How I Think About Top of Funnel Recruiting
Building strong recruiting pipelines starts long before a role opens; I’m sad to say that a surprising amount of recruiting pressure is self-inflicted.
A role opens, stakeholders want candidates immediately, and the search begins with a sense of urgency that often feels unavoidable. What gets overlooked is that many of the strongest hiring outcomes have very little to do with what happens after the requisition is approved. More often, they're the result of work that started months earlier through market mapping, relationship building, referrals, and ongoing conversations with people who weren't actively looking for a new opportunity.
I've always found it difficult to build meaningful pipeline without first understanding what success actually looks like. What problems need to be solved, what skills truly matter, and what would make a highly qualified person excited enough to explore the opportunity in the first place. Without that level of clarity, it's easy to generate activity while making very little progress.
Recruiting teams often feel pressure to be present everywhere, but the highest quality candidates don't necessarily come from the highest volume channels. Over time, I've seen stronger results from investing deeply in a handful of sources where relevant talent is already engaged, whether that's through referrals, industry communities, prior candidate relationships, or targeted events where practitioners are already sharing ideas and building connections.
Candidates can usually tell the difference between a message written for them and a message written for hundreds of people who happen to share the same title. Most responses I've received over the years haven't come from clever messaging, but, they've come from demonstrating genuine understanding of someone's background, experience, or interests and creating a reason for the conversation to feel relevant.
That becomes significantly easier when the company already has credibility in the market because candidates are forming opinions long before a recruiter reaches out, which means employer brand, employee advocacy, and reputation all influence the effectiveness of top-of-funnel efforts. Recruiting conversations tend to move differently when people already know who you are and what you stand for.
Some of the most valuable pipeline I've built has come from people who weren't interested when we first spoke. Maintaining those relationships over time has often produced better results than starting a new search from scratch every time a position opens.
When top-of-funnel recruiting feels difficult, the answer usually isn't sending more messages. More often, it comes down to whether enough time has been invested in understanding the market, building relationships, and creating a recruiting strategy that can compound over time rather than reset with every new opening.
