Skip to content
Home » Talent Acquisition » Why Automated Funnels Are Essential for Recruiting
Why Automated Funnels Are Essential for Recruiting

Whatever the type of position you are recruiting for, automation and streamlined processes can help build funnels for the top talent your company needs. Your recruiting funnels are important in order for you and your team to be proactive in anticipation of future openings and hiring needs. Once you have projections for new hires needed in the next 60, 90, or 120 days, you can use automation to create funnels that lead to an effective pipeline of talent to fill those positions.

Why Automated Funnels Are Essential for Your Hiring Efforts

Creating automated funnels for your positions not only requires planning but strategy too. You’ll need to decide the type of funnels you will use to engage your candidates. For example, in the current marketplace, you might want to focus on virtual hiring events. Along the way, you’ll use automation that supports virtual presenting, digital chat sessions, and interactive landing pages on your career site for candidate lead capture. Ahead of the funnel for your online hiring events, you’ll use advertising that focuses on and targets a specific job opening or targeted affinity group that includes the talent you want to reach. Automation supports all of these functions, but first, the strategy.

When determining what your funnels will be, there are criteria to consider for candidate touchpoints that involve automation. There are best practices for setting up these talent funnels that should be rolled into your recruitment strategy.

Your Recruiting Funnels Should Be:

1) Defined and specific

At the minimum, developing personas, mapping out how you will reach them and where, and reporting on the results are necessary to be able to define your target audience and the touchpoints in which you can reach this talent, along with setting goals to determine the success of your campaigns.

2) Have assets and copy designed to engage and drive applications, registrations, or downloads

Your emails, landing pages, and any other form of recruitment marketing content should have a lead generation goal, or clear call to action. The farther we move candidates into the funnel, the more relevant lead generation activities become and these are important in order to automate them. Using content marketing, landing pages, online events, and other tools designed to generate leads also gives you data on which candidates perform specific activities in your campaigns so that you can isolate and drive targeted and interested candidates to apply for specific job openings.

3) Scalable

It’s impossible to scale new programs and processes without data. Data and recruiting analytics will allow you and your recruiting team to make informed decisions about what to automate, where to spend time on high-touch tasks, how to reach candidates more quickly and in a targeted way, and manage costs. For specific nurturing and candidate marketing efforts, you’ll want to identify the KPIs that align with your company goals, such as open and click through rates for email campaigns, engagement rates for digital or social advertising, and so on.

4) Integrated with other technology

Your applicant tracking system is the heart of your recruiting and application process. Most ATS platforms have some level of automation that can support your talent funnels. For example, you can set up messaging automation with a FAQ for candidates and use your apply bounce back email to direct candidates to questions most asked by them during the interview and hiring process, as well as use the opportunity to re-engage previous applicants with content marketing.

5) Seamless

Well-planned, thought out and focused on providing resources, information, and details to improve the quality of your candidate audience. Your campaign targeting and content marketing can be built to grow quickly and using automation and technology – and they can be turned on or off at a moment’s notice when you’re using programmatic targeting and advertising. Using data-driven talent attraction solutions allows you to optimize a paid campaign in real-time, amplifying what’s working and turning off what doesn’t.

Putting It All Together

Automation and streamlined processes are critical to manage the many changes happening right now in the current economic climate. By leveraging automation, you can focus on strategy giving you a chance to breathe, reflect, and plan for different headcount and business changes before they happen.