In recruitment, strategy and creativity go hand in hand. And that is exactly what we mean when we look at cleverly devised campaign strategy in combination with the recruitment funnel. This funnel helps you attract the right candidates and then place them successfully. But that means you have to creatively adapt your campaign strategy to this funnel to have a chance of success. In this article we explain all about this and show you which campaign metrics help you to determine the effectiveness of the recruitment funnel, per phase.
The recruitment funnel
We'll start right away with the most important element: the recruitment funnel itself. Like any funnel, it consists of a structured process where candidates go through several stages. These range from the very first contact, to the final (hopeful) hire. These are the phases:
- Awareness: Creating awareness among potential candidates.
- Interest: Generating interest in your organization and job openings.
- Interview: Encouraging candidates to apply and schedule an interview.
- Offer: Selecting and evaluating applicants, then sending an offer to the right match.
- Hire: The final hiring and onboarding.
When looking at setting up a recruitment campaign strategy, you naturally start with thorough preparation. First, understand who your target audience is and what drives them. Use detailed market research and data analysis to understand the needs and preferences of your potential candidates, so you can really get inside their heads to know what they want. This puts you in a perfect position to create targeted and effective campaigns.
1. Awareness
Above you can see briefly the stages of the entire funnel, but we'll go into that in more detail now, starting with the awareness stage. Imagine this: as a candidate you are not yet at all familiar with your company and you want to make a kind of 'soft landing'. That means you don't want to be immediately targeted with product-specific ads you don't understand anything about anyway.
So what should you be doing? Brand awareness is the answer. This phase is all about making your brand visible and strong employer branding tells the real story of your organization. Especially respond to the pain points your target audience experiences and write a blog about them, or have employees share experiences in a video so the approach is smooth and not too direct. How can you actually evaluate whether your marketing efforts make sense? You can do so using the campaign metrics below:
- Number of visits to your work-at-home page
- New followers on your social media channels
- Effectiveness of channels you recruit through
2. Interest
Once you've attracted attention, it's time to actually generate interest. You do this by making potential candidates curious. What means do you use to do this? Consider interviews with experts, informative webinars and stories from the faces behind your organization. This will give candidates a good idea of the work environment and culture, something that is often left behind in simply producing job postings. For example, when candidates are interested, they are more likely to look at your company's Instagram page, as that channel is more likely to reflect the work atmosphere. These are important campaign metrics at this stage:
- Number of applicants per position
- Internal vs. external applicants
- Number of employee referrals
- Percentage of rejected job applications
3. Interview
Analytics are key in this step, and recruitment automation can help you tremendously. Besides the fact that you will be interviewing your shortlist of candidates, it is important to nurture these candidates and ensure that they maintain their interest in your company. Give the candidates enough additional details that they will find interesting, such as specific info about the position, the work environment and the company culture.
Once you have gathered all the useful info about your candidate, you can conduct an interview that really shows that you are taking the time to understand their needs and aspirations. Follow this up with a message (for example, via an email campaign) that contains more information about the next steps. You can test these KPIs:
- Number of applicants meeting job requirements
- Number of candidates qualified and suitable for the position
4. Sacrifice
The candidate should not only have done good research on your organization, but also on what competitors offer in terms of pay, work-life balance and fringe benefits for similar positions. In this case, you can collect short work-at-home videos of your employees to show why your organization is the best choice. You can target them through a campaign with these videos, they are by now very familiar with your organization and will be open to what you have to say. Important metrics in this phase are the following:
- The ratio of offers made to offers accepted
- Acceptance rate
- The relationship between candidates and negotiations
5. Hire
New employees are the best ambassadors of your brand you could wish for. They see all the benefits and have chosen your company for a reason. So make good use of these newcomers. Make videos, collect quotes, make sure they are heard - and do this through social media. This way, you continue to increase awareness of your brand and constantly replenish your talent pool. The analytics are extremely important in this step, make sure you have the following metrics in focus:
- Dropout rate
- Performance statistics of new employees
- Time to fill a vacancy
- Time to adopt
- Source of hire (through which channel?)
- Quality of hire
- Cost per hire
Tools for your recruitment funnel
Establishing an effective campaign strategy with the recruitment funnel requires a thoughtful approach and continuous optimization. Understanding and leveraging each phase of the funnel will help you attract and successfully place the right candidates. Authenticity and consistency are crucial here. This also involves technology to support and optimize your campaigns. Recruitment marketing software can help you strengthen your employer brand and make results measurable.
We've also put together practical tips for getting the most out of your recruitment campaign in a convenient guide. Are you ready to improve your campaign strategy with the recruitment funnel? Contact us, we can help you further.
