How To Create The Perfect Recruitment Funnel to Streamline The Hiring Process in Your Bookkeeping Firm
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Once you decide you’re ready to hire a team member for your bookkeeping or accounting firm, you’ll need to do a few things to ensure you’re implementing tools that make the journey as efficient as possible. The best way to do this is to create a recruitment funnel as part of your hiring process!
I remember hiring my very first contractor to support me in my firm — and it was kind of a hot mess! I kept losing track of which candidates I liked, how to contact them, and all our back and forth communication.
The more hiring I did, the more efficient I became (which is pretty much true with everything I do, even now!).
Once I realized the power of building a system around recruiting and hiring, everything became sooo much easier! Now, I have a seamless process in place that helps my team and I attract, qualify, and hire candidates with less stress.
Getting ready to hire a team member is SUCH and exciting moment! In this blog, you’ll learn exactly what you need to do to build a useful recruitment funnel that you can use again and again!
What Is A Recruitment Funnel?
A funnel is basically just something that helps you take a large amount of leads or applicants and narrow them down to a smaller group, eventually choosing one! You decide the guidelines on how to make the decisions for each stage of the process, and it’s designed to help you find the best candidate efficiently.
A recruitment funnel acts as a single source of truth so you always have the information you need at any given time during the hiring process. It helps you keep track of your candidates AND keeps everyone on the same page. For example, if you have someone in management that takes all candidates through the funnel until the final decision, you can easily access all the information you need to stay informed in an instant!
Once you start training your team members to move into leadership roles, you can totally hand off most of the hiring process to them — it’s such a game changer!
Your recruitment funnel doesn’t have to be fancy or anything, it just has to have a place for all the crucial information you’ll need throughout the hiring process.
Start with things like:
Candidate Name
Contact information (email, phone)
How they found you
Some kind of internal rating system
And once you get more advanced, you can add things like:
A link to their interview recording
A copy of their application
Location, time zone, availability
Whatever you think you’ll need to make things easier on yourself!
You Know You Want To Hire, Now What?
When we’re ready to hire a new team member, we know exactly what to do. But it took a couple tries to really nail down an efficient hiring process and build out an optimized recruitment funnel!
The first thing we recommend when you’re ready to start the search for your dream candidate: Get your assets together!
Write out your job description (and make sure it has all the important info)
Initiate the hiring process in your project management system
Decide how to spread the word about the opening
Determine how you’ll make a final decision on who gets the job
Once you start getting applicants, you can put them in your awesome new recruitment funnel and take them through the pipeline!
Where To Build A Recruitment Funnel For Your Firm
There’s really no right answer when it comes to where your recruitment funnel should live! Just make sure you’re storing it somewhere that’s easy for you and your management team to find/use.
We’ve used Asana to house our recruitment funnel and it worked really well! Since all the tasks related to the hiring process were already in Asana, it made sense to store our funnel there too.
We include a template for our EXACT recruitment funnel (+ over 30 other workflow templates) in our signature program Kickoff with Asana for Bookkeepers & Accountants!
You could also use the template in another project management system like ClickUp if that’s what you’re already using (don’t over-complicate it!).
Now, we use Notion for our recruitment funnel and it’s TOTALLY leveled-up the experience! Notion allows us to embed documents, videos, include custom fields, and just has more flexibility for storing information. Since we like to keep as much information in one place as possible, Notion is the right app for us to use at this point.
But you could even use a simple spreadsheet if that feels better for you! Like I said above, this funnel doesn’t have to be fancy, but we HIGHLY recommend you have one!
How To Know When To Hire And How To Simplify The Process
Not sure if you’re ready to hire yet? Only you can REALLY know for sure, but you could ask yourself things like:
Do I have consistent leads in my sales pipeline?
Is my current team at capacity with our current clients?
Am I ready to start delegating some work to focus more on big picture stuff?
Can I pay someone to do things outside of my zone of genius?
What’s AWESOME about our group coaching program, Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants, is that we help established firm owners feel empowered to make decisions like these. And they get to take ACTION on those decisions with less overwhelm by following our proven methods and systems!
We provide everything you need to find and hire team members — with templates for a job description, a recruitment funnel, and coaching to talk through your questions.
But it’s not only about building a dream team. We’re supporting firm owners in allllll aspects of running a successful business, based on our experience building multiple firms from the ground up.
Want in on our high-touch program that’s designed specifically to take your bookkeeping firm to exciting new heights?
