All You Need To Know About Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)

The need to attract and retain talent in a competitive job market has intensified as we move into 2021. As an HR professional or business owner, you have to foster a strong culture to comfortably meet your needs for talent. This is where you need to work on the idea of having a sound candidate relationship management system that could help you develop a distinct employer brand.

If we look at the current trends, companies don’t pick talent anymore. Instead, talent picks companies. So, it’s time to evaluate what kind of candidate experience you deliver. Why should talent pick your company? The way you build and manage relationships with candidates and employees will determine your business success down the road.

One of the most practical strategies to solve your biggest HR challenges once and for all is the implementation of a robust Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) system. In this post, I’ll comprehensively define CRM, how it works, its benefits, and why your business needs it. I will also highlight the difference between a candidate and a customer relationship management system.

Let’s get started!

What is a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)?

Simply put, candidate relationship management (CRM) is a systematic process for managing and improving relationships with your current and potential employees. It automates and streamlines various tasks from applicant tracking to communication.

From a candidate experience perspective, CRM makes it easy for your prospective employees to stay connected with your organization during the entire recruitment cycle. Just like businesses build sales funnels to turn prospects into customers, CRM helps recruiters create a talent pipeline to improve their hiring efforts.

Your talent pipeline may include active and passive candidates, full-time employees, remote workers, hourly contractors, and project-based workers.

If we look at the stats, on average, it costs somewhere around $4,000 and nearly a month to make a new hire. However, it can take more than that to fill various positions. Needless to mention how unfilled positions add up to a loss in revenue.

When you meet some promising candidates through different channels, you may not be able to hire all of them. However, a CRM can help you keep everyone engaged even if you’re not hiring them. You can reach out to all of the qualified candidates whenever the need arises.

CRM also segments potential candidates based on their expertise and your preferences so that you tailor your employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts. That is the only effective way to attract, nurture and hire high-value professionals.

Let’s discuss how a CRM works in different settings.

How Does A CRM Work?

1. Find Potential Talent

It all starts from finding the right people for your company through different platforms from social media to traditional job postings and applications arrived in your email. Regardless of the platforms, you hold all of the candidate data in a CRM.

A CRM brings in the data of candidates who weren't hired the previous time. The passive candidates you have earmarked should also be a part of your talent pool. When you start the hiring process, CRM keeps a record of all the interactions with candidates so that new people in your HR team can pick up quickly.

In the initial stages, your priority is likely to narrow down top-tier candidates. CRM helps you throughout this process and makes it easy to contact those top-priority candidates quickly.

As it is getting increasingly difficult to find the right people, you should work towards building a talent pool and allowing candidates to register even if there is no position open for them. People who don’t meet your requirements can also be given the chance to be a part of your talent pool.

2. Market your offers

Marketing is a key part of any recruitment strategy, especially when recruiters have to find the best. Companies use multiple channels to market job opportunities using recruitment marketing and social media. When you create a group of top-tier candidates, it becomes easy to launch highly targeted and personalized marketing efforts. At this stage, you are supposed to reach out to all the prospects and start converting them into your employees. And this is where a CRM will be your best friend.

3. Engage

Once you’ve filtered interested candidates, the next step is to engage them. Company updates, regular communication, and newsletters are some of the tactics to engage candidates. It is always recommended to keep your candidates updated. For example, you should notify or send feedback to those who were not selected. Constructive feedback will help them identify missing skills or anything that cost them the job.

A CRM can automate the communication between you and candidates. For example, you can create different email templates that keep candidates engaged at every stage of the process. It may include sending an acknowledgment email to whoever applied for a position.

People looking for a job want timely and clear communication. When they get real-time responses from you, it leads to a better candidate experience and an opportunity to build relationships.

Imagine how much time and energy is required when you perform everything manually.

4. Nurture And Hire

Businesses nurture their prospective customers to meet them where they are in the sales funnel. Similarly, HR professionals have to use different tactics to keep potential candidates engaged. A CRM makes candidate nurturing so much easier and more time-efficient. For example, the system can send out regular emails to keep them informed about what is happening in the company. When nurtured properly, those potential candidates can easily be converted into employees.

The CRM process, thus, helps you make well-informed decisions, helping you avoid bad hires.

Why Do Companies Need A CRM?

How you manage potential candidates can have a direct impact on how they perform when hired. It all begins when the candidate first comes across your employer brand.

