Candidate Relationship Management: Essential Guide to CRM for HR

What is a CRM, candidate relationship management?

Hiring professionals use CRM (candidate relationship management) software to manage the early phases of the recruitment process with job candidates — to identify a talent pool. It then works similarly to marketing automation solutions such as Marketo or Hubspot by using messaging campaigns to nurture the candidates, keeping them warm, active, and engaged in a brand.

Think of a CRM as a talent intelligence hub that includes past applicants, silver medalists (candidates you like but were unable to hire at the time), employee referrals, a proactively sourced talent pool of passive candidates, and perhaps current employees, contractors, as well as alumni.

A recruitment CRM can help talent acquisition professionals to:

• Build pools of qualified prospects, tailored around specific hiring needs, skill sets, or shared characteristics
• Easily create and send branded communications to your talent communities, keeping prospects in the loop and amplifying your employer brand
• Monitor campaign performance and maintain compliance seamlessly, with a talent operating system as your centralized system of record

With a recruitment CRM, you can treat all of your candidates like they are customers.

What features may be included in recruitment CRM software?

There are two types of CRMs: a stand-alone candidate relationship management system that bolts on to your applicant tracking system (ATS), or a CRM that is native to your ATS.

Regardless, properly built CRMs should have the following components:

• Email and text campaign functionality
• Source and conversion rate analytics
• Drip campaigns
• Talent pools
• CTA (call to action) functionality for landing pages
• Strong search functionality
• Ability to move interested candidates over to current job openings
• A landing page builder

The ultimate goal of using this software is to increase your overall talent pool of people who may be interested in working for your company in the future. In order to achieve that outcome, think of future job candidates as consumers, as you want them to have a positive employer brand experience with your company. Once fully implemented, the users of the recruitment CRM software (such as recruiters, employment-branding professionals, talent operations professionals, and others) are ready to:

• Engage and nurture candidates
• Create a positive candidate experience
• Increase collaboration across the hiring team
• Reduce reactive recruiting
• Deliver on-time hiring at a lower cost

With the functionality of recruitment CRM software, HR teams can effectively engage with qualified talent, expedite their sourcing efforts, and reduce overall costs as the needs for outsourced agencies and other top-of-funnel activities become diminished.

An effective CRM is about more than just technology

Successful use of a CRM is about more than just flipping on a switch. There is a certain amount of change management that must happen to make a CRM successful.

For example, if your hiring managers or recruiters feel like they’re more successful if they can poach someone from a competitor and are uninterested in pursuing past applicants or others in the CRM talent pool, the CRM technology could go to waste. Talent teams need to pursue the filling of an open requisition by trying to find the most qualified candidate, regardless of whether they are a past applicant, a referral, an alumnus, an employee, or, yes, a candidate currently working for a competing company.

Another important consideration with CRMs is the way you nurture potential employees. Sending a one-size-fits-all newsletter to your entire database won’t be terribly effective. For example, if you are a healthcare organization, what a doctor or nurse is interested in may be very different from what a rad tech or physical therapist is interested in, which may be very different from what someone who would be in charge of patient billing or customer service may be interested in. You will want to tailor your communications based on the person’s location and desired role.

A CRM success story

Miller’s Health System Is one organization that had great success with CRM.

In the first five months after implementing a CRM, the organization’s talent pool increased by about 1,000%. There were not only more candidates, but there were more engaged candidates. Miller’s personalized email campaigns were opened at a very strong rate of 46%. Its conversion rate from passive prospects to warm applicants was almost twice as high as what it was getting from Indeed.

Its time to offer dropped by about 20%, and its offer-to-hire ratio improved to 77%.

Why customers use SmartRecruiters’ CRM

Some of the reasons that many companies use the Recruitment CRM from SmartRecruiters include:

• Clean and accurate reporting and analytics
• More compliance and security due to less data exposure
• Lower initial investment and fewer maintenance costs
• Higher efficiency/productivity for recruiters
• One vendor to manage vs. multiple

Let us know if you’d like to learn more about recruitment CRM software.