You can find more by reading my blog post, but in short, I built this as a place to track my job seeking activities. I've built it in a way that I believe anyone can register an account and use it to track job seeking activities without intruding on the privacy of anyone else.
I structured the project around 4 stages which can trace their origin to a Recruitment Funnel or a Conversion Funnel;
- Awareness
- Application
- Interview
- Offer
As a job seeker, it can feel like getting a new job is all about trying to convince someone to take a chance on you, espeically if you're new to the field. In fact, finding the right candidates can be enourmously difficult and expensive for an employer. This is why any job seeker coaching or interview coaching you may have access to, will focus on how you bring value to the employer, not what the employer can do for you. That said, often just getting the interview can be the trickiest part of the job seekers journey. The Recruitment Funnel is a spin on the Conversion Funnel in that the recruiter is trying to sell the organisation or the team within an organisation. Much like the Conversion Funnel, you start with a wide net, you want as many applicants as possible, gradually reducing the number of potential candidates down to a number that you think will make it through to offer.
- Awareness
- Attraction
- Interest
- Application
- Skills Testing
- Interviews
- Hiring
It starts with listing the job, using the places that are known to generate a lot of leads. Once those applications start rolling in, you need to prioritise the time your human workforce is spending on this activity, therefore the use of tools to help automate things like CV scanning equate to using low cost (relatively speaking) tools which is why a job seeker rarely gets a personalised response to their application. The system automated your rejection and is unable to offer any feedback of great value at this stage. Much like the Conversion Funnel the aim is to whittle down the potential number of applicants down to a number that is more manageable at the interview stage, with the best of the interviewees receiving a job offer.
The Conversion Funnel starts with building product or brand awareness, using a wide net to generate as many potential leads as possible. This could be through advertising or casting a drag net over LinkedIn profiles.
- Awareness
- Interest
- Consideration
- Intent
- Procurement
The idea here is to whittle down the potential customers through to a number that will actually go on to buy your product, usually involving a cheaper workforce or cheaper tooling at the start of the funnel before unleashing your top earning sales folk for that final push through to procurement.
There are more similarities between the Conversion Funnel and the Recruitment Funnel than you may first appreciate. They both start with a drag net, seeking as many eyeballs as possible, narrowing down the people connected to those eyes at each stage, each stage is potentially more expensive than the stage before, mostly in terms of the time your key people are spending on the process. The best closers in the sales world are wasted making cold calls, and your busy Engineering Manager is wasted trying to read potentially thousands of CVs for any jobs they may be looking to fill.
I have been tinkering with this idea for a while, indeed I have been trying to convince one of those expensive Engineering Managers to take a chance on me, so I have applied to a large number of jobs (mostly without success at the time of writing).
- 0.10 = A Google spreadsheet, used just for me to track my own job searches [worked fine, for me only]
- 0.20 = A Kanban built using AirTable [worked kind of fine, but I don't like how AirTable funnels you to paid versions]
- 0.30 = A Kanban built using GitHub Projects [I use GitHub nearly every day, I thought I'd create something using GitHub Projects, I made it a bit too clunky]
- 0.31 = I threw some of the clunky away and made this project into a public template for anyone to use [it had a few pulls, but still too clunky]
- 0.40 = I thought this was the winner, I used a Low Code tool called Mendix to build out a much simpler model, [most of the clunk was gone]
- Failing to fully understand how to publish and charge for the Mendix app (actually I couldn't work out how to make it free), I returned to the web
- 0.50 = Returning to the web with that simpler model, using PHP Laravel
This is a 'build in public' project, I am open to collaboration, in fact I want it to be an Open Source project, though how to take something from 'build in public' to 'open source', I am currently unsure, feel free to reach out to me and let me know if you have the answers or want to help me build this thing.