In today’s candidate-driven job market, employers need to find ways to engage with candidates throughout the recruitment process and boost their candidate experience.
But, with today’s job market becoming more and more competitive, getting the recruitment process right is easier said than done for most businesses. According to studies by MRI Network, McKinsey, and Glassdoor, companies are finding it harder to attract top performers, and they’re also struggling to fill positions in under 12 weeks successfully.
So, how can businesses give their candidates relevant, updated information and keep them interested in their company during the recruitment process?
The answer is to use recruitment candidate relationship management (CRM) software. By using software built specifically to help businesses manage and nurture their candidates, companies will be able to attract more talent and fill their positions quicker.
Let’s take a look at what a recruitment CRM actually is and how it can help your business. And then, we’ll look at the 7 best CRM tools on the market that you can use to boost your recruitment process.
What’s in?
- What is a recruitment CRM?
- What are the advantages of using a candidate relationship management tool?
- 7 best candidate relationship management tools on the market
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What is a recruitment CRM?
A recruitment CRM is a recruiting software that companies use to engage candidates when they apply to work at their company. By employing timely and relevant automated communication to nurture candidates, a business can preserve relationships with candidates over time in a central place.
Such type of software – customer relationship management tool – is commonly used in marketing to engage customers.
But how does this help recruiters with finding (and hiring) the best talent for their business?
Let’s use an example. With a recruitment CRM, a recruiter can pull up any candidate’s file within the company’s talent database and see where they’ve worked, and what skills they’ve got. As all this information is kept on a talent file, recruiters can then use it to build a more in-depth relationship with each candidate and reach them on a more personal level during the recruitment process.
A recruitment CRM can help businesses to:
- Build up a talent network that lives in a single, searchable database
- Find, attract, nurture, and manage their candidates
- Have a one-stop-shop for their recruitment activities and give them to tools to send automated recruiting emails, conduct qualification screenings, schedule interviews, conduct background checks
- Measure and act on the effectiveness of their recruitment strategies through reports
In short, a recruitment CRM enables you to treat your candidates like customers.
Engaging your candidates before they even apply has a positive effect on reaching them later on.
For companies who recruit on larger scales, candidate relationship management tools can also help organize and manage the constant deluge of applications. Traditionally, companies would rely on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), which would track every inbound applicant, to manage their high-volume recruiting.
With a recruitment CRM, companies can manage an applicant’s journey from the moment they apply to the day they start their new position. We are talking everything from email nurturing to job offers to signing a candidate’s contract. A CRM covers engagement throughout all the bases of the recruitment process.
For larger scale recruiting operations, it’s crucial companies know which sourcing efforts are working, and what marketing approaches are contributing to their recruitment efforts. A recruitment CRM allows recruiters to track all of these efforts through detailed reporting and tracking.
What are the advantages of using a candidate relationship management tool?
Good candidate experience is crucial in the war for talent and keeping your candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process is an essential part of it. A candidate relationship management tool can make your job as a recruiter easier in multiple ways.
1. The ability to build detailed candidate profiles
When it comes to recruiting the best people for your company, every detail counts. A good recruitment CRM will capture all relevant information about a candidate when they apply, and give you the tools to decide whether or not to pursue their application.
A recruitment CRM should give a recruiter access to a candidate’s skill set, interests, social accounts, as well as tracking when the candidate has interacted with the company. Some recruitment CRMs even allow recruiters to run background checks on candidates and submit a candidate to clients for review before hiring them.
The goal for recruiters is to have an overall view of a candidate without having to search through records and databases tirelessly. With a CRM, all of this data is in one-spot.
Candidate relationship management tools help companies fulfill the expectations of their candidates in terms of communication and candidate experience overall.
2. An easier way to build talent pools
If a top talent interacts with your company or your career page, you would like to keep in touch with them, right?
With a recruitment CRM, you’re able to. It’s super important to generate interest in any position your hiring for, so when candidates show initial interest, your recruiters need a tool to build on that. Once talent starts applying for your available jobs, you can use a recruitment CRM to store their data and actively engage with them.
You can build talent pools quickly through online expression of interest forms, social media, and job boards that then automatically feed candidate data back into your recruitment CRM. Once you’ve got that data on hand, your recruiters will be able to hone and refine their talent pools until they’ve found the best candidate for the relevant position.
3. Automated personalized communication
We all know automation makes life easier, so it makes sense to use it in our recruiting efforts.
