In my previous role, I worked at a rapidly-scaling startup. I joined when the company had ~600 people. When I left in November 2021, the company had merged with another company, acquired a third company, and in total grown to ~2000 people. As a leader in the organization whose role is inherently cross-functional, in the span of 18 months, I interviewed over 500 candidates for roles across the company. That number includes hiring for the establishment and scaling of the research and content design teams.

Through that process, I observed an inverse relationship in the sources of candidates for my hiring funnel. The sources that had the highest quality of candidate had the lowest quantity of candidates, and vice versa.

My stack-ranking of candidate sources based on the quality of candidates is as follows:

1. Candidates who I reach out to directly.
2. Internal referrals from people who are on my team or very closely aligned with my team.
3. Candidates who a well-trained recruiter reaches out to directly.
4. Inbound interest after I have posted my opening to highly-targeted channels. These channels are those that are the most closely aligned with the role and level.
5. Internal referrals from people who are aware of my team but not aware of what makes a good candidate for my team.
6. Candidates who a naive recruiter reaches out to directly.
7. Inbound interest after I have posted my opening to less-targeted channels, such as job boards for historically-excluded groups or for very senior leaders and managers who work in tech.
8. Inbound interest after I have posted my opening to non-targeted channels, such as a LinkedIn post or Twitter post.
9. …
10. …
11. …
12. Direct applicants via LinkedIn or my company’s jobs website.

If I were to stack-rank these sources based on the quantity of candidate, my listing is almost the exact opposite. Direct applicants via LinkedIn and my company’s jobs website far outnumber all of the other sources of candidates combined. When I looked at the funnel for the last person I hired, I had more than 50x as many applicants who applied blindly via LinkedIn and the company’s jobs website than I did from all of the other sources.

You probably noticed that I listed recruiters twice on my list. I’ve never been able to hand a job description over to a recruiter who I haven’t yet worked with and had them be highly successful in identifying the right candidates to reach out to. A recruiter who specializes in research and design roles has a higher success rate, but it still requires time and investment to learn more about me, my team, and what a successful hire for my team looks like. This education helps them when they talk to candidates. They are better able to represent me and my team to the candidate in their early conversations. When I’ve aligned with my recruiter on what great candidates look like, they reach out to fewer candidates, but those candidates are of much higher quality for my open roles.

Analyzing the quality and quantity of candidates in my hiring funnel helped me identify where I should allocate my time when hiring. In doing so, I was better able to optimize my job description to be a better representation of the role and a successful candidate, allocate my time to the activities that were the most likely to result in a high-quality candidate, and reduce the time that I spent on low-value activities.