What does your recruitment pipeline REALLY look like?

A very poor representation of the process of engaging with and nurturing quality candidates? 

It is my view that the term ‘recruitment pipeline,’ although set in stone in the industry, is actually a very poor representation of the process and practice of identifying, engaging with and nurturing quality candidates.  

One of the principal reasons that recruitment pipelines don’t work is because, as I alluded to in my previous blog, workforce planning is very much a concept that frequently fails its first brush with the reality of the recruitment market and indeed the wider economy.  To give one obvious example, as highlighted in  McKinsey - The future of work after COVID-19, all the carefully formulated workforce planning schemes were immediately rendered irrelevant.

That does not mean you should just give up on workforce planning, nor that recruitment pipelines are a waste of time. On the contrary, it’s incumbent on your TA team to work even harder and engage more deeply with the wider business in order to understand the challenges ahead. As Dr John Sulivan shared in a recent article that highlighted how HR and TA  never demonstrated to senior managers that workforce planning is a “critical success factor” for growth. In relation to recruitment pipelines nurturing talent and engage ahead of time will make the difference.

Nurturing candidates to meet these challenges is one of the most fundamental duties of TA professionals.  Six months is often the minimum period for such engagement and, for key positions, often longer.   Building and maintaining a database (subject, of course, to GDPR) and sustaining candidates’ interest over lengthy periods of time is not easy.  Conventionally, we think of all these people as being at different stages of a recruitment journey, conveyed (hopefully effortlessly) along our ever-expanding recruitment pipeline until the day of their induction into our company.

?Sustaining candidates’ interest over lengthy periods of time is not easy? 

The problem with the pipeline concept is that for most people a pipe is a straight(ish) tube that conveys things from A to B.  Yes, it’s possible to have junctions with other pipes, but in general, it’s simply one long conveyor belt. While it’s perfectly possible to segment different audiences (for example, for finance, sales, tech and customer support), essentially, we think of the recruitment pipeline as a solitary, sedentary beast that shifts candidates into jobs.

In reality, it’s not that simple. The average largish company’s recruitment pipeline is really a network of different paths, moving at different speeds and with different factors influencing the success, or otherwise, of each discipline/geography. And that’s also assuming your ATS is actually kept up-to-date and is not simply a repository of dusty, out-of-date CVs.  

?Is really a network of different paths, moving at different speeds and with different factors influencing the success?

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for engaging with candidates.  Different disciplines require different messaging and consequently, your recruitment marketing needs to be tailored, within the broader corporate guidelines, to acknowledge this.

However, as I said at the outset, the term ‘recruitment pipeline’ is in with the bricks now.  I did try Googling synonyms for ‘pipeline’ but most didn’t offer what I was looking for. Words such as ‘conduit’ simply replicate the single-strand pipeline.  Channel, on the other hand, while still suggesting a direct line, was getting a bit nearer.  Then ‘network’ came up.  This was more like it, but still not right. 

It was at this point that I realised that a far better concept to accurately describe a company different strands of medium-long term candidate engagement would be a river network. The main river – in essence your primary pipeline (flowing into your ATS) – is fed by numerous tributaries, all moving at different speeds over different terrain. Man-made interventions can shepherd these channels into more useful directions, but at the end of the day, natural (market) forces usually win out in the end.  

Thinking of your overall recruitment marketing and engagement for future workforce needs in this way is, I suggest, to give the TA team a far better helicopter view of where all the different elements of their strategy fit together.  Rather than thinking of each different discipline or marketing campaign in isolation and/or as feeding into a separate channel, instead map how each individual channel interacts with the overall company requirement and how they can influence and impact on each other.  Solving one major recruitment difficulty frees up resource to concentrate on another, but if the no issue is not tackled then a blockage results.  Once a pipeline is blocked, everything backs up, resulting in time spent on fire-fighting that could be more profitably spent researching for and engaging with quality candidates.

?We need to stand back occasionally and consider if there might be other ways ?

I am not saying we should ditch the term ‘recruitment pipeline.’  However, I do think that, as with every aspect of recruitment, we need to stand back occasionally and consider if there might be other ways in which to visualise how candidates are attracted, nurtured and hired. What do you think? 

Martin McDermott