Using a recruitment CRM, companies can automatically send updates to candidates on how the recruitment process is progressing, remind them of cut off dates, and even send trigger specific emails based on their activity. For example, if a candidate completes a task to progress them to the next round of an interview, you can then follow this up (automatically) with an email that outlines what the next stage will involve for them.
This helps keep the candidate informed of where their application is heading, but it also takes the pressure off of your recruiters to follow up manually. It’s all automated, and it’s a win-win.
You don’t want to disappoint your candidates by keeping them in the dark about your hiring timeline and where they stand in the recruitment process. That’s where a recruitment CRM comes in.
7 best candidate relationship management tools on the market
So, now we know why it makes sense to use a recruitment CRM in your tech stack.
Let’s take a look at the 7 best recruitment CRMs on the market right now so your business can start hiring smarter.
1. TalentLyft
TalentLyft is a great entry-level option recruitment CRM that helps businesses to distribute their new job openings to multiple free and premium job boards with one-click.
Recruiters know that posting on one job board isn’t enough to get high-quality applicants for a role. But posting a position across multiple platforms involves a lot of time and effort. TalentLyft can help recruiters solve this problem through job board integrations.
Once a recruiter posts a job, they can have it automatically added to their company’s Facebook page, which gives the job position more online visibility. The CRM also gives recruiters visual scorecards so they can see how well a candidate is suited to a role based on their skillset once they apply:
On top of all this, TalentLyft also automatically enriches candidate profiles, schedules interviews (which recruiters can also keep a scorecard of), and offers email automation to keep candidates interested in positions once they apply.
Price: Starts at $99/month for 5 active jobs.
2. Beamery
Beamery is a recruitment CRM that’s all about attracting passive candidates to a job position.
The recruitment CRM helps companies run their whole sourcing organization on a single platform. Recruiters can make informed, data-driven decisions and predict short term and long term performance of candidates.
Using Beamery, recruiters can use multiple sources to attract candidates. The CRM gives recruiters the tools to source candidates directly from web-pages, social media, as well as import existing sourcing lists. Data is organized into comprehensible dashboards:
The CRM’s talent pool builder also gives recruiters the tools to build segmented and prioritized pipelines for open and future roles and keep them up to date. Plus, the CRM boosts internal recruitment goals through collaboration. Using Beamery, recruiters can easily share candidates, create notes, tasks, and follow-ups to collaborate more efficiently to ensure they’re hiring the right people.
Price: After you request a demo, you will be given a custom price for your needs.
3. Avature
Avature is perfect for companies looking for a solution to campus recruiting.
Using Avature, businesses can target new graduates by building events and managing their campus recruiting activities using a single platform.
Once students have attended an event and registered their interest in the company, recruiters can nurture them with automated emails to keep their interest. Plus, the CRM is customizable, and it can adapt to any type of campus recruiting your company does. If you need to refine your strategy based on your performance and results, you can.
Johnson Controls uses Avature for their campus recruiting. The company’s Global Talent Programs Senior Manager, Catie Anderson, says that over the years, students have changed their demand and they expect companies to evolve with technology like video interviewing and AI.
“We are a technology company, so that needs to be obvious when we interact with them on campus, or else our employer brand messaging falls flat,” she says. “Because of this, it’s crucial for us to partner with a vendor that is responsive, that understands the future, and understands what college students, graduates, and candidates want across the spectrum.”
Of course, Avature’s capabilities stretch beyond campus recruiting. Companies can use this recruitment CRM for performance management, new hire onboarding, employee referrals, and recruiting events management as well.
Price: Dependent on your company’s needs (book a demo first).
4. SmashFly
If you’re looking for a recruitment CRM that’s powered by AI, SmashFly could be the tool for you.
SmashFly is more than just a recruiting CRM. It can help with event management, referrals, and analytics solutions.
As AI powers it, SmashFly can conduct automatic candidate sourcing. It can hunt for new candidates based on requirements from your database of interested talent, and then automatically segment candidates into talent pipelines.
Once your team has that data and a complete record of every candidate in its database, they can build automatic nurturing campaigns that are triggered by a candidates behavior with your company.
Nestle Purina used to rely on traditional ATS as well as using spreadsheets to track candidate leads and touchpoints before they turned to SmashFly. After switching to a recruitment CRM, the company’s recruitment team believe their technology now matches its bold recruitment strategy vision and brand.
