getting your talent acquisition funnel right: five steps.

Getting the best possible hires every time is a recruiter’s dream come true. Achieving that dream however, has less to do with candidates and more with the recruiting strategy. Given today’s highly competitive, candidate-driven global hiring markets, the lines between recruitment and marketing are quickly blurring. People go through a similar journey, irrespective of whether they are buying a product/service or accepting a job offer. Much like marketers, recruiters need the right ‘talent acquisition funnel’ to step up their game and ensure there is a robust pipeline of candidates that can be used to quickly fill positions as and when required.

Here are five ways to get your talent acquisition funnel right:

1. attracting the right candidates:

First, define what your ideal candidate looks like, including their qualifications, work experience, soft skills, background, and even the absolute dealmakers and breakers. Much like buyer personas that marketers create, recruiters need to build ‘candidate personas’ which can include aggregating information from social media platforms, forums, etc. to better understand your target candidates. Next, consider your employment branding – a key factor for creating a robust talent acquisition funnel and a crucial aspect for over 76% job seekers. According to Randstad’s 2016 Q4 Talent Outlook Survey, 40% of organisations plan to ramp up spending on employment branding in the next 12 months. An engaged employment brand doesn’t have to come just from recruiters – it needs to be diverse and cross-functional. Leverage employees from different organisational departments to serve as ambassadors of your employment brand and see your EVP soar.

2. selecting from the pool:

Let’s say you did a great job in distributing the open profiles and are now swimming in a pool of applications. How do you then get down to selecting the right ones to proceed to the next stage? It is a crucial step as bad hiring decisions can cost your company dearly – 80% of employee churn can be attributed to them. In addition to the standard interview process, try using innovative methods such as video/Skype screening, social recruiting techniques, people analytics, etc. to save time and money in getting to the right handful of candidates from the horde of applications.

3. appointing candidates:

This is about making an offer and hiring candidates. Similar to ‘closing’ a sales deal, this step is at the bottom of the funnel. Success here depends on the money you offer, in addition to the strength of your employment brand again. While millennials are famous for choosing ethics, learning opportunities, etc. over competitive salaries, knowing what motivates your target candidates should be relatively easy by this step if you’ve done the preceding ones right.

4. onboarding new hires:

Successfully onboarding and assimilating new employees into the company culture matters more than ever today as job seekers have employers vying for their attention. A good onboarding process should take approximately 90 days by the end of which, an employee should be able to relate to the organisational vision, besides knowing key organisational relationships and being in line with his/her manager’s short and long-term expectations.

5. retaining successful employees:

This is the last and the hardest part of the funnel. Gone are the days when companies could use decades-old retention strategies, mainly hovering over pay raises and bonuses and still engage employees meaningfully. Transparency, accountability, and a strong employer brand are the new tenets of an effective employee retention strategy. Take, for instance, SoundCloud – the company attributes its low attrition rate to healthy internal communications among its over 300 employee base scattered across four offices located in four different time zones.

telling the right story - from start to finish

Funnel sourcing is all about a compelling story, told consistently, not just by the recruiters but by everyone in the organisation. Leveraging technology to simplify the candidate experience and optimise the recruitment strategy from time to time plays a critical role here. Does your organisation have all hands on the mission when it comes to creating a robust talent pool and a steady workforce?