Recruitment can be a labor-intensive, costly, and long process. Even if your hiring pipeline is streamlined, juggling which candidates are where isn’t always simple. Enter: a solid candidate relationship manager (CRM).
Is a CRM just another acronym or, worse yet, another piece of expensive software you’re going to use for a month before ditching? No! CRMs, when used correctly, can save you time and help make sure you’re not letting top talent slip through the cracks. Ninety-four percent of recruiters reported finding value from utilizing cloud-based technologies to track their recruitment pipeline. With the Great Resignation still going strong—after all, over 80% of people in their 20s would be open to changing jobs—the recruitment process can get hectic and disorganized if you aren’t careful. So if you haven’t yet checked out a CRM, now’s the time.
Do you need a CRM to recruit well? No. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a try. Many CRMs have customer service teams that are able to help you download and implement the software and answer any questions you might have. Don’t be scared off by the technology side of things. Think of the long-term picture instead, and focus on how much easier a CRM could make recruitment.
A CRM isn’t just a fancy spreadsheet or complicated piece of software. Here are five reasons to consider a CRM so you can spend less time reminding yourself who you need to reach out to and more time gathering great job candidates for your business.
CRMs Foster Communication and Collaboration Among Your Entire Team
If you’ve been recruiting for any length of time, you know that bumps in the road tend to occur when communication isn’t present. If you’re working on recruiting a candidate and another recruiter on your team has already been prepping him or her, or if a manager tries to bring in a new face without properly informing the recruitment team, things can get dicey. CRMs allow you to invite anyone who needs access in your company to view and manage the recruitment pipeline. You can easily stay up to date and facilitate better conversations around your recruitment needs. Less office politics, more effective HR policies—that’s what can take your company’s recruitment efforts to the next level.
CRM Analytics Help You See Your Blind Spots
The amount of data you can receive from a CRM is priceless. Think of all of the small measurables along every part of the recruitment process—and all of the ways those measurables can help you make decisions about your pipeline. For instance, if you see a high amount of traffic on your jobs webpage but not many people clicking through to an application, you may need to tweak your copy or imaging. If you see a lot of people starting your application but ditching it once they reach a particular question, it may be time to consider the wording of the question or the format of the answer. CRM analytics can also help you understand where the majority of your candidates are coming from, what processes move them along the pipeline, and how long your average job-fill time is. All of this information is incredibly valuable to recruiters, and CRMs can easily capture it without your having to go through mountains of numbers. The more data you have, the easier decisions are.
CRMs Reduce Paperwork and Stay Updated
Nobody likes facing an enormous mountain of files. It isn’t good for your productivity, it isn’t good for the environment, and it isn’t good for your recruitment process. By using a CRM instead, you’ll cut down on that hefty amount of paperwork and have an easy-to-access database. Furthermore, CRMs can often be automatically updated, meaning you don’t need to constantly manually update where candidates are in the pipeline.
CRMs Incorporate Automation into Your Pipeline
Automation is the key to efficiency, and CRMs have automation in spades. The amount of time you need to spend doing manual tracking—let alone the amount of time you waste switching from task to task—can be an incredible waste. Let CRMs do the heavy lifting. By choosing a CRM that can track candidate activity across various platforms, you’ll be able to stay up to date on where your various candidates are. When someone schedules an interview, he or she can automatically be moved into the “interview process” bucket and be sent calendars to schedule interviews with recruiters. Automatic reminder e-mails can be sent, as well as follow-ups, to ensure your business doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. The less you have to remember to do, the better you’ll actually be at your job. Instead of pouring energy into tracking where hundreds of people are in a pipeline, you can put that energy toward finding top talent, fostering relationships, and helping your company grow.
CRMs Can Serve as Candidate Pools
If you aren’t actively recruiting or hiring, why should you consider a CRM? The times when you aren’t looking for new hires are actually great times to do behind-the-scenes work in order to ensure your recruiting process will be smooth when it’s needed. After all, learning a new software and implementing it is a process that takes time, so it may not make sense to do it when you’ve got an important role to fill. Second, CRMs can serve as candidate pools for when you are actively recruiting. Instead of going out and finding new candidates from scratch, a CRM can function as a listserv where you have a pile of people ready and waiting. There are even CRMs with recommendation functions that allow others to recommend certain candidates for particular positions. Some CRMs even use artificial intelligence to predict when you’re going to have a high hiring need, like for retail businesses around the holidays. CRMs can therefore be an incredible resource to your recruiters, making their job easier and more efficient.
Claire Swinarski is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.