What is a recruitment pipeline and how to create one

Recruiting skilled candidates for your open roles can quickly become disorganized and time-consuming. 

Recruiters can lose track of appealing applicants, and unqualified candidates can advance through the hiring stages due to a lack of accurate information about their skills. In addition, your hiring team can waste valuable time and resources scanning an endless stream of resumes. 

That’s why having a reliable recruitment pipeline in your talent acquisition strategy is crucial. 

Recruitment pipelines can seem intimidating to newcomers, but they’re actually easy to build and will save your organization time and money during the hiring process. 

But what is a recruitment pipeline? Below, we’ll learn what it is, its benefits to your organization, and the best practices to follow when building one.

What is a recruitment pipeline? 

A recruitment pipeline is an organizational method recruiters use to visualize and manage the hiring process. 

Candidates enter the pipeline when they submit an application. Then, high-performers progress through the stages, like phone screenings, interviews, and onboarding. 

Each stage of the pipeline requires different actions from the recruiter or hiring manager to ensure the process moves forward smoothly and effectively. 

The main goal of a strong recruitment pipeline is to track and monitor job candidates’ progress and identify the right talent for your organization. 

What are the benefits of a recruitment pipeline? 

Recruitment pipelines offer several benefits to your talent acquisition strategy. They provide a structure for the hiring process that reveals strong candidates while holding recruiters accountable for essential recruitment tasks, such as identifying and engaging talent. 

Boost efficiency 

With robust recruitment pipelines, organizations can maintain track of quality candidates and avoid making a bad hire. 

Recruitment pipelines avoid these pitfalls and boost efficiency by keeping track of applicant profiles. Information can include: 

• Names

• Contact information 

• Qualifications

• Prescreening test results 

• Recruitment stage 

Once this information is organized within a recruitment pipeline, recruiters have a clearer picture of which applicants to communicate with and advance through the hiring process.

Improve candidate experience 

Providing a good candidate experience for skilled applicants is crucial for keeping them engaged throughout the hiring process so you can land a great hire. 

Recruitment pipelines improve the candidate experience by: 

• Reducing time-to-hire. With each candidate’s data easily accessible to your hiring team, recruiters can quickly identify top performers and advance them through the process. This way, recruiters can respond to applicants faster, which 80 percent of candidates say they want. 

• Personalizing the hiring process. Gathering and organizing candidate information also enables recruiters to become familiar with each individual and have more personalized interactions. Recruitment pipelines are part of a holistic hiring process that treats applicants like human beings rather than a collection of data points. 

• Preserve candidate relationships: Recruitment pipelines aren’t just helpful for candidates you plan on hiring. If a candidate doesn’t make the cut but shows promise, recruitment pipelines help to maintain these candidate relationships for future openings. 

Identify high-quality candidates 

Once candidates are organized in your recruitment pipeline, recruiters can identify and focus on candidates with the right skills and qualifications for a particular role. 

Recruitment pipelines can include filters, tags, and sorting tools to compare candidates’ skills, experience, location, and other role-specific criteria. This way, your hiring team is only focused on engaging top-tier talent. 

Increase diversity 

Since recruitment pipelines are data-driven, recruiters can identify, track, and advance candidates based on skills testing and their ability to perform well in a particular role instead of where they went to school or what’s written on their resumes. 

In other words, recruitment pipelines let organizations hire for skills, which has proven to increase diversity. In fact, TestGorilla’s skills-based hiring report for 2022, found that 91 percent of employers increased employee diversity using skills-based recruitment practices. 

Recruitment pipelines that eliminate degree inflation, for example, draw more diverse talent into the hiring process, boosting innovation, creativity, and productivity. 

How to create and nurture a recruitment pipeline 

Recruitment pipelines are only effective if organizations create and maintain them properly. Let’s explore the key steps to plan and execute a strong recruitment pipeline. 

Define your recruitment goals 

Before you can build a recruitment pipeline, you must define your long-term hiring goals. How many employees do you need to hire, and for what roles? What skills is your organization missing? What is your timeframe for making successful hires? 

Answering these questions is the first step to building a recruitment pipeline. To find the answers, try conducting a skills-gap analysis. This skills-based hiring strategy identifies the gap between the existing skills in your organization and the skills needed for success. 

