The Ultimate Recruitment Funnel Guide for Agencies in 2024

Implementing a recruitment funnel structure within your agency can lead to significantly improved productivity, efficiency, and performance. 

Messy processes become organised, candidates are given a clear path towards hire, and recruitment agency leaders are empowered to make smart, data-driven decisions.

In this guide, we’ll take you through the different stages of the recruitment funnel and cover how you can leverage data and technology to optimise every phase. 

Introduction to the Recruitment Funnel

At its core, a recruitment funnel is a way of breaking down the entire recruitment process into key stages, from attraction to hiring.

In doing so, the recruitment agency is better able to organise its processes, serve candidates and clients, and gather data to improve its recruitment operation. 

Furthermore, by considering each stage individually, it’s much easier for recruitment leaders to identify where and how performance needs to be improved.

A recruitment funnel is geared towards growth and scalability and, when constructed well, should act as an effective machine for attracting and hiring top talent. 

Why a funnel?

The hiring process begins by attracting as many candidates as possible. 

This pool then is gradually slimmed down as the best candidates for the role emerge. 

Stages of the Recruitment Funnel

The recruitment funnel encompasses five key stages: 

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Application
4. Selection
5. Hiring  

Here’s what you need to be aware of when building your recruiting funnel template.

Awareness: Attracting Talent

Sitting right at the top of the recruitment funnel, this is the phase in which potential candidates first become aware of your agency and its open positions.

The more people that are aware of your agency, the wider your talent pool.

But don’t just sit back and hope potential candidates stumble upon your agency by chance. 

Instead, boost the awareness phase by taking action to attract talent. 

Here are a number of strategies to help you grab attention.

• Create written, graphical and video content for your website and social media channels that puts your agency brand front and centre and answers frequently asked questions.
• Build your personal brand and position yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn by frequently posting useful and entertaining insights for job seekers.
• Engage with potential candidates and target candidates on social media by joining conversations and being active in the comments of your own posts. Then encourage direct messages when you encounter an interested job seeker.
• Use both paid and organic job adverts on search and social media to attract professionals in the relevant sector.
• Post every new job description on jobs boards that specialise in the relevant sector.
• Engage with passive candidates at events and on social media to continue building your future talent pipeline.
• Use social media to direct potential candidates to your website where they will find much more information about your employer brand and vacancies.
• Develop optimised landing pages for each sector you hire into that will bring visitors in from Google searches.

Interest: Engaging Potential Candidates

So now the job seeker is aware your agency exists, you need to pique their interest and encourage them to learn more. 

This is where nurturing comes in. 

At this point, the potential candidate should be actively researching your agency — and you need to ensure the information they’re looking for is super easy to find and personalised to them. 

If they take a look at your website and decide your agency isn’t what they’re looking for — or they simply don’t like the vibe — they’ll drop out of the funnel without a backwards look. 

To keep talent sliding down the funnel, use data surrounding their previous job searches to deliver:

• Personalised content
• Personalised job opportunities
• Personalised event marketing
• Custom calls to action 

For example, if a candidate arrived at your site by Googling “tech sales jobs,” you want to put tech sales jobs in front of them. 

This can be achieved on your website (think ‘you may also be interested in’ tabs when shopping online), or by automated newsletter if you have permission to send them emails. 

You can also assign them a recruiter who will send them any new tech sales jobs that come up via email, text, or LinkedIn, as well as content about the tech or sales industries and relevant events. 

This will make the potential candidate feel like you’re exactly the right agency to help them get where they want to be. 

If, however, they arrive at your website and are met with content about ecommerce marketing, they’re likely to decide you’re not the agency for them.  

Having a strong bank of easily accessible FAQs on your website is particularly important at this stage of the funnel as candidates are deciding whether to reach out to you or not. 

Remember: make sure your agency’s branding and digital footprint is cohesive across all channels. 

The interest stage is all about building trust in your agency, and an outdated website that has a different look and feel to your slick social media branding can be hugely off-putting. 

Application: The Submission Process

Well done!

You’ve masterfully transported your candidate through the awareness and interest stage — and now they’ve decided to apply. 

But this is no time to sit back and relax. 

Many candidates drop out during the application phase. 

You need to keep these candidates engaged by ensuring the application stage is as quick, easy, and smooth as possible. 

