Build a hiring funnel as strong as your customer funnel

1. The hours you give customers, and the hours you give hires

Start from your week. Selling customers, or working on how you sell them (the marketing function, the sales function, whatever it might be), probably takes 40 hours of it. How much of the week goes on selling people on joining you?

The gap. You have built a machine for winning customers, and you improvise when it comes to winning people. The problem is not the people; it is that there is no machine for getting them. Fixing that is said to help with the people corner of a business's structure, which is SOP 265 — Find which corner of functions, people and operations breaks first.

2. Why a business stops growing

Not the usual suspects. What stops a business from growing is often not its product, its market or its capital. It is that the business has too few great people, and nothing systematic in place to attract them.

What shows up. In a lot of the companies worked with here, what shows up is a product that fits the market, strong demand and capital. What they cannot do is bring people in quickly enough; or they bring them in quickly and quality falls, so headcount rises while growth stalls.

"No one wants to work anymore." A founder in that position blames the job market. That is called wrong. Great people are out there; they are being recruited by other companies (by five companies, by one count), and they are simply not choosing yours. The reason is a broken funnel for hires: you might have a first-rate funnel for customers beside a poor one for people, and the two run completely apart.

Harder than the customer side. It is arguably harder. On the customer side you might be looking for one or two kinds of buyer. On the hiring side you are looking for something like 17 kinds of people, because every role you hire for is a funnel of its own.

3. When growth outran hiring

In one example, a founder's earlier firm went this way. The business was growing very fast, and people were leaving faster than it could find replacements: the business boomed while the team fell apart. The hiring went like this: bring someone in, drop them into the work, and hope they worked it out. A lot of them did not last: either the firm let them go or they chose to leave. Those who stayed were buried in work, and the founder was working very long days just to hold it together.

The realization. The team had spent years tuning the customer funnel: each email, each nurture message, each call and each touchpoint had been optimized. For hiring, they put a post on Indeed and hoped someone good turned up. The founder decided the business needed a hiring funnel as strong as its customer funnel, and built one. What followed, reportedly, was growth that came from hiring better people, not from hiring more of them.

Your customers are capped by your team. Great customers might be yours for a while; then they stop coming, because without a great team they are not served well, and word gets around.

One weak employee. In one example, a customer had taken a chance on a small vendor. One of the vendor's employees sent the customer, by mistake, a message about the customer that was meant for the employee's boss. That one person fell so far below the rest of their team, and below the brand the company had built, that the customer's whole view of the business changed: the customer was not sure the vendor could be trusted, and at once wanted to leave, not because of the business or its brand but because of that employee. The conclusion: great customers need a great team.

4. The two funnels, stage by stage

Treat the stages of a hiring funnel just as you would the stages of a marketing funnel. The pairing, in order, with the principle for each pair:

Customer stage	Hiring stage	What carries over
Generating leads	Bringing in applicants	A product needs demand created for it; so do your jobs
Nurturing leads	How candidates are treated in your process	Interest in a product is nurtured; do the same for interest in the company
Sales and closing	Interviewing and closing	Customers are won on value; win candidates on the mission
Fulfillment	Onboarding	A product has to keep its promises; the job has to keep its own
Retention and ascension	Development and retention	A customer's lifetime value is grown; grow an employee's lifetime value

The claim. If you can win customers by selling, you can win recruits the same way. The two frameworks are called identical, one for one. A lot of people do not take the time to set them side by side, and so they do not get the people they need to grow. Most founders, it is added, are excellent on the customer side and poor on the hiring side.

SOP 200 — Treat a supply constraint as demand for talent, section 10, lays the customer and hiring funnels out in parallel, with onboarding and with retention and ascension on both sides. The principle for each pair is what this page adds.

5. Stage one: market the company like a product

The post is a sales page. Your job description works as a sales page and your job title as its headline; your brand as an employer is your marketing.

Ask how the reader will feel. Whenever you write a description, an ad or a posting, or post on Facebook, ask how the person reading it is going to feel. The post is not only there to tell people the tasks they will do. Are you selling a mission? The post should make the reader want to be part of what you are doing. If it does not, rewrite it.

Titles, before and after. Examples of a weak and a strong title:

• Weak: "Marketing Manager - Manage marketing campaigns"
• Strong: "Growth Marketing Lead - Help Us Scale to $100M (Remote)"

The instruction is to turn a title such as "Customer Success Manager" into one such as "Customer Success Lead - Build the Retention System That Scales Us to $50M", and the claim is that applications double. The reason: the new title sells a mission, not a list of tasks. Most job posts are dull, generic and easy to forget, and strong candidates are not desperately combing job boards; other companies are courting them. A post that does not stop someone scrolling has already lost.

Write to the person, not about the job. Where most people go wrong is thinking that marketing a job means informing people about it. Speak instead to the person you are trying to draw in. Top people do not want to dwell on the routine tasks; what they care about is the weight of the role: its importance, the value placed on it, and how you see it. Many people reportedly say they applied because they had never seen that role described that way. That is on purpose: the aim is for them to know they are seen as a partner and as critical to what the company does, whatever it might be, and to put that in writing. These are called the little things, the five percent, that makes a company great, and the effort has to be made.

Use an AI chat tool. With ChatGPT to hand, there is no excuse, in this view. Put in a posting you want yours to resemble and ask it to make yours read like that one, using your vision, mission and so on.

Test what is live now. Read your current postings. Would you be proud of them? Are they appealing? Would you put yourself forward? If not, maybe it is time to rewrite them. All of it is copy, and all of it is marketing.

The job ad laid out as a hook and the parts that follow it is section 8 of SOP 148, the page for a business of a few people. Treating an ad for salespeople as sales copy is SOP 252 — Market for salespeople the way you market for prospects, section 2. Better ads and a better-aimed title as the fix for too few applications, and nurturing applicants as the fix for too many poor ones, are SOP 201, section 6.1 and section 6.2.

