The Three Hiring Channels 📣
And how you can get the best out of them to hire faster and better.
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I remember an interview with Ozzie Osman about technical hiring. He wrote a great book about it, and was asked how startups and small companies can compete against big corps about talent.
At some point he said: they can, because hiring is a product.
That sentence stuck with me because, as you start thinking that way, everything changes. A product has a brand, a funnel, target customers, and so on.
More so, you can look at the whole employee lifecycle as a product — of which hiring is just the start.
👔 The Employment Funnel
The goal of the employment product is to hire great people and make them bring value and revenues to the company over time.
Your employees are your users.
To make it more practical, and see if the metaphor stands, we can use the pirate metrics to map the various stages of this new product:
Acquisition — finding new people to be hired. In this phase people apply for a position and you start the selection process.
Activation — converting applicants into new employees. It includes interviews, formal proposals, up to the point where you have actually hired the new person.
Retention — retaining people in your team. Making them happy, engaged, and minimizing the turnover.
Revenue — maximizing the value that is brought by the employee to the company. As each person grows in expertise and responsibilities over time, you want it to be higher and higher.
Referral — finding new hires via recommendation by other employees. This is incredibly efficient and often overlooked.
Out of these five steps, hiring covers the first two: Acquisition and Activation.
In this article I will focus on the acquisition phase, its main channels and how we can make them work better.
So let's dive in 👇