Who among us hasn’t quit an application form half way through — despite previously being excited about the role — because it was way too long and arduous to fill in? 

Indeed, research shows that some 60% of job seekers give up in the middle of filling out application forms online.

Why?

The processes were too lengthy or complex. 

So, how do we optimise the application process to increase conversions?

Firstly, keep application forms simple. 

Of course, you need enough information to thoroughly screen candidates, but don’t make them repeat everything that’s on their CV, or write huge personal essays. 

Instead, focus on the most important questions, while reducing the overall size of the application.

Ensure the website or app that hosts the application process is up to scratch. 

This is an important one in 2024. 

There’s nothing like a long-buffering or improperly loading web page to dent trust in a brand. 

And, with candidates increasingly using mobile devices to apply for roles, it's vital to ensure the application process is optimised for mobile too.

Communicate frequently throughout the application process, using automation to save your recruiters time. 

Welcome them to the application process via an email that delivers everything they need to know about it.

Automate follow-up emails that remind applicants to complete the application form where they have left it half-finished. 

These points of contact may seem small, but they help candidates to remain engaged with the process. 

Want to know what the applicant journey is like?

Complete the application yourself, and identify and resolve any points of friction along the way. 

Remember — throughout the application process, you need to be collecting valuable candidate data. 

In addition to indicating whether the candidate is right for the role they are applying for, this should give you key insights into your sourcing channels, talent pool, and recruitment processes. 

Drawing insights from this data then empowers you to adapt and improve the process for future applicants. 

Selection: Screening and Interviews

The screening and interview stage is one of the most critical to ensure you deliver a quality hire.

During this phase, you’re seeking candidates with the right qualifications, skills and experience for the role, while eliminating those who are not a good fit.

You also want to go a bit deeper, learning more about candidates’ personalities and considering how they will fit within the company’s culture. 

Throughout this phase, recruiters need to be in constant contact with candidates, letting them know exactly what to expect and when, scheduling evaluations and interviews, and feeding back. 

Best practices for screening candidates range from the traditional to the modern. 

They include: 

• Reviewing CVs and cover letters
• Phone screening
• Video screening
• One-way video interviews
• In person interviews
• Group interviews
• Social media searches
• Contacting references
• Job knowledge assessments
• Hard and soft skills evaluations 

After your candidates are screened, it’s time for interviews. 

This may involve one or more rounds of interviews with a recruiter, hiring manager, wider hiring team, future colleagues and/or senior leadership. 

Here, recruiters must set their interviewees up for success by thoroughly preparing them for the interview, from what to expect on the day to what they should research ahead of the big day. 

Following the interview, give feedback as quickly as possible to ensure you’re not giving applicants false hope — and to keep the successful candidate engaged with the process. 

Hiring: Making the Offer

This is the best part of any recruiter’s job.

You’ve found an exciting candidate, the client is thrilled, and soon you’ll collect your commission. 

What’s more, you get to deliver the happy news with a formal job offer. 

But the final stage of the recruitment funnel can be more challenging than it initially sounds. 

From salary and benefits to start date, there’s often plenty to negotiate at this stage — and if discussions fall through, you can lose your winning candidate at the final hurdle. 

So how can you help to ensure your candidate accepts your offer, and not one from another company?

This process starts higher up the funnel in the screening stage, when you’re getting to know your candidate. 

At this point you should have asked about their motivations, goals, and how they would like their future career to look, as well as any expectations surrounding salary and benefits. 

You also need to make sure the candidates understand what the company is offering — and that the compensation and benefits package aligns with the candidate’s expectations. 

It’s also important to highlight opportunities for growth and progression with their new employer at this point, in addition to any training, opportunities or mentorship schemes on offer.

Optimising Each Stage of the Funnel

So now we understand the anatomy of the hiring funnel, how can we optimise it for success? 

Leveraging Technology and Data

Investing in cutting-edge tech and data analytics capabilities is the quickest and easiest way to boost your recruitment funnel. 

Data transparency is of the utmost importance in modern recruitment agencies. 

After all, if you’re unaware of your performance and your progress towards your goals, how are you supposed to improve it? 

Similarly, if you don’t know about an issue in your recruitment funnel, you’re not going to address it until it snowballs into a much bigger problem. 

Game-changing recruiting analytics software OneUp gives recruiters and managers visibility into the data they need to hit targets and solve problems faster.

