Hiring Funnel - Candidate Pipeline

Applying the principles of sales funnel to recruitment process can not only bring more accountability to HR, but also help HR to monitor how well they stay on track to deliver results.

With help of historical values and input recruiting metrics, a hiring funnel can be designed in order to understand candidate pipeline anytime.

It all starts with the target hires per month (i.e. hires needed to execute the business plan). Then, a conversion rate hire-to-interview is reviewed to find out, how many interviews must be conducted in order to hire one person. Next, conversion rate interview-to-candidates is examined to learn, how many candidates must apply in order to select one for an interview.

Let’s look at an example. Say, 3 sales persons need to be hired at the beginning of the month. With the hires-to-interview ratio of 1/6, HR must interview 18 candidates in order to hire 3 of them. With the interview-to-candidates ratio of 1/8, HR needs to receive a total of 144 applications, or an average of 4.8 applications per day.

The figure below showcases the number of applications received in a given month against the daily target of 4.8.



As long as HR receives at least the specified number of applications per day, they know they stay on track. If the number is lower then the target, HR should take additional actions to fill the top of the hiring funnel, e.g. arrange new posting and/or refresh of job ads, wider candidates mining, new programs to encourage employee referrals, etc.