Professional recruiters know there is little magic in the successful hiring process. To find employees that meet specific requirements quickly and cost-efficiently, you must go step by step, attracting, engaging, and selecting candidates.
How to do it? Build a hiring funnel within your company or use the one supplied by a recruitment agency.
More details and tips about the hiring funnel for tech companies in our blog post.
What Is a Hiring Funnel?
A hiring funnel is a framework that determines the main stages of the recruitment process, from awareness to hiring. Going through this funnel, a company recruits one or several top candidates based on their skills and its business needs.
Recruitment Funnel Metrics
To ensure your talent acquisition process is efficient and doesn’t drain your budget, you must measure the following KPIs:
- Time to hire: The average time it takes to fill the position
- Conversions: The percentage of hires out of all applications received
- Cost per hire: The amount spent to hire a candidate
- Quality of hire: The combination of performance, turnover, and retention rates
- Source of hire: The number of potential candidates coming from each channel
Note that if you cooperate with a professional recruitment agency, they will track these metrics and provide you with regular reports on progress. This will give you transparency and help you measure recruitment expenses.
Benefits of the Tech Recruitment Funnel Compared to Unstructured Hiring
Besides being a highly effective recruitment tool, the hiring funnel brings multiple business benefits unstructured hiring cannot provide. You get a controlled recruitment process instead of the spray and pray approach.
Improved Tracking and Management
You know what is happening with your recruitment process and can regulate it if necessary. It allows you to measure the hiring success rate, track how many candidates churn at each stage, and improve areas of weaknesses.
Better Quality of Hires
When a recruitment team follows a clear path, the outcome is much better than compared with chaotic hiring. Recruiters can thoroughly analyze requirements at the start, target suitable candidates, ask the right questions, and supply you with great options for tech interviews and hiring.
No Hidden Expenses
Unstructured hiring means you cannot calculate recruitment expenses, including your recruitment team’s salary, software subscriptions, candidate assessment costs, advertising and online job board costs, and more. Knowing what it takes to find and staff a candidate thanks to the hiring funnel allows you to make recruitment more cost-efficient.
Solid Foundation for Future Hires
Once you build a hiring funnel, it becomes a valuable resource your business will rely on for each new hire. You will have a candidate base, know what channels to hire through, and realize how long it takes to fill a position for more informed planning. As a result, hiring will take less effort and resources the next time you need someone.
6 Tech Recruitment Funnel Stages and What Happens at Each of Them
There are multiple approaches to defining recruiting funnel stages, but all of them center around awareness, attraction, application, selection, and hire. Here we want to describe the recruitment process we follow at Sunvery to achieve a 25-day average time to hire for challenging tech roles. It is a more complex and refined tech hiring funnel than most companies use for in-house recruitment, but much more granular and efficient.
- Long List
At the top of the recruitment funnel, a company attracts potential applicants by posting a vacancy on relevant resources or uses its internal database to reach suitable candidates directly. If you cooperate with a recruitment agency, this stage will take days. If not, you must invest in a positive employer brand and gather a candidate base internally.
Tips:
- Spend time to create a clear job description with fair requirements, expectations, and offer
- Audit social media channels to understand where potential candidates reside
- Build or use an existing candidate base to reach people directly
- Replies
The sad truth is that not all candidates your company reaches through LinkedIn, Djinni, Indeed, personal email, a job application form, or other channels will reply. Usually, only up to 50% respond to recruitment offers. So, at this step, you need to scan and start filtering the replies received.
Tips:
- Say a thank you to everyone who replied, regardless of what they say
- Try answering messages as soon as they come
- Use customizable templates to speed up communication
- Showed Interest
Once you sift out those uninterested, it’s time to focus on a smaller share of the candidates who want to continue communication. You may ask them additional questions, request a CV if you still don’t have it, and investigate other details that matter for the position. At this point, it will probably turn out that not all the applicants are a good match for different reasons, and you must let them go.
Tips:
- Negotiate salary expectations to ensure they match your capabilities
- Prepare a list of additional questions that matter for the specific role
- Make the candidate journey transparent and provide timelines
- Prescreening
Hiring in the tech industry is challenging due to the versatile skills you must evaluate and consider. In particular, you must ensure future company employees have the proper soft skills to be a team player and have the required tech expertise. That’s why, the prescreening stage is necessary to learn more about the applicants and narrow the choice before tech interviews.
Tips:
- Ask about career goals and expectations to avoid candidates churn at the final stages
- Understand what each interviewed specialist is looking for in the position
- Tech Interviews
Now, you must engage tech experts proficient in the required technology to evaluate the candidate’s hard skills. This is one of the middle stages of the recruitment funnel, and the number of candidates is small enough to avoid wasting too much time on interviews. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what questions and tasks will allow you to evaluate each candidate’s true level.
If you cooperate with a recruitment agency, tech interviews are basically the start of the requirements process for you. You won’t need to do sourcing and prescreening.
Tips:
- Ask the project manager and/or leading software engineer to participate
- Prepare a short test task or conduct a coding assessment during a video call
- Offer & Hire
Send an offer to the best-matching candidate, but stay in touch with other suitable options if the chosen specialist declines the offer. Clarify how much time the candidate needs to decide and sign the documents. Sometimes, candidates change their minds at the last minute. Don’t be disappointed; you can always go with another candidate or continue the search until a successful hire.
Tips:
- Develop a system of benefits to make your company a decent place to work
- Be transparent about the job requirements and goals from the start
- Highlight growth opportunities
Sunvery for Tech Recruitment & Outstaffing
Sunvery is a recruitment & staffing agency that has made 2,500+ successful hires for tech companies since 2015. We have a 300,000 talent base and a well-established hiring funnel to hire top candidates in weeks. Meet the first candidates 2 days after the project starts and grow your team with a 25-day average time to hire.
Explore our recruitment and staffing services with a 100% guarantee and get a quote directly at our website.