But why does your company need a CRM anyway? Well, if you have to sell yourself to in-demand candidates, a CRM is the only efficient way to pursue this objective. The employee and candidate experience is just like customer experience. Besides, your employees define the ultimate customer experience.

Here are some situations where CRM can make your life a lot easier:

1. Head start on hiring the top talent

When something is important to your organization, you have to talk about it early and often. If hiring top talent is important and you want to keep it top of mind for everyone, you must have a system in place to keep your efforts more organized and measurable.

Let’s say one of your competitors is laying off some of their key employees. It would be immensely advantageous if you have already been building a pipeline of high-value candidates from that company with the help of a CRM. On top of this, you can be the first to reach out to those candidates.

2. Building a great employer brand

People read employer reviews before they reach out to an organization for a job. Therefore, the vitality of an employer brand should not be underestimated in finding and hiring the right people.

Whether you reach out to potential candidates or they contact you, it is important to maintain good relationships with your current as well as future employees. That is where a CRM can help you convince your potential candidates that they are headed to the right place. Recruitment marketing through CRM leads to a powerful employer brand to ensure you find the right talent for your company.

Pro Tip: Think like a marketer and use modern recruitment tactics to stay ahead of the curve.

3. Understanding your company culture

In a competitive environment, it is critical to realize the significance of company culture and how it helps organizations attract new employees while keeping the current ones inspired and motivated. However, many companies struggle to define what makes up company culture and why it is important. It may seem like a vague idea.

CRM generates valuable insights into the company culture. It not only helps recruiters or business owners but also gives potential candidates an insight into your company culture. So, pay attention to the culture you demonstrate through hiring or CRM practices.

4. Identifying issues in recruiting cycle

If you often lose talent or fail to attract and hire the right people, there must be something wrong with the recruiting process. CRM highlights areas that need improvement or stages of the recruiting journey where candidates are dropping out.

5. Analyzing diversity of your talent pool

An increasing number of companies are taking steps to promote diversity and inclusion following the social and political changes. Unfortunately, efforts to enhance diversity and inclusion in the workplace often fail. However, you can build a diverse workforce if you take all sorts of biases out of the recruiting process.

CRM allows you to segment potential candidates and gets an overview of what your current talent pool looks like. If the pool is not diverse enough, you can broaden your recruitment marketing efforts.

Key Features

Let’s take a quick look at some of the major features of a CRM

• Parsing through tons of resumes quickly
• Candidate profile creation based on real-time data
• Automating certain processes such as sending personalized emails to candidates.
• Rating candidates based on their skills, preferences, and qualification
• Creating talent pools for different positions
• Integration with current ATS
• Analytics and reporting
• Producing insights into what is working and what not

Make sure to choose a CRM solution that meets all of your candidate relationship management needs - not every solution is created equally.

Benefits

Let’s identify some of the benefits of implementing a CRM

• Build and manage rewarding relationships with candidates to get an edge over your competitors.
• Create a talent pool to stay in touch with candidates
• Setup automated email campaigns to respond quickly and keep your talent pool engaged.
• Source passive candidates and build relationships with them even if they’re not looking for a job.
• Build a strong employer brand to set yourself apart from other talent hunters.
• Accurately portray your brand and make it visible on your job ads and career page.
• Most importantly, create a memorable candidate experience

Candidate Vs Customer Relation Management

Things often get confusing when it comes to the abbreviations like CRM. It stands for customer relationship management as well as candidate relationship management. So, it is important to differentiate these two concepts.

I think we have already discussed a lot about candidate relationship management. Let’s define the second one: customer relationship management.

As the name suggests, customer relationship management is about identifying business leads and managing relationships with prospective and existing customers. It is a combination of technology, strategy, and tools used by businesses for attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers.

So, the difference between a candidate and customer relationship management is quite clear.

Final Thoughts

Strategic use of candidate relationship management will take your recruiting strategy to the next level. All you have to do is identity recruiting challenges and areas that need to be more organized and efficient. A CRM will help you implement best practices for sourcing, attracting, engaging, and hiring the right people.

So, are you ready to win the ongoing war for talent in a more organized and time-efficient fashion? If yes, find the right CRM for your organization. For example, Wiggli is one of the most reputable and comprehensive talent management systems that give you full control over the entire recruitment process.