where we end to help us design a faster and more effective recruiting funnel. If we flip our recruiting funnel upside down, we find ourselves at a much smaller and more manageable starting point – at recently hired quality employees.

The biggest benefit of starting at the end of our recruiting tunnel is that it saves us time. Instead of trying to guess where your star players frequent, you communicate with your top new employees to learn which sites they visited during their job hunt and the process they followed in order to be successful.

If instead of using a job ad to find you, they were referred by a member of your staff, then you know that you should focus at least some of your recruiting funnel energy on your referral pool. The key is to follow the trail of your star hires to determine what you should be doing to find more of them and the best route for accomplishing this is to ask them loads of questions. The more you know about them, the more of “them” you can find!

Feeling too overwhelmed to design an effective flipped recruiting funnel? Our hiring experts can help! Contact us today to learn more!