For recruiting firms that lack the help of a recruiting candidate relationship management (CRM), lacking qualified candidates, lengthy process to attract suitable prospects, or losing them mid-way or even before the interview process can be common occurrences.

With a recruiting CRM, a reliable, effective recruitment pipeline is a possibility. It is an eventuality. Do you know that, when using properly, a recruiting CRM can help a firm manage up to 80% of the recruiting process?

However, not all talent acquisition leaders can tell when their operation needs a recruiting CRM. Check out this article to see whether it is time for your business to adopt a recruiting CRM!

What Is a Recruiting CRM?

A Recruiting “CRM” is a technology implemented to help nurture adequate relationships between employers and their potential candidates. It also builds up a quality talent pipeline of both active and passive candidates, keeping them available for any open roles. In addition, a recruiting CRM software application helps keep your vast amount of candidate data well-organized, segmented, and tailored to your needs. You only need to adjust your filters to see suitable candidates. The system will help you scan through every profile without missing out on a single one. If you want to dig deeper into the key features and benefits of a recruiting CRM, you can check out this article!

How Does a Recruiting CRM Differ From an ATS?

So how is a CRM different from an ATS? Essentially, an ATS, or applicant tracking systems, focuses mainly on workflow and compliance. ATS is most suitable for the hiring process as it helps to track and manage already-applied candidates. An ATS saves your time by storing all applications in one place and tracking the applicant’s status throughout the hiring process.

Meanwhile, a recruiting CRM can help construct an immense talent pipeline, including people at any stage of pre-recruitment, which is beneficial to both recruitment and hiring processes. It helps employers to maintain engaging relationships between recruiters and their candidates.

Tell-Tale Signs That You Need a Recruiting CRM

1: You Are Having Duplicate Profiles in Your ATS

The prevalent issue recruiting teams often encounter is that an ATS makes you work by requisitions. This accidentally lays specific restrictions on visibility. So, a candidate can apply for more than one job at the same time, and your ATS will allow them to create duplicate profiles. This same problem of duplication happens when an old applicant reapplies at your company. Having duplicate profiles of one person can be problematic. You don’t get to see the changes and progress they have made on their career paths. A recruiting CRM allows every candidate to have a one and only profile. All candidate’s interactions will be recorded into this single profile only. This feature saves a lot of time for recruiters and helps avoid confusion.

2: You Do Not Have One Centralized Platform to Source Your Candidates and See the Entire History of the Candidates With Your Organization

Normally, if your team is using an ATS, chances are you use it with different platforms, namely excel spreadsheets, to complete your process. In such a way, pieces of information are stored in different places. Nevertheless, while sourcing your candidates, this inconvenience of not having one centralized platform makes you jump around and waste your valuable time.

A recruiting CRM is a big aid to your candidate sourcing job, especially when you’re actively sourcing. This software application is, by nature, an intelligent storing system. Every single action taken by your candidates with your organization is systematically saved to distinctive profiles. When needed, your CRM software program can retrieve information and show recruiters a complete history of any candidate or prospect.

3: You Are Manually Managing Email and Text Communications for Your Candidates

It is common for a recruiter to send dozens, if not hundreds, of emails and texts to their candidates and prospects during a campus recruiting event. Manually typing and sending many texts and emails is allegedly boring, plus a great waste of time. With a recruiting CRM as your handy assistant, writing emails and texts to candidates becomes a set of automated steps. Templates can be set up for every stage of the pre-hire procedures and hiring process. With only a few clicks and a minimum amount of typing, your candidates now receive well-scheduled, up-to-date information. Now, you can definitely utilize that amount of time you’ve just saved for more crucial purposes.

4: You Would Like to Stay as a Top-of-Mind Brand for Potential Candidates

To any company regardless of its scale, marketing its brand to potential candidates is a must in the recruitment process. Your brand should be preferably taken into account when candidates seek jobs. Enhancing candidate engagement and conversion rate are vital in the brand-building process. A recruiting CRM is what you really need!

A CRM for recruitment facilitates email and text marketing is necessary for a better candidate experience. To be more specific, recruiting CRM software applications can help collect and manage vital data of a candidate. This makes it a lot easier for you to see a candidate’s email responding patterns. This information will be later put in use to create personalized email templates for that specific candidate. A CRM for recruitment also grants you the ability to schedule your emails in correspondence with different marketing campaigns and events.

This case study of Balfour Beatty can be a great example. To best support their planned annual growth and competitiveness in the recruitment field, Balfour Beatty adopted a recruiting CRM. Up till now, their recruiting team has successfully maintained the average email open rate by 70%. Keep in mind that the right email sent at the right time by your CRM software program is a step closer to a higher conversion rate. Not to mention, this thorough marketing strategy via recruiting CRM has the potential to bring your candidate engagement to a new level. Hereby, your reputation expands, even if it’s only by word of mouth.

5: It Becomes Too Time-Consuming for You to Run Monthly Reports on the Effectiveness of Various Source of Recruiting

Having multiple sources of recruiting also means you have to make assessment reports for each source. Moreover, if you are using different platforms for your processes, it obviously takes lots of your time to find and collect information for the report. Times like that may just drain you out. This challenge will be non-existent if you adopt a recruiting CRM application! It manages all your data and is able to help you export overall figures for your ROI reports. This feature lightens your workload yet ensures the accuracy and transparency of your reports.

Conclusion

Adopting a recruiting CRM program is a long-term investment giving how it will be a great aide to your recruiting process. With far less manual work, a logically-organized database, and the candidate’s relationship always at the centre of your attention, you will be able to be super productive at work. We hope this article makes it evident that a recruiting CRM application can be the tool to win over your candidates. As a part of optimizing candidate experience, you can check out this article on candidate follow-up strategy to form better connections with your candidates.

Images used in this post: Freepik

This blog post originally appears on Rakuna's blog.