“A CRM is more than a database of names,” the company said. “Recruiters and sourcers need to have a way to build candidate profiles, segment leads for reqs, automatically nurture leads, etc. That key marketing component—email marketing, automation, analytics—in a recruiting CRM is exactly what we got from SmashFly.”
Price: After you request a demo, you will be given a custom price for your needs.
5. Talemetry
Talemetry is a perfect solution for enterprise companies who want a more marketing-driven approach to their recruitment efforts.
The CRM is a marketing/recruitment CRM hybrid that allows recruiters to use automation tools and relationship-based candidate experience solutions to drive more candidates into their talent pools. Using Talemetry, companies can nurture their candidates by using 24/7 chatbots, predictive job recommendations, intelligent job matching, and SMS/text messages to build relationships.
Talemetry says the combination of all these features provides candidates with a modern recruitment experience while increasing candidate conversion rates—all on an individual level.
CDW uses Talemetry to drive their recruitment, and they’ve been able to achieve application conversion rates of over 83% by using the CRM. The company has also managed to increase the average time spent on its career site to nearly six minutes, and their candidate email campaigns now have an open rate of 72%.
“We wanted to ensure we provided a great candidate experience and an integrated approach that would ensure visibility into the end result and allow us to predict outcomes,” CDW Manager – TA Operations & Technology Andy Mott said.
Price: After you request a demo, you will be given a custom price for your needs.
6. Jibe
If your company is looking for a recruitment CRM that works with Google, Jibe is your answer.
The CRM uses machine learning capabilities to serve up more relevant job search results to candidates looking for their next job on the search engine. Using Jibe, recruiters can go beyond the simple keyword matching algorithms found in most ATS and create custom career sites to give more relevant job results for future candidates, like this one Pepsico built:
By using smarter algorithms, recruiters can not only increase the number of candidates applying for a role, but they can increase the quality of those applicants as well.
The CRM allows recruiters to build and run automated marketing campaigns with branded email templates, and it’s also a perfect platform to support veterans, too. Because Jibe supports Google’s Cloud Talent Solution feature, US military service members can find their perfect job role using their military occupational specialty code (MOS, AFSC, NEC). Once their code is entered, they’ll be shown jobs that require similar skills to those used in their military roles.
The best part? Jibe is partnered up with the world’s largest recruiting platform, LinkedIn. The Senior Director of Business Development at LinkedIn, Lee Womer, says the company’s partnership with Jibe has helped global organizations streamline their candidate experience to attract, engage and hire the world’s top talent.
Price: After you request a demo, you will be given a custom price for your needs.
7. Yello
Are you a large company that has thousands of candidates applying for positions every week?
Yello is a recruitment CRM built for dealing specifically with high-volume recruiting. By design, Yello can help recruiters engage, screen and advance candidates at scale. The result? Your company fills its empty positions quicker.
The CRM has an external job sourcing features that allow recruiters to find talent by automatically searching job boards and then importing candidates into the CRM. It has integrated ATS mining, so your company can localize its searches to find candidates that fit. Plus, it’s integrated with LinkedIn so recruiters can quickly find talent on a high-volume scale.
But when it comes to high-volume hiring, companies need a smart system, so they aren’t overwhelmed by applicants. With Yello, candidates are automatically screened by their qualifications, which allows qualified candidates to move down the hiring pipeline faster. And the CRM keeps track of every candidate in your pipeline to see how successful your company’s recruiting efforts are with detailed reporting:
Cielo uses Yello for their recruiting, and the company’s Senior Vice President Adam Godson said the CRM helps them engage with candidates on a high-volume scale.
“We bring more than 500,000 candidates into Yello’s CRM each month, organize them into talent pipelines and send more than one million emails quarterly to keep candidates engaged.”
Price: After you request a demo, you will be given a custom price for your needs.
Wrapping up
Candidate experience is becoming a priority for recruitment and HR departments around the globe.
Whether your company is recruiting on-campus or at high-volume, one thing is for sure—you need a system to organize and nurture every single candidate in your hiring funnel. With a recruitment CRM, a lot of the heavy lifting that comes with hiring like emailing and pre-qualification processes can be put on autopilot.
Treating candidates like customers and showing them you value them is something that a CRM can help you with. And the more your candidates are looked after, the better chance you have of attracting top performers to work at your company.
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