The recruitment journey uncovered

Whether you’ve been through recruitment processes in the past, or are completely new to them, it’s essential to understand the different stages you might encounter on your journey. Let’s start from the beginning…

The recruitment funnel

The image above illustrates a recruitment funnel, providing a straightforward overview of the stages you might encounter during a recruitment process. While not all organisations will use every stage, larger businesses, especially those handling high volumes of applications for graduate schemes, often do. In contrast, smaller or medium-sized organisations typically rely on just two or possibly three stages. Since you can’t always predict which stages an organisation will use, it’s wise to prepare for any scenario. Additionally, the funnel doesn’t cover all possible elements, such as final interviews, cover letters, or psychometric tests—these can appear at various points in the process and are discussed further in this course.

So let’s Think Like A Recruiter! Imagine you are responsible for recruiting four graduates to start in your company, who will be working in the same role. How many applications would you be aiming for? It’s a lot more than you might expect – ideally, you’d want over 100 applications, with each stage reducing by between 33-50% each time (which means between 50-66% of candidates pass each stage, so the odds are good!)

Some of the drop in numbers between each stage can be accounted for by the number of candidates who drop out or withdraw their applications. You can reasonably expect a handful of candidates either stating their withdrawal or not responding to invitations to the next assessment at each stage. There will also be people earlier in the process who perhaps don’t have the right skills or experience for the role – which is why it’s so important to understand the organisation and the role and to demonstrate your experiences clearly and early on in the process. Each stage of the funnel reduces the numbers until you get a small pool of candidates who have performed best all the way through.

A typical job recruitment process might comprise five main stages. We’ll go through these in order and explain a little about what each stage is.

Stage 1: CV/cover letter/application form submission

The first stage of the recruitment process typically involves submitting your CV & cover letter or completing an application form. Application forms usually include questions about your educational background and personal information, such as your name and address. They may also contain open-ended questions that explore your motivation for the role and provide insights about you as a person.

At this stage, there are often numerous applicants—sometimes over a hundred. This high volume means that the likelihood of failure for candidates is significantly increased, as the recruiter aims to quickly narrow down the applications significantly. So not being clear on how you meet the requirements of the role or making (what can feel like) little mistakes such as inconsistent formatting or grammatical errors on your application can see you immediately discounted. However, the good news is that if you successfully pass the application or CV screening stage, you have already overcome the most competitive part of the process!

Stage 2: Telephone/video interview/psychometric tests

To assess enough potential candidates for a job, recruiters will need to see around 3x the number of candidates that they intend to invite to an assessment centre or final interview at a video or telephone interview stage, or a psychometric test. At this stage, you’ll generally be asked a series of set questions, and then given time to either record your response via an online platform or respond live over the phone to the recruiter. If you are invited to complete a psychometric test, this enables the recruiter to understand things like your drive, values, and how you might respond to different situations. It’s important to remember that you should be honest at this stage, complete the tests to the best of your ability and answer as honestly as possible. There are loads of different psychometric test examples and practice quizzes you can do to prepare yourself for these. We’ll talk about these later in the course in more detail.

Stage 3: Assessment centre/final interview

If a recruiter is hoping to make five job offers, they need to see around 3x as many candidates at an assessment centre, or 2x as many at the final interview. An assessment centre is simply a range of activities that you’ll complete all on the same day, with a group of other people. These activities might include psychometric testing, group activities, individual written activities, networking, tours of the site and/or interviews. They can either be conducted online or in person, depending on the organisation and the role. This will be an opportunity to show the recruiter who you are and how you would react in work-like scenarios particularly related to teamwork. An assessment centre is an excellent opportunity to show yourself off, impress the recruiter and demonstrate your skills and ambition. Final interviews are again an opportunity to show yourself off, demonstrating that you are the most suitable candidate for the role. They generally take around 60 minutes and can be conducted both in-person or online, usually with between one and three people asking you questions as part of a panel. Final interviews are a great opportunity to ask the recruiter(s) any questions (it looks great if you can ask something to gain more insight into the role or the organisation itself!), and to show off your hard work and research you’ve done.

Stage 4: Offers

If a recruiter wants four people to start in their organisation, they’d usually have to make at least five offers. This offer would be based on your performance throughout the process, particularly in the last stage of recruitment. Each recruitment process is different, with stages having different weightings. Some recruiters might take a stage-based approach to scoring your performance, taking each recruitment stage in silo – i.e. your CV or video interview stage score will not influence their decisions. Others might take your performance overall into account when deciding on who they would like to progress to the next stage and offer the role to, meaning your performance in CV and video interview scores are taken into account. It’s always worth making sure you do your best in all stages of the process!

Stage 5: Accepts offers and starts role

Here at the final stage, you’ll notice that out of the 5 offers sent out, only 4 were accepted and started the role. This is because it’s likely that (at least) one candidate will either not accept the role, or will accept and withdraw (renege) at a later date. This happens more often than you’d think, for a range of reasons – they’ve applied for multiple roles and decided to accept a different offer, they’ve got circumstances happening at home which mean they can no longer start, or they’re simply no longer interested in the role!

You might think this is the final step in your recruitment process, but if you are unsuccessful in any of the final stages, our one top tip is to make sure to ask for feedback on your performance. You can then use this to understand areas for personal improvement and development so that you ace the process next time around. It’s also always worth keeping in touch with the recruiter, and being polite to them, as fostering connections and expanding your network can often lead to more opportunities (check out one of our other courses, Finding Your Why, for more on this!).

We will zoom in on each of these stages through this module, allowing you to understand what each entails, and how you might position yourself to be at an advantage in your next recruitment process.

At the bottom of this step, you’ll find a workbook. Download this (even print it if you’d like!), as we’ll be asking you to complete different activities within the workbook in the different lessons of this course.