Once you have identified your internal skills gaps, you can determine which types of candidates are best suited to fill them. 

On the other hand, you can keep track of existing skills within your organization with tools such as multi-measure talent assessments. Skills tests measure employees’ role-specific skills, personality types, and cognitive abilities to give you in-depth data to make informed decisions and guide your hiring process. 

Identify potential candidates 

Once you have established the skills required and the types of candidates you’re looking for, it’s time to source potential candidates. 

Candidate sourcing is not a one-size-fits-all hiring strategy. Different industries may have success locating talent in different areas, and some sourcing strategies may work better than others. That’s why it’s important to use a combination of methods to source quality candidates. 

Get to know your potential candidates 

When making introductions to your potential candidates online or in person, don’t use canned greetings and responses. Take the time to personalize each outreach and respect your potential candidates’ time. 

Remember, candidates are human beings who don’t appreciate being hassled or misled. Be upfront and clear about the nature of the role you are hiring for, its responsibilities, location, development opportunities, and required skills. 

Learning how to communicate with candidates at each touchpoint in your recruitment pipeline is important. 

Each company’s communication process will differ based on its industry and hiring goals, but it’s important to maintain honest communication whether you advance candidates. 

Expand your talent pool 

A talent pool is an HR database of top candidates, including those who have applied for openings at your organization in the past, sourced or referred candidates, and other potential hires. 

Expand your talent pool by: 

• Eliminating unnecessary job requirements. Degrees, resumes, and unstructured interviews are not good predictors of future performance. Rework your job descriptions to use inclusive language focused on skills and abilities – not the path your candidates took to get where they are. 

• Using pre-employment talent assessments. Implement soft skills tests and personality assessments. Many role-specific hard skills can be taught, but innate characteristics like creativity and problem-solving must be identified and supported. 

• Offering flexible working opportunities. Don’t limit your talent pool to candidates who can work in person. Offer remote and hybrid working opportunities whenever possible to reach talent wherever they are. 

Consider hiring freelancers or contractors

There may be situations where you need to fill positions quickly, such as encountering a skills gap for a particular project. 

Consider including independent contractors in your recruitment pipeline to: 

• Cut hiring costs. Independent contractors don’t receive competitive compensation and benefits packages and can be easily hired using affordable pre-employment talent assessments.

• Reduce time-to-hire. Since freelancers are hired on a per-project basis, they can advance quickly through your recruitment pipeline.  

• Temporarily fill vacancies with experts. Freelancers tend to be experts in their fields with niche skills to solve complex problems in the short term.

Recruitment pipelines aren’t just about the long-term future of your organization. They are an effective strategy to attract and hire skilled professionals so you can address immediate company needs. 

Track your progress

A crucial part of creating a strong recruitment pipeline is monitoring your progress. Are you gaining or losing talent in your pipeline? Are candidates responding to your job descriptions? How many top performers have you advanced? 

When using TestGorilla’s multi-measure talent assessments you can effectively manage candidates in your recruitment pipeline in thirteen stages: 

• Not yet evaluated

• Evaluated 

• Invited for interview 

• Interviewed 

• Invited for take-home test 

• Take-home test completed 

• References checked

• Offer sent 

• Offer declined 

• Candidate withdrew 

• Candidate unresponsive 

• Rejected 

• Hired 

This way, strong candidates don’t get overlooked and your hiring team can keep track of each individual’s progress. 

Attract, engage, and retain skilled candidates with recruitment pipelines

A recruitment pipeline is an important part of a strong talent acquisition strategy. It enables you to clearly determine the quality of candidates in your talent pool, and helps you expand it, all while boosting efficiency and diversity. 

When building your recruitment pipeline, it's important to follow best practices, like defining your hiring goals, getting to know your candidates, and tracking progress throughout. 

Be sure to include multi-measure talent assessments in your recruitment pipeline to evaluate potential candidates, upskill existing employees, and identify internal skills gaps. 

Create talent assessments tailored to the specific needs of your open role with TestGorilla’s extensive library of 300-plus tests.

To get started right away, sign up for a free plan, book a free 30-minute live demo, or take a product tour and find out how TestGorilla can improve your hiring process.