When you work in an in-house recruitment team, it’s vital to understand Candidate Relationship Management and know how this strategy can help you to achieve better hiring outcomes.
In today’s recruitment market, the war for talent is hotter than ever, and recruiters are looking for powerful strategies and technologies that will allow them to secure the best candidates for roles within their business.
Candidate Relationship Management, or CRM, is one of the keys to successful modern recruitment, and it can also be greatly enabled with modern candidate relationship management systems that heavily automate your optimised hiring process. Candidate Relationship Management is a relatively new approach for HR professionals, but it’s already being used heavily to achieve powerful results.
What is Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)?
Candidate relationship management (CRM) allows recruiters to manage relationships with candidates throughout their lifecycle, and it allows them to build on those relationships to build a positive experience, whether individuals are currently applying for roles or potentially will do so in the future.
In this way, CRM is a long-term strategy that nurtures great talent and primes it for when the right role comes along within the organisation. Get it right, and your business will see more successful hires, with a shorter time to hire, a better fit in roles, and lower turnover. In this way, it can be used to build your talent pipeline and improve retention as a whole, ensuring that your hires are strongly aligned with your company culture and a great ‘fit’ with their role.
The strategy can also be used to boost morale and build a positive employer brand, for further brand equity in the employer market. Even better, modern recruitment tools make it easy to automate key elements of Candidate Relationship Management! Intrigued? Read on to find out more!
Why Is Candidate Relationship Management Important?
Here are some of the benefits that businesses can achieve with a sound Candidate Relationship Management Strategy:
Supports the candidate experience
A good Candidate Relationship Management strategy will help to boost candidate engagement and the overall candidate experience. This describes the overall experience that an individual candidate will receive when they enter the recruitment cycle.
This experience is key because it builds a positive impression of your firm in the candidate’s mind, and then continues to build and reinforce this positive impression over time. Even if the candidate isn’t successful with their original job application, they will be motivated to apply for further roles within your business because they feel a positive connection with your employer brand.
It builds the employer brand
Businesses need to support relationships with current candidates, past candidates and potential future candidates. The candidate relationship process supports this by showing that you value your candidates and allowing you to share your corporate culture. This builds your employer brand and gives you a reputation of being a great place to work.
It gives businesses a head start on hiring
CRM helps businesses create powerful talent pools and pipelines that can be nurtured for ongoing hiring needs. By maintaining these pipelines, businesses already have a warm pool of engaged and pre-screened candidates who are actively seeking work and have already shown an interest in working for the business.
When a new role is released, it can be shared with these motivated candidates who already have a positive perspective of the company thanks to the CRM process. This can make hiring quicker and more effective.
It provides powerful candidate data
Want to know where your business is losing talent? Keen to understand the level of diversity in your applicant pool? Your candidate relationship management system can provide rich data for better management decisions.
Today’s CRM software puts powerful data at your fingertips in real-time, offering you powerful insights into the effectiveness of your recruitment.
Candidate Relationship Management steps
Every business will have its own approach to developing a candidate relationship management process, but the typical stages to consider are discovery, attraction, engagement, nurturing and hiring. These work as follows:
Discover the talent
In this stage, you will find a range of talent using all channels available to you, from direct applications to social media recruiting. This stage includes recruitment marketing, social media marketing and employer branding, and the data will be added to the CRM solution.
Every time you post a new role, the CRM should flag existing candidates in your talent pool for engagement, with segmented talent pools for targeted communications.
Attract the talent
During this phase, you can use a variety of techniques to attract candidates, promote your employer brand, and engage with passive talent. You will use engaging communications and recruitment marketing strategies to tell a rich, engaging and enticing story about your business as an employer, tapping into the motivations of talented individuals who would perform well within your culture.
Engage candidates
In this phase, you will filter interested candidates and implement an engagement strategy, including regular process communications and employer brand-focused company updates. Your CRM will include email templates and automated scheduling that make it easy to communicate with candidates at each stage of the process.
Nurture candidates
Often, a role will attract several good candidates, who might be great fits for other positions within your firm. So, for those who don’t make it through to the end of the interview process, send regular emails and tailored communications to keep them engaged.
When you nurture these relationships, you have a good chance of converting these talented individuals into employees at a future date.
Hire successful candidates
The final stage is to choose your preferred candidate and offer them the job. Because you will have nurtured the relationship to this point, the candidate will know plenty about your business, its culture and their reasons for working there, and you will know enough about the candidate, boosting your chances of a successful new appointment.
As you can see, the CRM process is there to help you hire talented and vetted individuals in a structured, highly managed way. The process can deliver excellent hiring outcomes and long-term talent retention.
Candidate Relationship Management tools
Even better, various tools exist to make candidate relationship management easy and as automated as possible. These tools can be integrated into your existing business infrastructure and are usually cloud-deployed so that they can be licensed for immediate use.
What to look for in a candidate management tool
Each tool will have its own features and benefits, but these tend to be the most important for businesses:
- Candidate profile creation with customisable features
- CV scanning software
- Automated workflow features, such as personalised emails for interview scheduling
- The ability to rate candidates for different skillsets to help assign groups by priority
- Talent pool creation and management
- ATS integration
- Reporting features for CRM campaign measurement
- A mobile app version for use on the go.
Candidate Relationship Management vs ATS: Is it the same?
ATS and CRM systems do offer many of the same functionalities and features, but there are key differences in their scope and purpose:
- A CRM system exists to build and nurture valuable relationships with job candidates so that a business can create an ongoing talent pipeline for its recruitment needs.
- An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is there to automate the hiring process as a whole, from the posting of a new job to the post-hire onboarding process. It streamlines the process of talent acquisition and helps to streamline and improve the candidate experience.
As you can see, both systems reinforce each other and offer similarities, especially when it comes to communications scheduling and engagement.
About Teamdash:
Teamdash is a powerful talent acquisition tool that helps businesses get better outcomes from their recruitment activity. Our applicant tracking system is packed with valuable features such as interview scheduling, asynchronous video interviews, social media recruitment tools and recruitment automation. If you’re serious about improving your recruitment, Teamdash can help you achieve clear wins!
If your in-house hiring team is serious about securing top talent for your business, contact our friendly team now for a no-obligation product demonstration of our powerful, intuitive system.