This platform pulls data from your tech stack in real-time, providing a single source of truth from which to draw vital insights. 

You can build custom reporting dashboards for teams, individual recruiters, and managers in minutes, showing them the recruitment funnel metrics only they need to see. 

This tech also forecasts expected results, making it easy to see whether reps are on track to hit their goals. 

Meanwhile, the ‘target templates’ functionality makes onboarding new recruiters easy. 

You can quickly and easily dive deeper into the data to identify the actions that contributed to your target recruitment metrics over time — and save unlimited reports so this key data is only ever a click away. 

What’s more, you can track recruitment funnel trends over time with intuitive visualisations, empowering you to take faster action on any issues that arise.

Automation can also be used to great effect throughout the entire recruitment funnel.

For example, OneUp empowers recruiters to automate repetitive workflows, allowing them to focus their time where it matters. 

This means no more manual spreadsheets, no more time-consuming, office-wide email updates. 

How does this work?

Control how your automations begin by triggering events when any data point reaches a specific value or increases by a certain percentage — or simply, on pre-scheduled times and dates. 

These triggered events may be emails, Microsoft Teams notifications, In-App messaging, or even a TV flash. 

You can also get recurring recruitment analytics reports delivered directly to inboxes, ensuring goals, targets and data remain at the forefront of your team’s mind.

This software also enables you to track all your automated workflows over the past 90 days. 

Best Practices for Funnel Optimisation

As outlined above, modern recruitment leaders should turn to data and technology to optimise each stage of their recruiting funnel. 

Here’s how.

Optimising Awareness

When you’re attempting to attract potential candidates to your vacancies, it helps to know which sourcing channels work best.

It’s worth crunching the numbers on the effectiveness of your sourcing channels.

This will tell you how well different job boards and social media channels perform at attracting candidates, both by quality and by volume, for different types of roles. 

Going forward, your recruiters can then focus their attention on the channels you know work, saving time while boosting productivity. 

Optimising Interest

Much of the ‘interest’ phase surrounds putting the right content in the right place within the user journey.

Using tools such as Google analytics, you can see how effective your content strategy is at bringing visitors to your website, answering their burning questions, and ultimately triggering them to apply. 

These results should then shape your content strategy in terms of the content subject, medium, and user experience. 

Optimising Application

The application stage is the first part of the recruitment funnel where the potential candidate is required to put in significant effort — which means they’re at risk of dropping out of the journey. 

In your efforts to make the application journey as quick, easy, and smooth as possible, it’s important to gather data surrounding where users are giving up. 

This data should direct you to points of friction within the journey, so you can eliminate them from the application process and hold onto more applicants in the future.

Optimising Selection

Screening is historically a hugely time-consuming process for recruiters.

Harness the significant power of AI to optimise this phase.

This cutting-edge tech can carry out tasks from matching CVs to job descriptions and evaluating skills to scheduling interviews and automating candidate notifications. 

In addition, these tools can be employed to help eliminate bias from the screening process through merit-based skills tests.

Optimising Hiring 

Be sure to ask for feedback from the candidate and hiring manager after they have been in the job for one month, six months, and one year.

Their levels of satisfaction will give you useful data to feed back into the system to help identify best fits for roles in future.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

The recruitment funnel is a complex system, and there are a number of pitfalls that can set your operation back.

Here are some of the most common red flags to watch out for. 

• Not using data-backed decision making. There’s no need to rely only on gut instinct in 2024. Instead, ensure all your decision making is clearly backed by accurate, relevant and consistent data.
• A lack of consistency in your recruitment processes. Your recruitment processes should be finely-honed and regularly improved based on the latest data. Inconsistent hiring processes are messy, unproductive and inefficient, and means optimising your recruitment funnel is impossible.
• Failing to engage with candidates. From in-depth conversations to find out more about candidates to gathering their feedback, recruiters should regularly engage with candidates. Failing to do so leads to an unengaging candidate journey, more drop-outs during the application process, and a bad first impression on behalf of your clients.
• Always sourcing from the same places. Refusing to think outside the box when it comes to sourcing severely restricts your talent pool and can impact negatively on DE&I. Get creative with your sourcing channels, and listen to what the data is telling you about their effectiveness.
• Refusing to automate. With recruitment teams stretched, agencies can’t afford to avoid automation. Automate tedious run-of-the-mill tasks to save your recruiters a huge amount of time and allow them to focus on more enjoyable (and important) human-led actions such as working on their strategy or getting to know candidates. 

