When it comes to acquiring talent, the goal is always the same: to find the best job candidate possible in the least amount of time possible. With the advent and evolution of technology, there are more tools at a person’s disposal to help achieve that goal. And a recruitment CRM software is definitely one of those tools.
CRM can stand for either client relationship management or candidate relationship management. For those who utilize a CRM, some use it for clients only, some use it for job candidates only, and some use it for both. Obviously, if you’re a corporate recruiter or Human Resources professional, then you’re only dealing with job candidates. On the other hand, if you’re an agency recruiter or search consultant, then you’re using a CRM for your interaction and communication with both clients and candidates.
What is a recruitment CRM?
But let’s back up for just a moment. What is a recruitment CRM?
A recruitment CRM is a type of recruiting software or tool used by a recruiting and/or hiring professional that helps them to build, cultivate, and sustain business relationships, while also managing the recruiting and hiring process. These relationships are primarily with job candidates, but in the case of an agency recruiter or search consultant, the relationships could also be with clients—hiring managers or other decision makers within an organization.
On the Human Resources and corporate recruiting side, your company is typically hiring for multiple positions at the same time. Managing large volumes of data can be time-consuming and overwhelming for any Human Resources department. The beauty of a CRM software solution like Top Echelon is that when all of your recruitment data is centralized in a single platform, your HR team has access to all of the information they need to do their job far more efficiently. It’s a smart way to connect and engage with the right job candidates while managing the entire recruitment process.
A recruitment CRM software helps professionals organize, manage, streamline, and accelerate the entire process of candidate relationship management. This creates a positive experience for candidates, which helps to brand the organization in a similarly positive way. (And in today’s market, employer branding is more important than ever.)
Recruitment CRM software benefits
What are the benefits of using a recruitment CRM for your recruiting and/or hiring efforts? That is a splendid question that deserves an equally splendid answer.
Below are seven recruitment CRM software benefits for recruiters and search consultants:
#1—Ability to attract and source top job candidates
In a candidates’ market, job candidates can be scarce. And top candidates are even more so. As a result, being able to find and attract those candidates is critical to successfully recruiting top talent. With a recruiting CRM software, you can accomplish both of these objectives and do so more quickly.
The most important tool in terms of attracting top candidates is a solid career site that advertises the jobs for which you are recruiting and hiring. A solid career site is one that is, first and foremost, optimized for the mobile viewing experience. More professionals are passively looking for new jobs on a mobile device with each passing day, so optimizing your site for mobile is a must. Second, your recruitment CRM should allow you to post your jobs not only to your career site, but also to preselected social media channels for even more exposure.
#2—Detailed and comprehensive candidate profiles
Yes, data is king . . . but data can also be a quagmire and sucker of time and your will to live. That is, if you let it. This is where the best recruiting CRM software can help you to collect and manage candidate information in a way that will make your life better, not worse.
Recruiting and hiring is all about speed. It’s about finding the best job candidate possible for the position and then acquiring that candidate in the shortest amount of time possible. That means not only having the right information, but also being able to access that information when you need to access it. That way, you can streamline the process, move more quickly, and acquire the top job candidates you want to acquire—before your competition does.
What information should your recruitment CRM collect, store, and allow you to search through quickly and easily? Information such as skill sets, certifications, geographic location, previous and/or current employment, links to their social media accounts, and even their trail of communication with the organization. More information is only better if you can access that information quickly for optimized recruiting and hiring.
#3—Schedule interviews and activities all in one place.
CRM solutions help you to manage candidate leads and coordinate all communications so you can stay in contact with your clients and candidates, increase your production, and streamline your day-to-day workflow. Systems like Top Echelon create a customer network in a single searchable database—containing all information that pertains to the following:
- Hiring campaigns
- Positions in your talent pipeline
- Points of contact
- Job posting
- Email marketing
- Resume parsing
- Seamless searching
- Scheduling interviews
It’s a powerful tool that equips your HR team to work far more efficiently. They can stay on top of communications at every level in a way that is branded and personalized. Speaking of which . . .
#4—Personalized communication for stronger engagement
This is where the “relationship management” piece of candidate relationship management comes into sharper focus. The good news is that it solves two problems at once. Job candidates need to receive personalized communication so that they’re more engaged in the process and less likely to drop out of it. On the other hand, recruiters and hiring managers do not have all the time in the world to type out personalized messages to every single candidate.
The solution: the recruiting CRM software can automatically send emails to candidates. These emails are triggered based upon the activity of those candidates. If they do something to trigger an email, then they will receive an email. What job candidates want to know the most about during the recruiting and hiring process is where they stand in the process and information regarding the next steps of the process. A recruiting CRM software that sends automated yet personalized emails and messages can provide them with that information.
But wait, there’s more! That’s because you can use automatic triggers and personalized messages in other ways, as well. These messages will also help keep job candidates more engaged. They include:
Alerts when new jobs are posted—By registering with the career site, job seekers and candidates can set up job alerts. These alerts will notify them when jobs matching their criteria are posted to the site. This way, they can explore those jobs immediately. (Or at least as soon as they receive the email notification.)
Newsletter that includes jobs of interest—A newsletter with relevant articles and links to select hot jobs is another way to keep candidates engaged. (You’ve probably noticed by now that the way to a candidate’s heart is through bigger and better jobs and the inferred prospect of growing their career.)
Product releases and other newsworthy items—People like to work for winners, so you must show job seekers and candidates that you are a “mover and shaker” within your industry. They especially like to work for organizations that give back to society in some way, so highlight your charitable work and contributions.
With a recruitment CRM software, you can even segment your email lists to send messages that are even more personalized and specific. And once again, if you’re a professional recruiter or search consultant, you can also send automated messages and personalized emails to hiring managers and clients.
