Recruitment Funnel’s, sales funnel’s blah blah blah….what’s the deal with this? It’s 2020, surely by now we have all realised that anything that stems the follow of any traffic will ultimately disrupt your business? Information is key, data is everything so why in recruitment discount anyone through an archaic modelling structure that was built for a world where the company was king, where the candidate was secondary and should be thankful” for an interview never mind a job offer. This is nonsense – the candidate is king and rightly so. The candidate not only has the skills you need, but has the network to make your life both easier & harder from a recruitment perspective. Anyone that shows an interest in you or your company is potentially a future tool to help you amplify your brand message….everywhere, forever!
Okay, so it’s time to recruit…..and quickly. This is invariably either going to be a complete pain in the backside or at least cost a few quid that could ideally be best spent elsewhere. If you are at the point of needing staff urgently then then the time has come to take a step back and look things a little differently….dare I say it, you need to turn the world upside down.
Companies traditionally use the mass media and agencies to market their vacancies, spending much of their budgets on hit-or-miss communications. They hope their message will somehow penetrate the media din and reach a sufficient number of receptive prospects who will engage and show an interest in a vacancy. Of course, some agencies are better than others and those that provide value to you and understand your business please keep close to your side, they are worth their weight in gold, but there is a more obvious way to get your message out there, especially when time is off the essence.
We need to focus on the experiences of your existing employees and convert them into engaged, enthusiastic advocates who will provide powerful, credible word-of-mouth advertising? Not only will employee retention will be far more powerful and cost effective than employee acquisition but at times of urgent onboarding your message will authentically spread like wildfire.
By looking from the inside out you will turn everything on it’s head, you would flip the funnel! Instead of ending with onboarding a new employee, you would begin with it. Imagine that! If you focussed the lion’s share of your effort, energy and budget on keeping employees versus attracting them you could correct this inbalance, and in doing so, not only get your employees to stay, but tell others to do so as well and even more to join!
The world is changing, rapidly, and the world of recruitment is no different. For those of you involved in technical or medical recruitment, you will have witnessed an unprecedented shift of power to the candidate fuelled by the virtual megaphone handed to them through the vast array of social media outlets over the past 5 years. If an employee is angry, had a bad day at the office or just plain bored of their day to day routine, the old rule of thumb was that they told an average of 10 people about it. In today’s world some could easily be telling 1000’s or more with a simple status update, meme or emoji.
So this doesn’t sound like great news, especially when we are led to believe that people are more likely to complain than praise – right? No – not at all – this doesn’t work in today’s world. Credible, positive & most importantly authentic digital chatter has the ability to turn your workforce is the most powerful PR machine you could ever wish for and now is just an important time to do this then at any other time in living memory. Your happy employees could be telling many more than the old average of 3 about their ace job / benefits & prospects. It is our / your job as a recruitment / HR specialist to design initiatives that enable and activate them to do so and that shift can be represented by adapting one of every recruiters favourite conceptual frameworks – the Flipping Funnel!
Traditional Funnel – Compression
The Flipping Funnel – Amplification
Okay, so it’s all the wrong way around, or is it? Doesn’t this make more sense? Rather “than casting a net” – the pool was already there, there was segmentation through advocacy. Wouldn’t it be great if at the point you were releasing a very specific vacancy you were actually targeting a very specific audience that were already bought into your company and culture? Sounds ideal – well this is how it can & should be done and this is how Hirecracker look to assist companies like yours recruit en mass but leveraging the power of your workforce via a myriad of social tech to spread your message to an already engaged audience.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, we would love to help.
Martin Blythe
