An efficient recruitment funnel should be precise and consistently secure the best talent. Yet, for many companies, hiring is a game of luck, often feeling risky and unpredictable. While recruiters sometimes match the right candidates to open roles, they mostly end up with mismatched hires or empty positions.
Building a structured recruitment funnel cycle solves this problem, guaranteeing accuracy and order at every stage. When done right, it ensures that each hiring cycle delivers qualified candidates that truly suit the role. Dive in as we share strategies to help you build an effective recruitment funnel and hire right every time.
What is a recruitment funnel?
Recruitment funnels are a useful tool to help recruiters and talent teams visualize every step in the recruitment process from attraction to hiring. Ideally, the process involves capturing several potential leads at the wide mouth of the funnel and narrowing the pool until you are left with the top candidates.
A well-structured recruitment funnel saves time, reduces hiring costs, and ensures you consistently secure candidates who are both highly qualified and a strong cultural fit. Understanding your recruitment funnel helps you view talent attraction strategically, with the ultimate benefit of setting up a robust pipeline that continues to deliver.
Why recruitment funnels lose candidates
Recruitment funnels are leaky. Not every candidate who enters the top of your recruitment funnel will end up coming out the narrow end, and that’s exactly how it should work. The funnel is designed to filter a broad pool of applicants down to a select few who are the best fit for the role.
Candidates typically leave the funnel for two reasons:
- They decide to drop out: Applicants may withdraw at any stage, often due to a poor candidate experience, unclear communication, or lengthy processes.
- You screen them out: The funnel naturally narrows the pool to a small group of the best candidates and, ultimately, a single hire.
In the next few sections, we’ll explore tips for effectively reducing your applicant pool while keeping candidate attrition to a minimum.
Recruitment funnel stages
Breaking the recruitment funnel into stages shows you where you’re spending most of your time in recruitment and where you need to invest more energy. Also referred to as the hiring funnel, it has seven main stages, shown below:
- Awareness: Put your organization on the candidate’s radar and build brand recognition.
- Attraction: Guide interested talent toward a specific job opportunity.
- Interest: Provide resources that help candidates learn more about your company and role.
- Applying: Support candidates through a smooth, user-friendly application process.
- Evaluating: Assess skills and qualifications to screen, rank, and shortlist fairly.
- Interviewing: Engage candidates in structured, meaningful conversations via phone, video, or in-person.
- Hiring: Extend an offer, secure acceptance, and kick off a strong onboarding journey.
Stage 1: Awareness
The first stage of the recruitment funnel involves building awareness amongst talent pools that your organization is a great place to work. This involves brand recognition and visibility to make your job postings stand out in a competitive job market.
In the awareness stage, you shouldn’t funnel candidates towards a specific job opportunity yet. Rather, the goal is to make your company attractive to candidates by investing in employer branding. When candidates recognize your name and associate it with positive workplace culture, they’re far more likely to think of you as a potential employer.
Some tips to build a strong employer brand and increase candidate awareness include:
- Identify what makes your organization a special place to work and broadcast these features to stand out from the crowd. These could be job perks, strong company values, or the team culture.
- Optimize your digital presence to make your organization highly visible to remote candidates in other cities or countries.
- Build and maintain a great career site or “Work with us” page on your company website.
- Partner with marketing to ramp up your organization’s social media presence.
- Encourage your team to become word-of-mouth advocates for your organization.
- Create videos showing happy, engaged (and real) team members at work.
Here’s a top-of-the-funnel example from BHP:
Another powerful approach is to interview a current employee, such as this video from Mondi:
Stage 2: Attraction
The next step in your talent acquisition funnel is to attract job seekers towards a specific job opportunity. Here, your focus is to capture the attention of qualified candidates with your job posting and motivate them to apply.
The centerpiece of this stage is the job description, as it is the main document that your prospects engage with. However, countless job postings are uploaded daily, so here’s how to make yours stand out:
- Invest the time needed to create an outstanding job description and avoid recycling outdated templates.
- State the job’s perks or benefits at the very top of the page rather than several paragraphs down. This could be the salary, flexibility, or team culture.
