Recruiting organizations are realizing the importance of creating and most importantly building their own Talent Networks.  These Talent Networks can provide a free and important source of qualified candidates to help these organizations fill their open job positions.

Therefore, one of the biggest trends in the recruitment technology space is the rise of Talent Network and Recruiting CRM technologies.  Not only are more of these technology solutions popping up every day but the capabilities and features provided by these technologies are becoming more robust as well.  But what features are the most important when you are looking at CRM technologies.

Here are a few that will be important:

Social Profile Integration:  The idea of a living database is one that is becoming very popular.  Using social profiles in Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to keep candidate contact information up to date in your CRM is becoming more important.  There's a wealth of data that it continuously updated on these social media platforms and can keep your Talent Network fresh.

But you may not want to rely on Social Profiles themselves to keep your CRM contacts up to date.  You can also enable contacts to update their information themselves through a quarterly email.

Sourcing:  A CRM is only worth the contacts that fill it and to build it you need tools that make it easy to add contacts to your CRM.  A good CRM will enable you to add contacts in a variety of ways such as Dual Purpose job ads, Resume Sourcing, Mobile Recruiting, Internet Tools, Excel Imports, Email Inhaler and a number of other ways.

Figure out the ways that you want to source candidates and make sure your CRM supports these sourcing methods.

Pipeline Creation:  With any CRM, the value not only comes from being able to source contacts but most importantly being able to utilize them.  Any good CRM will enable you to search through your contacts and easily create your own talent pipelines and targeted candidate groups.

Not only should these pipelines be easy to create but they should also automatically bring in any new contacts that fit the criteria you set forth for the pipelines.  This should make it easy to manage and build these pipelines.

Distribution: Once you have your contacts into pipelines, it is all about communicating with them about your employer brand and job opportunities.  Make sure your CRM enables you to send targeted communications to targeted groups or individuals in your database via email & SMS.  Also, with the rise of social networks, you'll want to make sure you can communicate through their social profiles as well.

Assessment: This is a trend, I see beginning to form.  Companies are looking more and more for tools that enable them to understand how good a candidates skills are.  With the CRM as the backbone of all your recruiting contacts, it will be important for CRM to connect with assessment technologies to help companies better understand what candidates are the most qualified in their Talent Network.

A CRM is just a tool to help you build your Talent Network.  Make sure that you have a recruitment marketing plan in place in how you will build your Talent Network and make sure the technology you put in place fits your plan (not the other way around.)