Hiring pipeline
- Applicants needed per hire
- 50
- Applicant to screen, percent
- 20
- Screen to interview, percent
- 40
The numbers on this page come from the inputs you enter and the method stated: 3,600 seconds to an hour, 52 weeks to a year, twelve months to a year, and nothing else. No industry shrinkage figure, no occupancy benchmark and no assumption about your attrition; every one of those is yours to enter.
A hiring pipeline in the forward-looking sense is the set of people you already know who could fill a role you have not opened yet, and it is usually discussed as a good idea without anyone putting a number on it. The number is available. On the worked example a desk takes 31 days to hire, and 26 of those days pass before an offer exists: the sifting, the screening and the scheduling that turn 300 applicants into 24 interviews. A candidate already known to you skips most of that. Even allowing for the conversations that keep a pipeline warm, the saving is most of a month per hire, which on a desk making six hires a year is a meaningful amount of vacancy. The cost side is the honest part: keeping a pipeline warm is work, it decays quickly in a hot market, and it is only worth doing for roles you hire repeatedly. This page sets out when the arithmetic favours building one and when it does not.
Open the Recruiting pipeline Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
What a pipeline saves, in days
Most of the 26 pre-offer days on the worked example. A known candidate does not need finding, sifting or first-round screening, and scheduling is faster because there is already a relationship. That is the whole of the benefit and it is worth quantifying rather than assuming.
What it costs to keep
Contact that means something, at intervals, for people who may never join. It is real work with no guaranteed return, and it decays: a pipeline untouched for a year is a list of names. Budget the hours the same way you would budget advertising, and expect some of it to be wasted.
When it is worth it
For roles you hire more than once or twice a year, and for roles where the market is thin enough that a cold search is slow. For a one-off senior hire, a pipeline built from scratch is almost never the cheaper route and an agency may genuinely be the better buy.
Will it do what you need for Hiring pipeline?
Tell us how your team plans its staffing today and where the number gets argued; a person who has built one answers.
Hiring pipeline: common questions
Is a hiring pipeline the same as a talent pool? Close enough in practice. Both mean people you know who could be hired later. The word pipeline is also used for the applicants currently in process for an open role, which is the other sense this site covers.
How many people should be in it? Work backwards from your conversion. If your pipeline candidates convert far better than cold applicants, you need fewer; the pipeline sheet on this site gives you your own cold conversion to compare against.
Where should it live? Somewhere with a date against each contact, so you can see what has gone stale. That is exactly what an applicant record with a source and a date gives you, and it is what Reqnix Pro keeps.
Orgplanly Pro
Keeping what you make
The worksheet answered today's question. Pro keeps the answer: the plan you just worked saved against the team it belongs to, re-opened at the next review instead of rebuilt, branded and exported for the budget meeting.
- Download the finished checklist or intake form as a file the client accepts
- The paperwork goes out clean, without the Kickoffo watermark
- Re-use the checklist for the next client instead of rebuilding it
- Your firm's logo on every checklist and form you send
- Export every client's onboarding at once when the account review or the buyer asks
- Send the plan for review from the record, not a spreadsheet
- Not part of Orgplanly today; your billing stays where it is
- Not part of Orgplanly today; your ledger stays where it is
$90per month, whole team
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