What is a candidate relationship management tool, and how can it funnel a much higher number of qualified candidates into your hiring pipeline?
Recruiting is perhaps the most important function within your entire business. Without a strong recruiting arm, the people you hire won’t flourish — they’ll flounder. And their poor results will translate to team dysfunction, botched company goals, and catastrophic hits to the bottom line.
Thankfully, that doomsday scenario can be avoided with the right recruitment CRM. But What Is CRM In Recruiting, and why does it matter? In this piece, we’ll explain exactly what the tool is, how to use it, and what features to prioritize when purchasing one for your team.
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What Is CRM In Recruiting
A recruitment CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) is a software tool that helps hiring teams build and nurture lasting relationships with job seekers to form a healthy hiring pipeline. Recruitment CRMs are heavily inspired by customer relationship management tools like Salesforce and HubSpot.
Unlike an applicant tracking system (ATS), which lets you manage applicant data and automate hiring logistics, a recruitment CRM focuses on building your brand and growing your talent pool. A candidate could live in your CRM for months, if not years, until the right position opens up for them.
Learn more about the differences between a CRM and an ATS, and why the best recruitment tools deliver both. See our article: ATS vs CRM.
Uses for Recruitment CRMs
Recruitment CRMs are a fundamental part of any successful hiring strategy. Here are just a few ways to leverage CRM software:
1. Build Your Employer Brand
Appearances matter. According to Glassdoor, 75% of job hunters are likely to apply to a role when the company actively manages its employer brand. Many recruitment CRMs let you create your own career page. From text to images, color palettes to font types, customize this page to speak to your ideal candidate profile.
2. Post to Popular Job Boards
Recruitment CRMs take the monotony out of hiring by posting automatically to job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter. Write a compelling job description for an open role, click “Publish,” and your CRM will collect candidate responses. You can also make changes to existing postings without missing a beat.
3. Market Open Roles to Your Pipeline
Too often, employers reject candidates and forget about them. Yet savvy recruiters know that outright rejection is a missed opportunity. A recruitment CRM stores candidate data, past and present, so you never lose contact. Automated messaging will share job postings with relevant people in your pipeline too, so they can reapply to your company, often for a better-fit role.
4. Passively Grow Your Talent Pool
Even when you’re not actively hiring, your recruitment CRM helps cultivate top talent. Post on job boards, inviting job seekers to get notified about future jobs, and your CRM will automatically track submissions. The best CRMs filter candidates based on their work history, prior job titles, and transferable skills — so when a role opens up, you already have a shortlist in mind.
5. Weed Out Bad or High-Risk Candidates
It’s a common story: A candidate checks all the boxes, dazzles during the interview, and has a stellar work history. Fast-forward 90 days, and they’re failing. The reality is, bad candidates don’t always “out” themselves during a phone screen. Recruitment CRMs can spot those bad apples thanks to powerful pre-screening technology. Spend less time on dead-end applicants, and more time finding the right fit.
6. Streamline Candidate Communication
Communication is one of the biggest barriers to speed — especially when hiring. Cut down on the days or weeks of logistics when coordinating with candidates. Use a recruiting CRM to send templated messages to candidates and automatically schedule structured interviews. The best CRMs will even handle reference checking, so you can avoid chasing down ghosts.
7. Integrate With Your Workflow
Perhaps the strongest benefit of a recruitment CRM is its ability to embed seamlessly within your existing hiring process. Modern CRMs integrate with software tools including Microsoft Office, DocuSign, and ADP. Whether you want to sync candidate interviews with your calendar, send an offer letter, or share onboarding documents, your CRM does the heavy lifting for you.
Recruitment CRM Features to Insist On
Not every recruitment CRM is built equal. Here’s the shortlist of must-have features when purchasing a CRM:
- Candidate Tracking: Gather and manage candidate data, and track applicants from the moment they apply to your organization to the moment you extend an offer letter.
- Pre-Screening Assessments: Automatically qualify candidates using science-backed assessments that test for cognitive ability, integrity, critical thinking, and more.
- Workflow Management: Leverage hundreds of automations that cut down on admin tasks and streamline candidate comms, so you can prioritize time-to-hire.
- Interview Guides: Generate custom interview scripts that tell you exactly what questions to ask candidates to confirm fit for a role or identify red flags.
- One-Way Video Interviews: Save time by allowing candidates to record their responses to interview questions, so you can review their answers at your leisure.
- Candidate Scorecards: Identify candidate traits that are critical for success, then create a custom rubric that your hiring team can use as a central source of truth.
- Automated Reference Checking: Send automated messages to candidate references, and let your recruitment CRM automatically solicit and aggregate their feedback.
- Performance Management: Provide new hires with candid feedback, then track their performance data over time to encourage sustained performance.
Discovered – Performance Hiring Software: More Than a CRM
With extended CRM and ATS functionality, Discovered – Performance Hiring Software brings you ten times more highly qualified, pre-screened candidates for a fraction of the cost. This powerful tool will let you build engaging job descriptions and job ads, and post them to a wide mix of broad-reach job boards with just a few clicks.
Even better, once those applicants start rolling in, Discovered will help you screen them with ease. You can click to administer pre-employment assessments and one-way video interviews, and even automatically check references, so you find as many top candidates as you need, with less HR labor hours than you can imagine.
Find out why this low-cost tool is such a hit with HR leaders like Jared M., who says:
"The team walked (and still is walking) us through every step of the way, super helpful and knowledgeable and brought up many items to consider that we hadn't thought of in over 30 years of being in business!"
