Hiring Is a Bloody Funnel—The Whole World Is

As a wise man once said, «The whole world is a bunch of bloody funnels», and I agree with him. The concept aptly applies to the recruitment process.

The spray-and-pray

When hiring people, it's important to understand that the best specialists are almost never actively looking for a job. They are comfortably seated in companies with good salaries, big bonuses, a gym, free juices, and a fancy badge that pleasingly beeps when swiped at the office turnstile.

Often, the whole recruitment process is just a 'spray and pray' approach. Recruiters write to potential candidates: «Hey, we have a cool vacancy, pay well, interested in chatting?». According to my LinkedIn profile, I'm a co-founder at several companies, and I'm still getting the whole bunch of such invites, although it's quite obvious that a job offer would be ignored.

Such workflow can catch some people who are already job hunting but it sends the same message to a large number of people who aren't, resulting in a generally low response rate.

The good ol' funnel

I suggest looking at hiring as marketing, which opens up new and amazing edges. The good old funnel approach comes into play.

Let's consider this in the context of searching for a CTO.

How a marketer would approach this task

1. First, conduct classic JTBD (jobs-to-be-done) customer development (in-depth interviews). Select CTOs that fit your profile but who you know for sure are currently not interested in joining your firm. Arrange calls with them and the main question to ask is: what would make you immediately resign and accept an offer; describe your dream job (what kind of company, tasks, team, salary); what are 3-5 factors that you look at when choosing where to work and who to work with.

   
   

2. From analyzing the customer development interviews, it turns out that top candidates are not as motivated by money; for them, it's more important to have recognition, a cool ambitious case in their resume, the level of people they will work with (to learn from them), the company's mission (increasingly critical), and interesting tasks.

   
   

3. Based on these responses, you can creatively upgrade your materials at all stages of the HR funnel: the message on LinkedIn, the job vacancies page, your company's pitch during introductions, a whole lot of them.

   
   

4. As soon as each stage of the funnel is based on the real needs of the client (candidate), the conversion at each stage dramatically increases, and most importantly, the quality of candidates.

   
   

5. Rinse and repeat, continue to test at each stage, re-do customer development and upgrade your materials.

A message to such guys might look like this:

Hi username, a few guys from #### told me you're the coolest CTO they know, so I decided to write to you. (recognition)

Here at ####, we've assembled a team from ####, ####, and #####, ##### and are developing #### in #### (we're already one of the highest in revenue in the region). (cool team, interesting tasks, opportunity to learn)

Interesting tasks for 2024 include #####, #####, and then ##### (ambitious case).

Cool stuff: we use ####, and like no one else in the market #### (interesting tasks, opportunity to learn).

We're currently talking with various awesome people, looking for someone to head our development instead of one of the founders. (recognition)

Maybe you'd be interested in a 15-30 minute call to get acquainted? (won't take much time)

The same framework works for other vacancies. Iterate, research, test, improve.

Good luck with your search, guys. I wish you the top candidates!