- Keep the document short and succinct. Avoid long lists of requirements or vague, biased wording that could drive candidates away.
- Be direct and engaging, taking care to use your organization’s voice, tone, and brand messaging, not jargon or overly formal language.
- Be clear about the candidate’s next steps.
- Advertise where your candidates are.
Properly written job descriptions attract the right candidates and present an opportunity to discourage unqualified candidates from applying. To strengthen attraction further, go beyond text with role-specific videos, such as day-in-the-life clips, to help candidates picture themselves in the position.
Embed these videos in job ads, careers pages, and social posts to make your opportunities more relatable and engaging. Also, consider candidate demographics, industry sector, and type of profession before choosing a distribution platform to make your job descriptions reach the right people.
United Airlines provides a great example with this day in the life of a flight attendant video: https://youtu.be/IAEsAhD0MBA?si=95sz2F9QN3PT7sA9
Stage 3: Interest
In the interest stage, candidates take action for the first time, shifting from passively noticing to active engagement with your brand. They’ll research your organization, explore your culture, and weigh whether applying is worth their time.
Your role is to optimize your digital presence and provide candidates with everything they need to help them decide to apply. There are two major ways to do this:
1. Strengthen your employer reputation
Candidates will likely google your company, visit your website, and scan your social channels. Outdated content, abandoned feeds, or negative reviews can discourage them from applying. Keep your careers page polished, showcase authentic employee stories, and maintain an active presence on the platforms where your talent pool spends time.
2. Provide clear, accessible information
Brainstorm questions candidates may have about your organization, the application process, or the job opportunity, but don’t try to shoehorn all the answers into the job description.
Instead, create an easy-to-find resource, like an FAQ page or a chatbot, for candidates to locate answers to their questions. For higher engagement and less candidate attrition, offer a way to connect directly, whether through a recruiter email or a quick phone call.
Some companies create videos as a compelling way to answer common questions, such as this explanation of the hiring process from Google:
Stage 4: Applying
Although the application stage is a milestone, it is also one of the biggest drop-off points in the recruitment funnel.
This tells you that it’s not enough to build candidates’ interest; you also have to maintain momentum and ensure they actually apply. Therefore, your focus in stage four should be to build a best-practice application process that drives high completion rates and creates a great candidate experience.
The biggest tip is to keep applications short and straightforward—Appcast’s survey found that completion rates drop by a staggering 365% if the application takes longer than 15 minutes to complete. Other points to keep in mind when designing your applications for high conversion rates include:
- Optimize applications for mobile. Most candidates apply on their phones, so make sure the process works on small screens.
- Remove unnecessary steps, like duplicate resume uploads.
- Complete the application yourself to time the process and spot any problem areas.
- Analyze user data to pinpoint any questions that cause applicants to drop out.
Aim to streamline applications to under five minutes with no more than 25 questions, and always keep candidates informed with timely, transparent updates. An automated confirmation message that shows your brand’s voice goes a long way in leaving a positive impression.
Stage 5: Evaluating
A SmartRecruiters’ survey showed that Australian recruiters typically handle 53 hires per month, a whopping 78% more than the global average of 30. With such large applicant volumes, candidate screening can become a major challenge.
The right candidate selection methods help recruiters evaluate candidates quickly and make accurate decisions throughout the hiring process. Getting it wrong, however, can introduce unconscious bias and inadvertently cause you to screen out great candidates.
While traditional evaluation methods, like resume screening, are popular, they have significant limitations. Candidates may exaggerate achievements, and even accurate credentials are a poor prediction of job success. Additionally, resume screening is time-consuming and biased, and it excludes promising but unconventional candidates despite automation.
Meanwhile, skills testing offers a way to see how candidates do the job before they get the job. By identifying the key skills for success in a role and testing all applicants against them, organizations can confidently progress top candidates while reducing the risk of bias.
Like the job application process, candidates will drop out of your recruitment funnel during the testing phase if they have a poor experience. Avoid this by:
- Keeping the candidate well-informed about the process and being prepared to answer questions.
- Ensuring tests are not too long, too hard, or too easy.
- Using a mix of formats (text-based, multiple-choice, and video-based).