Recruiting Funnel Metrics to Measure Success

Recruitment KPIs are metrics that measure your success, allowing you to derive key insights.

So in order to properly optimise your recruitment funnel, first you need to identify the right metrics to track. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the Recruitment Funnel

Your recruiting KPIs will vary depending on your agency’s goals and needs. 

And it’s important not to take on too many metrics, and end up bogged down in the data and disengaged from your recruitment funnel analysis. 

But there are a number of KPIs that are particularly useful for tracking and analysing the effectiveness of your recruitment funnel. 

Here are some of the most important, broken down by funnel stage. 

• Sourcing channel effectiveness
• Applicants per opening
• Application completion rate
• Applicant-to-interview ratio
• Offer acceptance rate
• Time to hire
• Cost per hire
• Quality of hire

Using Data to Refine Your Recruitment Strategy

Once collected and analysed, this data must be used to refine your recruitment strategy. 

Start off by establishing recruiting funnel benchmarks with which you can compare future performance. 

Every decision you and your recruiting team make — whether large or small — should be supported by data from your recruiting funnel analysis. 

For example, if you look into the data and find out that one of your recruiters has a very high applicant-to-interview ratio and that an unusually large number of their candidates are dropping out during the application process, you could conclude they need more training around sourcing and selection. 

Perhaps another recruiter has a significantly low offer to acceptance rate, in which case they need more support to adequately manage candidate and client expectations. 

Recruitment performance software OneUp provides a single source of truth that allows you to quickly and easily drill down into your data.

With clear visualisations that depict progress towards goals, it’s easy to spot and swiftly rectify any issues within your recruitment funnel. 

Set SMART goals for your recruiters as they strive to nudge potential candidates down the funnel, and then track their progress on a custom recruitment funnel dashboard. 

If the dashboards show that a recruiter is succeeding or failing in a certain area, you can drill down into their performance data to find out what exactly is going right or wrong. 

These findings should shape your overall recruitment funnel strategy. 

For example, if you’ve noticed a boost in candidate quality, you might drill down into the data and find this change is due to a new sourcing channel one recruiter has tapped. 

A simple way to optimise your funnel is to recommend your other recruiters use this channel too, and also cast their nets wider when sourcing. 

Final Thoughts on Optimising Your Recruitment Funnel

The recruitment funnel gives agencies a strong structure on which to base their processes and KPIs. 

But simply having a recruitment funnel isn’t enough.

Indeed, in 2024, it’s vital you optimise your funnel through the use of data insights and new tech like automation and AI. 

Equipping yourself with this real-time knowledge will boost decision making, efficiency, and productivity, and ultimately, ensure you remain competitive. 

To find out more about how OneUp can support agencies in enhancing recruitment funnel effectiveness, book your demo here.

FAQs About Recruitment Funnels

What is a Recruitment Funnel?

Looking for a recruiting funnel definition?

A recruitment funnel is a way of organising the entire recruiting process into five recruitment funnel stages. 

The five stages of our recruitment funnel template are:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Application
4. Selection
5. Hiring  

Implementing a recruitment funnel helps recruitment agencies to organise their processes and workflows. 

Meanwhile, gathering and analysing data on individual funnel stages empowers recruitment leaders to make more targeted improvements to their operations. 

Finally, candidates enjoy a clearer journey to hire, and clients should end up with higher-quality candidates. 

What is Top of Funnel Recruitment?

Top of funnel recruitment is when a recruiter focuses on activities within the first few stages of the recruitment funnel. 

Their aim is to quickly find and move qualified candidates down the funnel.

Top of funnel recruiters may spend more time working on employer branding, agency marketing, website content, and social media activities, as well as pre-screening exercises. 

How to Calculate Recruitment Funnel Effectiveness?

In order to calculate the effectiveness of your recruitment funnel, you must select, track, and analyse key metrics. 

Widely used candidate recruitment funnel metrics include:

• Sourcing channel effectiveness
• Applicants per opening
• Application completion rate
• Applicant-to-interview ratio
• Offer acceptance rate
• Time to hire
• Cost per hire
• Quality of hire