#5—A more streamlined recruiting and hiring process
When planning to redistribute talent or strategizing for recovery in the middle of a hiring freeze, a CRM system is the ideal way to streamline and manage recruitment and hiring. Solutions like Top Echelon’s recruiting software allow Human Resource professionals to organize talent data based on filters that match potential candidates to relevant job requirements:
- Work experience
- Education level
- Skill requirements
- Industry knowledge
- Location
And users can define and customize filters, as well:
- Assess appropriate screening and scoring
- Define actionable insights
- Create dynamic lists and more
Solutions like Top Echelon help to you minimize your time to hire by keeping a robust candidate pool full of good leads. Because of the resume screening software features, you know each candidate’s special skills and can call upon the most qualified talent with a quick Boolean search. CRM solutions also allow you to easily be responsive to changing market and industry conditions and scale talent acquisition efforts.
#6—Measurement tools to gauge success (or the lack thereof)
You’ve probably heard the old saying, “You must inspect what you expect.” Oh, and here’s another one: “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t improve it.” Both of these speak to measurement tools and their role in quantifying important numbers and metrics during the recruiting and hiring process. A recruiting CRM software can help you to tabulate metrics for both the organization overall and also for individual employees of that organization. And it can do so with a wide array of customizable measurement and reporting tools designed to help you improve your performance over time.
Specifically, a sophisticated and inclusive CRM system like Top Echelon offers analytics and reporting that gives you control over data on the following recruiting and hiring practices:
- Applicant channels that support quality talent
- Adherence to your company’s hiring process
- Total time to hire
- Talent retention
#7—Build candidate relationships for the future.
The one downside to sourcing a ton of great job candidates with your recruitment CRM software is that you can’t hire them all. At least not immediately. After all, you can only hire one candidate for one position. What about the candidate that came in second? Or third? You still have their information, which means that you can still engage with them in case another position is created for which they would be a good fit.
This is where the phrase, “Always be hiring” is relevant. Not only should you be hiring for the present, but you should also be hiring for the future. No matter the job market, the one thing that you can never have too much of is access to high-quality job candidates who could provide tremendous value, either for your organization or your client’s.
In the final analysis, CRM solutions put vital information for evaluating candidates, recruiting strategy, and hiring processes right at your fingertips.
CRM for recruitment agencies
We’ve talked a lot about Human Resources professionals and corporate recruiters to this point, but what about CRM for recruitment agencies? As we mentioned at the outset of this blog post, CRM can mean both candidate relationship management and client relationship management. That’s because agency recruiters are tasked with building relationships with both groups of people. And ultimately, their success depends largely upon their ability to do that well.
As with corporate recruiters, their use of a recruiting CRM tool comes down to features and functionality. Does the software have the features that the recruiters need and do those features have the full range of functionality necessary to help them accomplish their goal of building and sustaining long-lasting relationships with both candidates and clients? That’s a defining question for analyzing a CRM for recruitment agencies.
Best recruiting CRM features and functionality
The great thing about Top Echelon’s recruitment CRM is that it can work for a small recruitment agency, a mid-sized agency, or a large recruiting firm with multiple team members. The best recruiting CRM software has the “must have” features, as well as the “like to have” features. Four of Top Echelon’s features, along with their associated functionality, are as follows:
#1—Job posting
With Top Echelon, users can post jobs to sites such as Monster, ZipRecruiter, and more. Not only that, but Top Echelon also offers one of the most affordable job posting tools in the industry, starting at just $21 per job for a 30-day posting. However, multi-job packages are also available for additional sourcing. The even better news is that these packages are discounted for volume. This means the bigger the package, the more affordable the postings are.
#2—Email marketing
As we’ve discussed, staying in front of candidates and clients is important if you want to build relationships. You can save time with your email marketing efforts with Top Echelon, since our recruiting software allows you to turn repetitive emails into templates. Below is additional functionality of Top Echelon’s email marketing feature:
- Logging of every email sent
- Ability to utilize email aliases
- Mass email to your contacts from search results
- Dedicated email marketing servers
#3—Activity Planner
This feature ties into benefit #3 on the list above. Top Echelon’s recruitment CRM allows you to schedule calls, meetings, and events. This way, you know what you need to do on your recruiting desk, what’s completed, and what’s overdue. The Activity Planner is both simple and powerful. That’s because users can sync to an external iCal calendar and also move activities to a different day, if need be.
#4—Easy reporting
Top Echelon’s recruiting software has three different types of customized reports. They include the following:
Activity Reports—Allows recruitment agency owners to see how many activities were logged by each user for a specified timeframe
Pipeline Reports—Allows owners to review Pipeline candidates across multiple job orders at one time. It allows them to see candidate names and total counts within the various stages of their recruiting process so they can establish priorities and review overall progress.
Placement Reports—Allows owners to review placement details for their agency over a specified time frame. This report also allows owners to compare metrics, such as Total Fees by User and by Company. In addition, owners can review other important placement details, such as their firm’s Average Fee, Time-to-Fill, and Source Reporting.
Recruitment CRM tool: free trial and live demo
One of the best ways to figure out which recruitment CRM tool is the right one for you and your organization is try them out! And Top Echelon offers both corporate recruiters and agency recruiters the opportunity to do just that. (It’s important to note that some recruitment CRM systems do not offer a free trial. The best recruiting CRM software packages typically offer one.)
However, Top Echelon offers a 15-day free trial of its recruitment CRM tool. It doesn’t matter if you’re a HR professional, a corporate recruiter, or an agency recruiter or search consultant. You can start your free trial by clicking HERE.
But if you’d rather wait to start your trial, you can also request a live demo of the software. One of our account representatives would be happy to walk you through all of its features and functionality. Click HERE to request your live demo of Top Echelon’s recruitment CRM software!
