Sales recruiting funnel: application details
Many recruiters have long adopted the tools used in sales, these are cold calls, mass mailings, work with objections, and much more. I decided to look at the similarity of the sales and recruitment processes more widely and used the long-established sales funnel tool in recruiting, it turned out something like this:
1. Applicants - people who are potentially suitable for a given job.
2. Profiles - people with whom we managed to communicate and chat.
3. Interviews - candidates with whom an interview is scheduled.
4. Offers - candidates who have been nominated by the offer.
5. Contents - candidates who accepted the offer.
6. Employees - candidates who went to work.
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What to do to the final number of new employees was satisfactory?
Not so long ago, the article “ Intensity is more important than thoroughness ” raised the issue of using the law of probability distribution, which is enough to increase the flow at the entrance, so that with the remaining external factors get an increased flow at the exit.
Obviously, this approach does not work for recruiting in general for two main reasons:
1. Technical specialists are most often involved in the recruiting process, whose time is quite expensive, which generally increases the cost of recruiting staff and lowers the loyalty of these employees (instead of direct responsibilities, they have to look at hundreds of resumes and conduct dozens of interviews).
2. With an increase in the number of candidates at the entrance, chances are growing that applicants dissatisfied with the outcome of events broadcast negative messages about your company to the outside world and, possibly, even about themselves.
Therefore, the ideal solution would be to try to make a cylinder out of the funnel, or at least bring it closer to that state, that is, increase the conversion at each step. This is where the book by J. Cox and E. Goldratt “ Goal. The process of continuous improvement , which I read several years ago. It discusses in detail the effect of the so-called “narrow bottlenecks,” which inhibit the overall process in certain places.
That's what happened with me when I tried to put the theory of "bottlenecks" on the "sales funnel" in recruiting.
Imagine, for example, the following situation. We need to hire three specialists in the testing department, the critical requirements for which is having a testing certificate not older than 2 years from a certain educational institution. We know for sure that there are exactly 100 such people. We managed to contact about sixty of them, thirty were invited to an interview, only five of them were offered jobs, three of them accepted the proposals and they went to work.
NB: In the general case, initially, we do not know exactly what specific number of specialists suitable for our vacancy exists in the labor market. We need the Applicants level rather in order to choose the right segment and search tool. But in the particular case, as in the example described above, it is possible that we know a specific number of suitable potential candidates.
In the diagram below:
1) numbers in squares reflect the number of applicants at each stage of recruiting
2) numbers at arrows reflect conversions at each step
To the naked eye, the narrowest neck of our funnel is noticeable. Spending 30 hours of technical interviewer time, we made a total of 5 job offers. Conversion was 16%. If you set a goal, you can calculate how much money the company spent at the interview stage, the figure will be impressive.
By decomposing the recruiting process in a similar way, you can clearly track the most "failed" places and try to improve them. How to do it? Take advantage of the easiest way that only mankind invented. You need to ask yourself the right question.
1. If you cannot find a sufficient number of potentially suitable candidates for you, ask yourself the question: are we looking there?
Practice shows that if you have a top job open, then most likely the job on a standard job search site will not help you. And if you need to find a large number of students for internships or courses, then LinkedIn is not the best place for this.
2. If you find a sufficient number of specialist resumes, but sending them to the technical interviewer for consideration, you get negative feedback, ask yourself: are we looking for those?
In this case, most likely, as practice shows, the problem lies in the fact that your idea of the candidate is different from the view of the technical interviewer. It is not necessary to send for review all without exception resumes that you find when searching. The technical interviewer will be much grateful if the resume is not 30, but dubious, but 5, but the most to the point, verified by personal experience.
3. If you conduct a sufficient number of interviews, but do an extremely small number of offers, ask yourself: are we inviting those people for an interview?
The number of interviews you conduct per month is not your measure of effectiveness. You should not invite people for an interview, who are not interested in your company, you should not beg and drag them by force. Usually potential candidates can independently determine their interest in your company and the project, or its absence.
4. If you make job offers in sufficient quantity, but very few people accept them, ask yourself several questions at once: do we make job offers? Are we the people we make them? Do our proposals reflect in full the expectations of candidates?
Take feedback from your candidates. Try to understand the root cause of the failure and try to eliminate it. You may even have to go back a step, if you suddenly realize that just the wrong people were originally invited for an interview.
5. If your job offers are successfully accepted, but people do not go to work, ask yourself the following question: do we accompany candidates until the first working day?
However, based on the personal experience and experience of my colleagues, low rates at this step are extremely rare and are the exception rather than the rule.
Using the sales funnel in recruiting, you can afford some flexibility in its application, which, of course, is a significant advantage.
You can apply this approach to the entire recruiting department, taking for the reporting period, for example, six months or a year. If you are interested in the effectiveness of a single individual recruiter, then you can take his personal indicators. You can evaluate a bunch of "recruiter-technical specialist" in different combinations, if you have several employees involved in the same process. You can also apply this approach to evaluate work on a specific vacancy, or on vacancies of one technical department. Use options are many.
Of course, this does not mean that the entire set of options must be used. Choose for yourself, your team or company the most suitable of them.
Small PS: after conducting a completely small survey with the help of some friendly companies (unfortunately, not all companies are ready to provide quantitative indicators to an external recruiter), I came to the conclusion that in most of them, the indicators of the first three stages did not rise above 60%. On average, these stages of conversion fluctuate around 30-40%.
