Recruitment is a very complicated process. Employers frequently need to find opportunities to engage with applicants during the recruiting process to increase their candidate experience and simultaneously build their employer brand.
But as the race for talent becomes increasingly tedious, companies have a tough time keeping their candidates interested in them and offer appropriate, updated information throughout the recruiting process. Even though the world’s best apps cannot solve lazy hiring practices, they can save you time and resources and put you leaps and bounds ahead of competitors by having the right tech stack.
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The solution is to use a CRM tool for recruiting. Via specially designed apps, businesses can recruit new talent and fill their vacancies sooner, helping them organize and promote their candidates.
Let’s see what a CRM recruiting tool is and how it can boost your recruitment process.
What is the use of CRM in recruitment?
One of the most important, most useful systems in a CRM for recruiters is automated follow-up. By using “smart sequences”, messages can be auto-escalated until responded to, then when a trigger action is taken, the recipient removed from a list and added to the next sequence in a customer journey.
That’s a bit technical and wordy, but what it really means is this:
Hours of freedom back, every day. Once set up, it can amplify your efforts substantially.
If you are a recruiter, keeping accurate records of everything related to your job is essential. It helps you streamline your workflow, identify patterns in candidate responses, and make sure you are providing the right information at the right time. Managing and tracking all the aspects involved is impossible without a sound CRM system.
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a term used to describe organizations’ practice managing information about leads and customers. But it is much easier to start using CRM when you think about it a different way: as an ‘information management system.’ It is precisely that–a system–that makes it useful for recruiting. In the context of recruiting, CRM, or Candidate Relationship Management, helps recruiters to track all interactions with candidates and manage the communication between offices, recruiters, and managers.
A recruitment CRM will allow organizations to:
- Create a talent network that resides in a centralized database.
- Source, attract, engage and manage their candidates.
- Automating repetitive hiring tasks.
- Measure and track critical recruiting KPIs and work on the effectiveness of existing recruiting strategies.
- A good CRM setup ensures that everyone in the hiring process is on the same page.
A recruitment CRM software can also help businesses organize and handle the constant influx of applications during high-volume hiring. With such tools, businesses can navigate through the entire candidate journey, that is, from the moment they apply to the day they start their new job. A CRM for recruitment covers engagement and management of candidates throughout the recruitment funnel.
What is the difference between an ATS and a CRM?
ATS or Applicant Tracking System is a recruitment software that optimizes your recruitment process. It serves as a one-stop solution where recruiters and hiring managers can build and post job opportunities, manage, screen, analyze and transfer applicants through each phase of the recruiting funnel from a single platform.
Over 98% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS in their recruitment process.
Even though the two terms may sound similar in function, they have some differences. Here are some indicators that your ATS or spreadsheet database is not a CRM solution:
- You cannot measure how engaged your candidates are.
- You have several status fields that the recruiters manually update.
- Your recruiters consider filing data as a tedious admin task without returns.
- You are unable to understand if the candidate is actively looking and what jobs interest them.
The real power of both these platforms become evident when they are used together:
- A CRM software to handle your social media postings, email, and recruitment marketing campaigns directed at your desired candidate personas.
- Once you receive applications, hop over to an ATS platform to follow the candidate’s progress through the remainder of the recruiting funnel. A good ATS should integrate with other HRTech solutions such as a pre-hire assessment platform to manage automated assessments such as a java online test.
Benefits of using CRM for recruitment
Recruitment CRM helps recruiters and hiring managers to build strategic talent communities and predict future talent needs to ensure a consistent supply of quality candidates. A CRM tool can make hiring easier in many ways.
Create comprehensive candidate profiles
Every single detail is essential when it comes to hiring the right individuals for your organization. When employers receive applications, a good recruitment CRM should gather all pertinent information about the applicant to determine whether or not to continue with them. This includes providing recruiters with data such as the candidate’s social media accounts, qualifications, skills sets, and tracking data to monitor the candidate’s engagement with the company.
Keep candidates engaged with personalized communications
Keeping your candidates engaged throughout the hiring process is essential to build your employer brand and maintain a constant supply of quality candidates. Sending out bulk emails is a tedious process, but automated campaigns with a recruitment CRM are much more comfortable.
Companies can now automatically update applicants using a recruitment CRM and even send relevant emails. This helps keep the candidate aware of where their application is, but it also takes away the burden to manually follow up with the recruiters.
Ease of maintaining your talent pool
A more straightforward way to create talent pipelines is by keeping in touch with the top talents that apply for positions in your company. This is best achieved with a recruiting CRM. You can easily create talent pools through social media and career boards that instantly feed applicant data back to your recruitment CRM.
It is crucial to stimulate excitement in any job you are recruiting for because when applicants demonstrate initial interest, the recruiters need to build on the same. Once talent starts applying for your open positions, you can use a Recruiting CRM to store granular data about the candidates and effectively engage with them.
Better data-driven decisions
A CRM software encourages recruiters to establish connections with the talent pool and lets them make better data-driven recruiting decisions. Insights provided by a recruitment CRM help assess the different recruitment marketing strategies. With a recruitment CRM, you can customize your marketing strategies to particular markets, interest groups, and goals by customizing the dates and recipient lists.
Wrapping up
A positive candidate experience is now a priority for recruiting and HR teams across the globe. Most tedious recruiting tasks can be automated with a recruitment CRM. Treating candidates as consumers and engaging them with special care is what we need in the recruitment industry.
Author Bio:
Keerthi Rangan is a Content Marketing Strategist at Adaface, which provides conversational assessments for companies to find great engineers.
