Having a robust applicant pool for every role is a common goal for talent leaders across industries. This is especially important for large employers and staffing firms who are often looking to fill hundreds of open roles each month. As such, organizations tend to over index on top-of-funnel initiatives while often ignoring their applicant-to-hire conversion metrics. 

Here are our Top 5 Cases on when to focus on improving your applicant journey vs increasing top of funnel:

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1. Volume Hiring Campaigns

When recruiting hundreds of candidates for a similar role, a relatively small increase in conversion can have massive savings implications. This is especially true for high-volume recruiters where marketing spend becomes increasingly expensive for your next incremental applicant. 

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2. Expensive Screening Process (High Platform Costs)

Organizations tend to focus heavily on marketing costs but often ignore the ‘mid-funnel costs’ such as background checks and drug screens. These costs can quickly add up and often double or triple your overall CPH (Cost per Hire) for low converting applicant funnels. 

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3. Significant Qualification Requirements

Roles with specific certifications or licenses will always limit your applicant pools - regardless of marketing or job board spend. As such, ensuring you are engaging and supporting applicants early and throughout the candidate process becomes crucially important to effectively fill open roles quickly. 

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4. “Gig”, “Part-Time” and “High Motivation” Roles

For organizations hiring a high volume of gig or part-time roles, it is critically important to measure and monitor your post-hire activity or “activation” rate. These roles tend to draw large applicant pools due to the attractiveness of flexible work but often see low activation rate if the recruitment process lacks a focus on education, support and motivation. 

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5. Complex or Non-Traditional Compensation Structure

Roles with complex bonus or commission structures often require additional recruiter time and resources to walk applicants through the overall earning potential of the role. This additional hurdle can often create a bottleneck within the recruitment process for organizations without the sufficient internal resources to engage applicants at scale. 

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While most high-volume recruiters feel they cannot deliver a great applicant experience cost effectively, new tools and services are allowing teams to engage with much larger candidate pools and drive efficiency in terms of both time-to-fill and quality-of-hire. In addition, a great applicant experience often drives a great “early hire” experience - shortening onboarding time and ramping new hires to full productivity faster. 

Interested in learning more about high-velocity recruitment? Connect with a member of our team.