And one more PPS: bringing the conversion to the level you need, you can artificially expand the inlet neck of the funnel to increase the number of new employees, or narrow it, depending on the needs of the company.
1. Applicants - people who are potentially suitable for a given job.
2. Profiles - people with whom we managed to communicate and chat.
3. Interviews - candidates with whom an interview is scheduled.
4. Offers - candidates who have been nominated by the offer.
5. Contents - candidates who accepted the offer.
6. Employees - candidates who went to work.
')
What to do to the final number of new employees was satisfactory?
Not so long ago, the article “ Intensity is more important than thoroughness ” raised the issue of using the law of probability distribution, which is enough to increase the flow at the entrance, so that with the remaining external factors get an increased flow at the exit.
Obviously, this approach does not work for recruiting in general for two main reasons:
1. Technical specialists are most often involved in the recruiting process, whose time is quite expensive, which generally increases the cost of recruiting staff and lowers the loyalty of these employees (instead of direct responsibilities, they have to look at hundreds of resumes and conduct dozens of interviews).
2. With an increase in the number of candidates at the entrance, chances are growing that applicants dissatisfied with the outcome of events broadcast negative messages about your company to the outside world and, possibly, even about themselves.
Therefore, the ideal solution would be to try to make a cylinder out of the funnel, or at least bring it closer to that state, that is, increase the conversion at each step. This is where the book by J. Cox and E. Goldratt “ Goal. The process of continuous improvement , which I read several years ago. It discusses in detail the effect of the so-called “narrow bottlenecks,” which inhibit the overall process in certain places.
That's what happened with me when I tried to put the theory of "bottlenecks" on the "sales funnel" in recruiting.
Imagine, for example, the following situation. We need to hire three specialists in the testing department, the critical requirements for which is having a testing certificate not older than 2 years from a certain educational institution. We know for sure that there are exactly 100 such people. We managed to contact about sixty of them, thirty were invited to an interview, only five of them were offered jobs, three of them accepted the proposals and they went to work.
NB: In the general case, initially, we do not know exactly what specific number of specialists suitable for our vacancy exists in the labor market. We need the Applicants level rather in order to choose the right segment and search tool. But in the particular case, as in the example described above, it is possible that we know a specific number of suitable potential candidates.
In the diagram below:
1) numbers in squares reflect the number of applicants at each stage of recruiting
2) numbers at arrows reflect conversions at each step
To the naked eye, the narrowest neck of our funnel is noticeable. Spending 30 hours of technical interviewer time, we made a total of 5 job offers. Conversion was 16%. If you set a goal, you can calculate how much money the company spent at the interview stage, the figure will be impressive.
By decomposing the recruiting process in a similar way, you can clearly track the most "failed" places and try to improve them. How to do it? Take advantage of the easiest way that only mankind invented. You need to ask yourself the right question.
1. If you cannot find a sufficient number of potentially suitable candidates for you, ask yourself the question: are we looking there?
Practice shows that if you have a top job open, then most likely the job on a standard job search site will not help you. And if you need to find a large number of students for internships or courses, then LinkedIn is not the best place for this.
2. If you find a sufficient number of specialist resumes, but sending them to the technical interviewer for consideration, you get negative feedback, ask yourself: are we looking for those?
In this case, most likely, as practice shows, the problem lies in the fact that your idea of the candidate is different from the view of the technical interviewer. It is not necessary to send for review all without exception resumes that you find when searching. The technical interviewer will be much grateful if the resume is not 30, but dubious, but 5, but the most to the point, verified by personal experience.
3. If you conduct a sufficient number of interviews, but do an extremely small number of offers, ask yourself: are we inviting those people for an interview?
The number of interviews you conduct per month is not your measure of effectiveness. You should not invite people for an interview, who are not interested in your company, you should not beg and drag them by force. Usually potential candidates can independently determine their interest in your company and the project, or its absence.
4. If you make job offers in sufficient quantity, but very few people accept them, ask yourself several questions at once: do we make job offers? Are we the people we make them? Do our proposals reflect in full the expectations of candidates?
Take feedback from your candidates. Try to understand the root cause of the failure and try to eliminate it. You may even have to go back a step, if you suddenly realize that just the wrong people were originally invited for an interview.
5. If your job offers are successfully accepted, but people do not go to work, ask yourself the following question: do we accompany candidates until the first working day?
However, based on the personal experience and experience of my colleagues, low rates at this step are extremely rare and are the exception rather than the rule.
Using the sales funnel in recruiting, you can afford some flexibility in its application, which, of course, is a significant advantage.
You can apply this approach to the entire recruiting department, taking for the reporting period, for example, six months or a year. If you are interested in the effectiveness of a single individual recruiter, then you can take his personal indicators. You can evaluate a bunch of "recruiter-technical specialist" in different combinations, if you have several employees involved in the same process. You can also apply this approach to evaluate work on a specific vacancy, or on vacancies of one technical department. Use options are many.
Of course, this does not mean that the entire set of options must be used. Choose for yourself, your team or company the most suitable of them.
Small PS: after conducting a completely small survey with the help of some friendly companies (unfortunately, not all companies are ready to provide quantitative indicators to an external recruiter), I came to the conclusion that in most of them, the indicators of the first three stages did not rise above 60%. On average, these stages of conversion fluctuate around 30-40%.
And one more PPS: bringing the conversion to the level you need, you can artificially expand the inlet neck of the funnel to increase the number of new employees, or narrow it, depending on the needs of the company.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/285578/
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