Tech Hiring Funnel.

How to Make Tech Hiring Predictable, Measurable, and Boringly Reliable

Hiring in tech is one of the highest-leverage activities in a company.
It’s also one of the most chaotic.

Teams are under pressure to “hire great people quickly,” but often lack three basics:

• a clear definition of who they’re looking for,
• a consistent standard for how they evaluate candidates,
• … and a measurable way to see whether their approach is working.

This post focuses on that third point: turning your hiring process into a measurable funnel that you can plan, benchmark, and explain to your leadership team and board.

Before the Funnel – Get the Basics in Place

You can’t fix hiring with metrics alone. If you measure a broken process, you just get very precise about doing the wrong thing. There are three foundations you should have in place before you start obsessing over numbers.

A Clear Description of What You’re Looking For

“Looking for a great engineer” is not a description.

You need a written, concrete description of the role. Start by describing the problems this person will solve and the outcomes you expect them to deliver in the first 6–12 months. Then spell out the skills and experience that are genuinely required, as opposed to “nice to have” credentials. Add the non‑negotiables that matter in your context: things like ownership, communication, product mindset, or a strong focus on security.

This isn’t only for candidates. It aligns your own team on what you’re hiring for and keeps interviews from devolving into “who did I like the most?” Instead of hiring for vague “seniority” or “talent,” people are all evaluating against the same expectations.

A Career Levels Framework

A career framework defines what “junior,” “mid,” “senior,” and “staff” actually mean in your company. For each level, you describe the scope and complexity of the problems they handle, how much autonomy they have, the kind of system or architecture decisions they’re expected to make, how they mentor others, and how they communicate and collaborate across teams.

This matters enormously for hiring. Interviewers know what “good enough for level X” looks like, which makes decisions less arbitrary. You can decide whether someone should come in as a strong mid-level or as a lighter-weight senior, instead of arguing over a title at the end. And you avoid the “we thought we hired a senior, but actually…” surprise a few months in.

Pay Levels That Match Roles and Levels

Once you’ve defined levels, tie pay bands to them. Each level should have a salary range, and offers should be made within that range. People at the same level should be paid consistently.

This gives you fairness and internal equity. It also takes some of the emotion out of compensation: instead of improvising numbers with every candidate, you can say, “This is our band for this role and level,” and actually mean it.

At this point, you know what you’re hiring for, at what level, and how you’ll pay. The next question is: is your hiring process actually working?

Benchmark Your Hiring Funnel

Most companies do something like: post a job, run some interviews, make some offers. That’s not a system. That’s chaos with calendar invites.

To really understand hiring, you need to think in terms of a funnel. How many candidates enter at the top? How many make it to each next step? How many offers are accepted? How many people are still with you after probation or after one year?

These numbers tell you whether your process is efficient, whether your judgement is good, and whether your hiring goals are realistic given your current capacity. Once you have them, you can do something powerful: predict.

You can start to say things like: “If we hire about 10% of all candidates who pass an HR prescreen, and we need 30 engineers this year, HR needs to talk to about 300 candidates.” That’s the level of consistency and reliability you want—and it’s the level of clarity your leadership team and board expect.

A Real Example of a Tech Hiring Funnel

Let’s look at a real hiring funnel from the start of a year.

The goal was to hire around 40 engineers over 12 months. The process had six stages:

1. A 30‑minute pre‑screen with HR or a recruiter
2. A 30‑minute pre-screen with the CTO or an Engineering Manager
3. A 1.5‑hour team interview with three engineers
4. An offer
5. A hire
6. Still at the company after probation

Here’s what the funnel looked like numerically:

Two things stand out immediately.

Top-to-hire conversion rate

Of all candidates entering the funnel, 8.75% were ultimately hired. In other words, for every 100 candidates we brought into the top of the funnel, we ended up hiring about 8–9 engineers.

That single number—the fraction of candidates at the top who become hires—is your top‑to‑hire conversion rate.

Once you know it, you can answer very practical questions. If you want to hire 40 people, and your top‑to‑hire rate is 8.75%, you need about 40 / 0.0875 ≈ 457 candidates over the year. That implies around 457 HR pre‑screens. You can then use the conversion rates between steps to work backwards and figure out how many team interviews engineering will have to run.

