The pandemic has wreaked havoc on our economy, unemployment in the U.S. has shot up to 8.4% as of August 2020. Recruiters are put in a tricky dilemma, as they have to be extra picky. When many people are unemployed, the number of job seekers skyrockets, and so the conversion rate automatically drops. When choosing from such a wide variety of candidates, you have to be careful, especially when dealing with the tight budget that Covid-19 allows your company.
So how can you deal with the overwhelming number of candidates? A proper Candidate Relationship Management solution! And if you’re optimistic, think of when the pandemic subsides, and you have plenty of positions to fill. Good candidate management can help you achieve great results in times like this and in the future.
So What Exactly Is a Candidate Relationship Management Solution?
Candidate relationship management, or CRM for short, is the process of building rapport and maintaining a good relationship with your candidates, leading to successful recruits. What’s more, it even helps with nurturing your prospective candidates - job seekers that are interested in your company. In other words, this is a lubricant to wash talent down the recruitment funnel easily, and it requires effective communication where you can demonstrate what bright future awaits ahead of your candidates.
Have you heard that it costs a U.S. employer on average $4000 and 24 days to hire a new worker? Sourcing talent is a never-ending task, and you can never expect to hire all the prospective candidates. But with a CRM software, you can keep them engaged for a much longer period. In times of need, you can just reach out to these leads before advertising your open positions.
Why Choose CRM software?
The Ability to Build Detailed Candidate Profiles
Good CRM software stores all the information you need about a candidate and enables you to decide if they’re worth your time and vice versa. With proper CRM software, you have insight into a candidate’s skill set, interests and timeline; it centralizes data to make way for easy management.
Good CRM Software Gives You an Edge Against Competitors
CRM is essentially maintaining a good relationship with your (past) candidates, which gives you a safety net to fall back on everytime you need to lay off someone. With such good existing rapport, you can be the first to reach out to your candidates, who might just be the next perfect employees. This gives you the upper hand compared to your competitors, since before they can contact their prospects, you have already built rapport with them and reeled them in.
Moreover, CRM helps you analyze your recruitment funnel. With enough data and tracking, you can identify the stage at which candidates drop out. This way you know where the hole lies in the recruitment funnel and can devise a proper response.
Good Employer Branding
In a candidate-driven market, a recruiter has to think like a marketer. Maintaining a good relationship with not just current employees but also former ones, you create a long lasting good impression and convince them that they have made the right choice working for you. And for candidates, you can show them you care. With good CRM software, you can build an employer brand that attracts the best talent.
Automated Personalized Communication
Using CRM software, you can automatically send candidates reminders, updates on the progress of the recruitment process, newsletters about your company successes, metrics to inspire confidence in the organization or even problems that their role will help solve. This act keeps candidates informed of which direction they’re going, and does away with following up manually for recruiters. In other words, it’s a win-win.
What Makes a Good CRM Solution?
Candidate Profile Creation
Good CRM software should help you create a candidate profile from the data collected from their resumes and through communicating with them. With a profile like that, you have an overview of who that candidate is and can roughly decide whether someone is a fit for your company or not. Firstly, you have all of their basic contact information. Secondly, you should have their working experience on your hand, which sometimes even contains their prior employers’ reviews and references. And to make it easier for recruiters, you should also have evaluation forms readily available on candidates’ dashboards.
Automated Workflow
This goes without saying, it should be able to automate basic actions such as sending confirmation emails or personalized updates. When you are recruiting in high volume, doing repetitive manual tasks is a big NO. You should automate as many tasks as possible, and spend your team’s willpower on the tasks that actually matter.
Some typical uses of CRM are sending post-event emails, talking to candidates with bots, exporting ATS, etc. Did you know, another type of CRM - Customer relationship management helps business increase customer retention and satisfaction by up to 47% and sales revenue by 45%? This is a rough comparison but you should get my point.
Ratings
Candidates’ skills should be rated and sorted. Criteria for ratings can vary depending on what you deem important, such as cultural fit, or just overall capabilities. This is more of a suggested addition to the candidate profile that should definitely be deployed.
Advanced Automation Techniques
Recruiting has come a long way in the past few years. New technologies allow you to target specific geographic areas with geofencing and geotargeting. For example, if there’s a university that you’d like to target to find people who are about to graduate or who just graduated on a specific date, this technology will allow you to focus your recruiting to those few square miles.
Reporting Analytics
This is a given, data is power. CRM software should be able to track the performance of sourcing channels, the number of employee referrals, conversion rate and so on. And to make it easier for meetings, those reports should also be printable.
Cross-Device Functionality
Smartphones have taken over all the aspects of life. Studies show that Gen Z spend on average as many as 4 hours and 15 minutes on their phones everyday, with 95% of them owning a smartphone, so it would be a huge loss if the CRM software doesn’t support it. And yet, not all the CRM software supports the mobile version as well as that of the desktop version, so it is important for you to find the best CRM software to do with.
If you have a hard time choosing a CRM software, why not start with us (shameless plug)? Rakuna recruiting software can offer you all of the aforementioned benefits with even more!
Categories
As any good tracking tool, there has to be a functionality that enables you to sort candidates according to certain criteria like majors, years of experience, age, etc. Again, this is a welcomed addition to the candidate profile. And when your team of recruiters contain a lot of members, do keep in mind the “tag” function so you can tag anyone anytime you need to communicate fast between platforms.
Conclusion
There you have it, the survival guide on CRM software. This is undeniably a crucial tool you should have in your arsenal. Recruitment is changing day by day and having a CRM solution by your side surely will make your job a whole lot easier.
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