6. Stage two: answer fast and treat each candidate like a customer

Think of this stage as nurturing leads. The figures offered:

Figure offered	What it measures
8 days	How long top candidates stay on the market
23 days	How long the average hiring process takes
60 percent	Candidates who lose interest when there is no reply within 48 hours

What waiting costs. Each day you wait, another employer closes the person you wanted.

Your process is your brand. How you treat applicants is your employer brand at work. Someone applies and hears nothing for a week. What that tells them: that the business is disorganized, careless of their time and slow to answer. In this view a quick reply signals a business that runs well, and a slow one signals that something is wrong.

One team's rule. Every candidate hears back within 24 hours, even when the answer is that they are not a fit. The reasons: the person you turn down today might be perfect for you in 12 months, or might know someone who is. So handle each candidate as you would a customer: people talk, and your reputation rides on it, even when you already know you will say no.

The hot-lead test. If a hot inbound lead came in, you would not tell the sales team to follow up in ten days or so. You would jump on it now. Candidates are no different.

7. Rate each stage, then fix the two lowest

Score yourself from 1 to 10 on each stage. At the bottom, 1 means the stage does not exist; at the top, 10 means you are so good you should be teaching it. Here is a question for each stage to score against:

Stage	What to ask
Bringing in applicants	Do strong candidates know you are there?
How candidates are treated	Does your process make them feel valued?
Interviewing and closing	Do you sell belief, or only assess?
Onboarding	Do new hires feel equipped to win?
Development and retention	Can your people picture a future with you?

Mark the two stages with the lowest scores; that is where people are leaking out. If you score under 7 on any stage, you are losing people there. The observation here is that most founders score a 9 on bringing in applicants and a 3 on onboarding: good people are hired, then gone within 90 days. Fixing the leaks is your work for the next quarter.

8. What to build, and who owns it

The build list, in order:

1. Rewrite your job posts, treating each one as a sales page.
2. Cut your response time, with the 24-hour rule for every candidate.
3. Build a five-step interview: screen, culture, skill, alignment, close.
4. Design onboarding in stages at 30, 60 and 90 days, as proof that you keep your promises.
5. Create growth paths, so every person knows which skills to gain to move up.

The interview is SOP 268 — Gate each interview step, then sell at the close. Onboarding and growth paths are SOP 270 — Onboard every hire against a written plan, then keep them growing.

Who owns it. Bringing in people is not a job for HR. It belongs to the managers who lead people. For the highest-level roles in a large business, where the founder has to court the best candidates personally, see SOP 181 — Recruit top talent as the founder.

8.1 Before a search

Never hire in a rush. One practice here sets no deadline: a hire takes as long as finding the right person takes. Need makes a weak candidate look perfect, even to a logical mind. So first take the urgency out: cover the gap with other people or resources, such as more assistants, or by spreading the work.

Make room in your week. The search costs time and effort, so does training, and the new person will not match the one who left for a good while. Ask what on your plate could hold for about three months without anyone being hurt or money being lost, and set it down. You either do fewer things or get more help: hire for the urgent work so you can do the important.

Expect to miss at first. Your first try will probably miss. The first time you hire a new kind of role, you might go through two or three people before you know what a good one looks like.

9. When your name as an employer is already damaged

A common question: how do you attract great people after former staff have damaged the company's reputation as they left, which the owner puts down to their own lack of leadership? The answer starts: say what happened, and be truthful.

What you cannot fix. Honestly, it will affect you. Some people will see the damage, or the reviews that have been left, and never apply, and you cannot change that now.

What you can do. You cannot remove the bad; you can try to add more good and bury it. So ask whether you can get people to say good things about the business now. If you can't, then when candidates are in interviews, tell them where you went wrong, and own it.

In one example, a founder cut staff at a firm and saw its reviews fall sharply, then told people plainly what had happened and where the founder had got it wrong. The view here is that all anyone can do in the end is tell the truth, and life is easier without keeping up a front. The advice: be honest; if candidates do not like that, it is all right, and it is not your responsibility.

10. What this page does not decide for you

• Where the speed figures come from. The 8 days, 23 days and 60 percent are given as facts. Where they come from and how they were measured: Not established on this page.
• The doubling. The claim that a rewritten title doubles applications comes with no evidence given. This page gives no figure for what a rewrite adds in your business.
• How to get good reviews. Section 9 asks whether you can get people to say good things now; how to do it: Not established on this page.
• What a 7 looks like. Under 7 counts as leaking; what each score between 1 and 10 looks like for a stage: Not established on this page.

11. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Compare the time you give each week to selling customers with the time you give to selling people on joining
2	Lay out your hiring stages beside your customer stages and apply the principle of each pair
3	Rewrite every posting so it sells like a sales page, and make the title a headline that sells a mission
4	Ask how the reader will feel; if you would not apply, maybe rewrite it, with ChatGPT or a similar tool to help
5	Reply to every candidate within 24 hours, as one team does, even when the answer is no
6	Answer candidates with the urgency of a hot lead, and handle them as customers, including those you turn down
7	Score each of the five stages from 1 to 10 and circle the two lowest
8	If any stage is under 7, make fixing it the next quarter's work
9	Give the work of bringing in people to the managers who lead them, not to HR
9a	Before a search, cover the gap so you are not rushed, and free time by setting down what can hold for about three months
10	If your reputation is damaged, add good reviews where you can, and tell candidates the truth about what went wrong

12. What this page does not cover

Values in the interview are SOP 269 — Test a candidate's values live instead of asking about them. The routes for finding salespeople are SOP 252 section 6.

Employment law, including the law on layoffs and on job ads, is not covered on this page.