How to Analyse the Recruitment Funnel

Why spend time on this?

We could pull out several benefits of analysing your recruitment funnel, as you’re effectively putting the ownership of the recruitment process back in your hands.

Today we’re going to focus on how your analysis can influence your stakeholder conversations. Thibault (ex-Microsoft recruiting leader) illustrates how powerful that can be.

What do we need to know first?

A couple of quick definitions…

The funnel: the recruitment funnel is a framework to visualise the recruitment process. It starts at awareness and candidate attraction (top of funnel) and ends at the point of hire (bottom of funnel) with candidate numbers narrowed down as they move through the stages of the funnel (aka the interview process).

Pass through rates: refers to the percentage of candidates who move from one stage of the funnel to the next (also known as conversion rates).

Below we’ve got an example of a funnel (which we will analyse shortly). We can see there were 20 candidates at the screening stage with 10 passing through to the next interview, giving us a pass through rate of 50%.

Which part of the funnel should we look at first?

Pass through rates are useful to guide us here. If we’ve got a disproportionate drop-off in one area, this is our low hanging fruit where we can make the biggest gain (probably with marginal effort in comparison).

In our example we’ve reached out to 480 candidates, but only converted 20 to a phone screen. This feels like a lot of effort being wasted and therefore a good place to start.

So, we need to improve response rates?

Not necessarily. Pass through rates tell us where are problem is, but they don’t tell us what the problem is.

Failure analysis assigns a reason to why each candidate didn’t pass to the next stage and paints the full picture. We did this for our role:

• No Interest = 280 - 58.3%

• No Response = 60 - 12.5%

• Inactive - Salary Expectations = 110 - 22.9%

• Inactive - Hard Skills (technical) = 20 - 4.1%

• Inactive - Soft Skills (energy/motivation) = 10 - 2.0%

Here we can see the response rates are actually very high (no response is only 12.5%), but there are a couple of with a high failure rate which again is our green light to dig deeper and start taking action.

1 - Responded Not Interested

Lot’s of candidates responded the role wasn’t interesting for them. How you could pitch this figure internally to get some support*:

• Hiring Manager - get more time reviewing profiles together so you can understand how to improve and personalise your messages further

• Hiring Team - get more access to the wider team so you can improve your pitch of the team and role and find alternative sourcing channels

• Leadership - get access to more experienced colleagues who can educate you on the business to improve to improve the company pitch

• Marketing - get support on creating additional assets (like candidate packs) to improve positive responses

• Your manager - you may be able to get sign off on more sourcing support by proving it’s a challenging market

• Increase personalisation to show candidates they are a fit

*some may be more appropriate than others with more context on the role

2 - Can’t Match Salary Expectations

Lots of candidates had salary expectations above our budget. Possible action items:

• Review our sourcing strategy: Are we sourcing above the requirements? Are we sourcing technical skills unrealistic for the seniority we want? What range are the perfect fit candidates earning?

• Review the profile (with the hiring manager): Which of the criteria are more important to the position - can we be flexible in some of them?

• Review the budget (with HR): Are our salary brands competitive? Can we review them? What else can we offer?

Let’s go again

Next we’ve seen only 30% are moving passed the technical round. After documenting reasons we find a high % aren’t completing the test.

Problem: Poor Completion of Technical Test

Documenting why candidates haven’t completed the test shows the main reason is due to the large time it takes to complete. Possible action items:

• Present this data to the hiring manager explaining the issues it’s causing

• Create a proposal to move from technical take home tests to technical interviews

• Support this with some industry data (e.g benchmarks showed only only 20% of candidates assessed by technical interviews don’t deliver as expected, 80% do)

We’re done here?

Ideally you would make one change at a time so you can re-check your pass through rates and failure reasons.

Iterate on the initial failure reason or move to a secondary reason until your pass through rate improves and you can share the joy with the stakeholders who helped!

Interested in learning more?

✅ That’s it for this week, we hope this was helpful! Please reply to this email with any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

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