Suddenly, hiring isn’t a wish. It’s a capacity plan.

Turning Funnel Data Into Predictable Hiring

Let’s stick with the goal of 40 hires per year and the example numbers above.

We know the top‑to‑hire conversion rate is 8.75%, which implies around 457–460 candidates at the top of the funnel. We also know the approximate pass‑through rates between stages:

• From HR prescreen to CTO/EM screen: 75%
• From CTO/EM screen to team interview: 38%
• From team interview to offer: 39%
• From offer to hire: 78%

Now we can work backwards from the target of 40 hires.

If 78% of offers are accepted, 40 hires require roughly 51 offers. If 39% of team interviews lead to offers, those 51 offers require about 131 team interviews. If 38% of CTO/EM screens lead to team interviews, those 131 interviews require about 345 CTO/EM screens. And if 75% of HR pre‑screens lead to CTO/EM screens, those 345 screens require around 460 HR pre‑screens.

And there you have it: roughly 460 candidates at the top of the funnel to hire about 40 engineers.

This matters for a few reasons. HR and recruiting can plan their sourcing and outreach, instead of guessing. You can estimate engineering interview load: 131 team interviews, each 1.5 hours with three engineers, is about 590 engineer‑hours. And you can have an honest conversation with leadership: “If we want 40 hires, we need around 600 hours of engineer time for interviews. Is that acceptable? If not, something else has to change.”

This is how you turn vague hiring pressure into clear trade‑offs and explicit decisions.

What Your Funnel Says About Your Judgement

The funnel doesn’t just describe efficiency; it also reveals how good your judgement is.

Two metrics are especially useful: offer‑to‑hire rate, and the fraction of hires who are still employed after probation.

Offer to Hire Rate

In the example, there were 18 offers and 14 hires. That’s an offer acceptance rate of 77.78%.

That’s a healthy number. It suggests that compensation and pay levels are reasonably aligned with the market, that the role is being explained accurately, and that the process is not so slow or painful that candidates drop out in frustration.

If this number were much lower—say 30–40%—you’d suspect under‑market pay, a weak employer brand, poorly communicated role and growth opportunities, or a process that is too slow and inconsistent.

From Hire to “Still Employed After Probation”

In the same example, 14 people were hired and 13 were still there after the probation period. That’s a probation pass rate of 92.86%.

This is a strong sign that interviewers are calibrated, that the career levels framework reflects reality, and that you’re not over‑hiring people into roles they can’t perform in.

If this number were low (for example 60–70%), you’d want to examine your evaluation criteria. Are you actually interviewing for the day‑to‑day work of the role, or are you over‑indexing on abstract “smartness” over role fit and collaboration? You’d also want to look at your onboarding and clarity of expectations; it’s possible you’re hiring the right people and then setting them up to fail.

When you track these metrics over time, you can see whether your judgement is improving or drifting.

Communicating With Leadership and the Board

For non‑technical leadership, hiring often feels like a black box. They hear: “We need 40 engineers.” Then: “We’re doing interviews.” And eventually: “We’re working on it.”

A hiring funnel changes that conversation.

Instead, you can say: “Our current top‑to‑hire rate is 8.75%. To hire 40 engineers, we need around 460 candidates in the funnel. That implies about 600 engineer‑hours for team interviews, plus recruiter time. With our current recruiter capacity, we can realistically source about X candidates per month. If we want to accelerate, we either need more recruiting capacity or different expectations.”

That message is transparent and predictable. It’s grounded in real numbers instead of wishful thinking. Boards and leadership teams already understand funnels for sales and marketing. You’re giving them the same kind of lens for hiring.

Conclusion

Tech hiring will never be effortless. But it can be predictable.

If you have clear role definitions, a realistic career levels framework, pay levels tied to those levels, and a well‑tracked hiring funnel, you can turn hiring from a stressful guessing game into a manageable, measurable system.

In the funnel we looked at, 8.75% of all candidates were ultimately hired, and 13 out of 14 passed probation. That’s what a functioning hiring engine looks like: a reasonable top‑to‑hire rate combined with strong validation that your judgement is good.

From there, it’s “just” a matter of feeding the funnel and continuously improving it.