Getting to know your candidates and keeping them is harder than ever before. As a recruiting professional, you’re overloaded with candidate information from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and you have hundreds of relationships to manage through your own internal systems. Add to this, today’s candidates expect you to know who they are. Not just their job requirements and channel preferences, but they expect you to know who they are on a human level. During the course of conversations with your candidates, you’re discovering what they did over the weekend, their interests, their passions, their families, their likes, and dislikes. It’s extremely hard to earn their trust and goodwill unless you engage with them in meaningful ways consistently to create memorable experiences around things that matter to them. After all, the only thing stopping them from leaving your agency for another agency might only be a few dollars.

In order to create candidate loyalty through trust and goodwill, you need to retain what you learn about your candidates and have meaningful, consistent, personalized engagements with them. But where are you supposed to keep this information?

Today’s Challenge: No Tool to Surprise and Delight

The challenge comes when you try to use the rich information you’ve collected to surprise and delight your candidates and improve their overall experience. Chances are you capture great pieces of information in your memory, on paper, or even in the notes section of your CRM. But what happens to it after that?

I don’t know about you, but as I get older my memory isn’t what it used to be. I also find myself writing more notes and then never looking at them again.

CRM systems are great at capturing transactions and interactions candidates have with a company. But they fall short when it comes to really knowing the person on the human level.  In a conversation with a recruiter recently, he described his CRM as a place “where data goes to die.” I’m not saying CRM systems are bad. I’m suggesting that they’re lacking in the relationship category because there’s nowhere in the CRM system to store detailed “relationship” information.  After all, relationships aren’t based solely on data points, transactions, and business dealings, they’re about connecting with people on the emotional level and building trust.

You may also be using social media to find and connect with your candidates. But social media is self-serving. These platforms aren’t meant to serve candidates in a meaningful way or create that emotional connection you need. They’re crafted to “self-promote and sell.” How many times have you received the default Facebook message congratulating you on a birthday? Social platforms don’t provide the flexibility to store information and suggest meaningful actions to truly engage your candidates.

No matter where you capture these nuggets of information, you may only reference them from time to time, and that’s if you remember where they are. We all have the best of intentions when we learn something new about a person; but there are only so many hours in the day to do something with that information.

Tomorrow’s Solution: A Tool for Building Meaningful Relationships

Though the traditional approaches outlined above can work on a small scale, there are other ways to build relationships that are much more effective. The ideal tool for building deep and meaningful relationships with your candidates would save you time, be easy to use, proactive, and actionable. Let me explain.

1. Saves You Time. The right tool should do the work for you. No more exhaustive searches looking for the perfect gift or personalized content for your candidates. You shouldn’t be spending your time doing research, you should be engaging with your candidates. For instance, you know that one of your candidates is going to New York City in a few weeks. The right tool will provide you automatic contextual content and appropriate suggestions with which you can engage your candidate about activities going on, what restaurants to go to, and the local weather forecast along with links for more detailed information.
2. Easy to Use. All the information about your candidates should be on one screen, no toggling between systems or looking at spreadsheets anymore.
3. Proactive. The right tool will help you learn more about a person’s interests, family and life moments and suggest simple, meaningful actions to delight them consistently.
4. Actionable. There should be a sophisticated analytics engine working behind the scenes providing you with contextual, personalized recommendations that can be immediately acted upon. You’ve put in a lot of effort to learn about your candidates, you should be able to do something with that information. If you don’t, your competition will.

Research shows that service professionals who cultivate deep, personal, meaningful relationships get 3x more referrals. What’s it worth to you to build more meaningful relationships with your candidates? One referral? 10 referrals? For a staffing firm, a referral can be worth more than $10K. Those numbers can add up quickly.

How do you manage your candidate information beyond the transactional data so you can use it to build more meaningful relationships?

Coming up next…

Now that you’ve captured all this rich data about your candidates, how do you drive meaningful engagement with them and your entire candidate base consistently (and quickly)?