5 Metrics for Your Workweek – Wednesday: Placement Funnel

Welcome to a new Bullhorn Blog series entitled “5 Metrics for Your Workweek.” InsightSquared and Bullhorn are teaming up to get you more involved and engaged with your data. Read a new business intelligence metric tip each day and learn how running your recruiting business by the numbers can help drive success.

Here’s the next metric for your workweek, especially designed to get you over the hump. Today, let’s examine what you can learn from your Placement Funnel, one of the most interesting and potentially the highest ROI report you could be running from your Bullhorn numbers. This report has immediate implications to increasing your bottom line, so minimize Facebook for a moment and dive on in.

The Placement Funnel is a visual way of understanding how many of the total Job Orders you start with eventually become Placements, with conversion rate for each step in your process. From Job Order to Internal Submission to Sendout, all the way to a made Placement, this funnel shows you how efficiently you are converting your flow step-by-step. Knowing where your weakest conversion step is will show you exactly what part of your process needs improvement, giving you a clear action item that will directly affect your revenue.

For example, say your worst conversion step is from Interview to Placement. It currently stands at 45%, leading to 297 Placements (from 660 Interviews). Let’s say you coach your team so they know how to prep their candidates to interview better and this conversion rate goes up by just 10%. At 55%, you’re now seeing 361 Placements made, an improvement of nearly 22%.  If you take it further and assume your average placement fee is $X  that means an additional $Y in revenue. A huge win.

With this in mind, how will your approach to coaching your team change? Knowing that you want to focus on a specific stage in the deal process, in this case Interview to Placement, it will hone the topics you discuss with your employees. Does your team have the depth of knowledge required in this sector to be successful in coaching candidates for interviews? Do they need to shore up on this vertical? Maybe you need to chat with the client again to zero in on what they’re really looking for in a candidate?

Knowing your Placement Funnel will also tell you:

• Overall, how many of your Job Orders actually make it to Placements
• The total number of Jobs you have at each stage
• Your Won Percentage from each stage (Job:Placement, Sendout:Placement, etc.)

How to Calculate: In a given period of time (the past year works well as a snapshot), start with the number of Job Orders that were created. Tally the number of Job Orders that moved to the next step in your process, as well as the number that didn’t. You can then calculate the conversion rate for this step. This calculation can be is difficult since you’ll have to trace the Job Orders that have converted through each step.

If you take this even further and consider these ratios per rep and per client, you may discover additional opportunities for improvement.  For example, if you have a client whose job’s always get stuck at the Interview phase, perhaps a conversation is in order to further clarify the types of candidates they are looking for.  Or if you have a recruiter that can’t seem to get candidates through the sales person for a Sendout, perhaps there is a disconnect between the recruiter and the sales rep.

Finding the weakest point in the conversion process is something very few recruiting companies know how to do. The Placement Funnel report can be a game-changer for your efficiency, giving you a clear view of what needs work and what is working just fine.

Want an easier way to pull this metric? Ask your Bullhorn rep about InsightSquared today!

About the Author

Robert Woo is the Marketing Manager at InsightSquared. You can read more of his analytic entries at InsightSquared.com.