- Easing into it by starting with easier questions and building in difficulty.
- Including example answers to assist candidates.
Stage 6: Interviewing
By this stage, the hiring funnel is starting to narrow, but a sub-standard interview process can undo your previous work. There’s very little time in an interview to gather all the hiring information you need to make decisions, so it’s important to use that time wisely.
If candidates have already completed a skills test, build on those results rather than duplicating them. Probe into areas where weaknesses appeared, or focus on qualities that weren’t tested, such as cultural fit and values alignment.
Practice these tips for optimum performance at this funnel stage:
- Leverage skills test results, focusing on gaps and strengths revealed during assessments.
- Treat remote interviews as seriously as in-person ones. Be professional and prepare beforehand, asking questions that reveal a candidate’s ability to thrive in hybrid environments.
- Don’t rely on personal preference or ‘gut feel.’ Use standardized questions, interview scorecards, and diverse panels to establish an even playing field.
Always keep candidates informed regardless of outcomes. Communicate clearly, thank them promptly, and be empathetic when letting them know they were unsuccessful. Remember, the holy grail of candidate experience is when a candidate exits the recruitment funnel with a positive impression despite not getting the job.
Stage 7: Hiring
After you’ve completed reference and background checks, send your best performer a compelling offer. Top candidates often have multiple offers, so a thoughtful, persuasive pitch can make the difference. Highlight meaningful benefits and personalize the offer by sharing what impressed you, like a top test score or their interview engagement.
Once they’ve accepted the offer, launch straight into your onboarding program. This will keep new hires interested and excited during the period between offer acceptance and their first day on the job.
Common mistakes in building recruitment funnels
Certain mistakes tend to be commonplace when designing recruitment funnels. Although they seem minute, they could undermine your hiring efforts. Avoiding these pitfalls will save time, improve candidate quality, and protect your employer brand.
1. Having too many funnel stages
Long, repetitive, or confusing processes frustrate applicants and drive high drop-off rates. They also lengthen your recruitment cycle, increasing overhead costs and making hiring less efficient. Streamline your funnel, maintaining only the most relevant steps to keep candidates motivated, reduce attrition, and avoid draining your internal resources.
2. Overlooking employee advocacy in talent attraction
Employees are a credible resource in candidate sourcing and talent attraction. Encouraging them to share job opportunities and authentic workplace stories can dramatically extend your reach and build trust with potential candidates. It also facilitates teamwork and synergy in your workplace, contributing to overall growth.
3. Over-relying on resumes instead of skills
Your candidate evaluation process is the core of recruitment and largely determines the quality of your hires. Resumes can be misleading and give little insight into a candidate’s abilities, which could lead you to make wrong hiring decisions.
In contrast, skills-based testing gives you objective, bias-free results and shows who can actually perform the role, ensuring stronger shortlists.
4. Ignoring candidate experience
Candidates tend to share their hiring experiences, and negative encounters aren’t left out. A negative candidate experience can damage your reputation and push ideal applicants to reject your offer, regardless of the benefits. Prioritize giving a good perception of your brand at every stage of the recruitment funnel with interactive communication, feedback, and engagement.
5. Failure to track results and implement feedback
Without tracking key funnel metrics, it’s impossible to know what’s working and what areas need improvement. Pairing analysis insights with candidate feedback uncovers blind spots and opportunities for improvement.
Use surveys at different stages to gather candidate perspectives, and track hiring patterns and conversion rates over time. Regular reviews of this data will highlight weak points and help you refine the funnel for better results.
Elevate your funnel results with Vervoe
Building a strong recruitment funnel is challenging without a reliable way to evaluate candidates. In the absence of clear, fair assessments, even the best funnel risks bias, inefficiency, and missed opportunities.
Vervoe makes this easier. Our versatile assessment library with over 300 assessments, bias-free AI, and automatic scoring and ranking helps you identify top performers with confidence. Vervoe also offers personalization and automated candidate communication features to keep your funnel efficient while giving candidates an engaging, interactive application journey.
Experience Vervoe’s unique results in your hiring process. Schedule a free demo to enjoy easy, seamless hiring today.
